Customizing Your Contacts

Each contact has a variety of standard fields that can be altered in the "Settings" section of the application. Attaching different fields, or categories, to each contact makes finding contacts quick and easy. The best part, you get to decide how you want them sorted. Below is a description of each field, followed by instructions for creating your own field titles.

Standard Editable Fields

Stage
The Contact Stage is used to organize and classify each and every contact. There are a few defaults already entered when you setup your account, but each one can be changed or deleted depending on your company’s in-house lingo. For example, a university admissions office using KarmaCRM can easily replace the default fields with categories such as, "Interested", "Resume Received", "Under Review" and "Accepted" as their contact stages.

Status
The Contact Status gauges how close your contacts are to becoming a client or customer. The hottest leads should probably receive the most attention, while the cold or dead leads might be in a trickle contact cycle.

Referral Source
The Referral Source is a great tool for identifying and visualizing exactly where your contacts come from and should hopefully help to calculate your ROI for various initiatives. A refined referral source grants you the ability to determine which sources yield results and which are a waste of time. Either way, you win by either making sales or saving time, and, honestly, we could all use a little more of both!

Creating and Editing Your Standard Fields

To start customizing the standard fields click the "Settings" tab in the top right of your application. If you do not see the settings tab then a site administrator will need to login to change the settings.

Stage, Status and Referral are all created and edited the same way. Here’s how. Once in the Settings section click on the "Contact Stages" link located in the menu on the far right side of the screen.

To create a new stage, just click the "Add Contact Stage" button at the bottom of the list. Once you fill in the field and hit "Create," it the new stage/status/referral will be added to the bottom of the list.

You will be presented with a form. We decided to add 'Deal Closed' to our stages.

To edit the stage just click the stage name or click the pencil edit icon located to the right of the stage name.

To edit the stage just click the stage name or click the pencil edit icon located to the right of the stage name.

Reordering Your Fields

Notice: This order affects how these items appear in the drop down boxes with the item at the top appearing first.

You can add custom headings, text fields, text areas, select boxes and check boxes to your contacts.

How Do I Create Custom Fields?

Users can create custom fields for their contacts by clicking the "Settings" tab located at the top right of the application. Important: Only users with admin privileges can to see and edit settings. Once in the settings section click the "Custom Fields" link in right menu.

Be sure to select 'Contacts' in the Custom Fields for dropdown. This is also where users may add custom fields for Companies and Deals by selecting them in the drop down.

Click the new field button to begin adding fields to your contacts.

Where Do They Appear?

Your custom fields will be displayed right below the "Referral Source" drop down in the contact form.

In the contact detail page, fields will appear below your standard fields in the top section of the page.

What Happens if I Delete a Custom Field?

If you delete a custom field, then all the data associated with that field will also be deleted. Be sure to tread carefully when editing and deleting fields.