CRM Contacts
What a Contact is in Eleventh, what it can hold, and how it connects to your bookings and enquiries.
What is a Contact?
A Contact is a confirmed customer or any other business relationship worth keepin gtrack of, such as a supplier, subcontractor or venue. Contacts are the settled side of the CRM: where a Lead is something you are still winning over, a Contact is someone you now work with.
Contacts matter because a Booking is always owned by a Contact. You cannot create a booking against a Lead, so every customer who books with you ends up as a Contact first.
Contacts, Leads and Enquiries
The CRM has three building blocks, and each one has a different job:
Lead | Contact | Enquiry | |
|---|---|---|---|
What is it? | A prospective customer you have not confirmed yet. | A confirmed customer or business relationship | One ongoing conversation or opportuniuty (a "deal") |
Moves through a pipeline | Yes, your own custom stages | No | Linked to a Lead or a Contact (an Enquiry can be assigned a custom Status, though...) |
Details it holds |
|
|
|
Can own a Booking | No | Yes | No |
In practice: a Lead comes in, an Enquiry tracks the conversation, and when the customer confirms the Lead is converted to a Contact. From then on, new Enquiries and Bookings attach to the Contact.
What a Contact can hold
- Contact details — more than one email address, phone number and postal address per Contact, so you can keep a personal and a work number side by side.
- Marketing preferences — record whether the Contact is happy to receive marketing from you.
- Groups — organise Contacts into groups, for example "Wedding clients" or "Regular venues" .
- Custom fields — capture whatever data matters to your business.
- Attachments — upload files and organise them into folders.
- Chat and messaging — correspondance with the Contact.
- Internal notes — private notes your team can see, but the Contact cannot.
To find a Contact quickly, use the search box at the top of the CRM. It searches Leads and Contacts together, so you do not need to know which one someone is.
Contacts, Bookings and Enquiries
Every Booking belongs to one or multiple Contacts, so a Contact's page is the place to see the full history of what you have done for them. Where multiple customers are assigned to a booking, the booking bears a Primary Customer, though it will still show in the "Booking History" for all customers assigned to it.
Enquiries can be owned by either a Lead or a Contact. Once a customer is a Contact, any new Enquiry from them should attach to the Lead, but may be visible from the lead if you used the Lead Conversion screen to convert from Lead to Contact (as when converted via Eleventh's conversion feature, the two objects become linked under the hood!)
Where Contacts come from
There are two ways a Contact is created:
- Added directly. Use this for suppliers, venues, repeat customers and anyone who never needed to be a Lead.
- Converted from a Lead. When a Lead is confirmed as a genuine customer, convert it. The Contact keeps a link back to the Lead it came from, so you can jump back to its history at any time.
Nothing is lost in the move: the Lead remains as the origin point of the relationship.
Troubleshooting
- I can't create a Booking for somebody. Bookings can only be created against a Contact. If the person is still a Lead, convert them to a Contact first (using the Actions & Convert menu in the Lead screen)
- I can't find someone in my Contacts. They may still be a lead. The search box at the top of the CRM checks both.
- I can't see or edit Contacts. Viewing needs the View CRM permission and editing needs Manage CRM. Ask an organisation administrator to check your permissions.