I’ll second that feature request. I can see the need for adding the two missing features: ‘Assigned to’ and ‘Additional Filters’ that are currently available for both Contacts and Project Blogs. I know that Solve is very Contact focused, and that works for the one closest to the contact, for example the sales rep since he knows all his contacts. But let’s say his/her manager doesn’t know the specific contact names, but knows the companies that he/she is responsible for. Just one example of how this could come in handy. That said, Solve has been very good at not creating a middle management / top down approach to the system, which is why it makes it a million times better than any other CRM system out there.

I would also like to see more filtering options.  Is it possible to run a query with multiple filters on 2 or 3 levels, plus numeric filters for custom fields i.e. =,<, > “x” amount?

Thanks for the tips…

I tried finding the “closest” topic that existed before just creating my own topic…

I am trying to figure out how to do a few things, that maybe other users (and Norada) can hopefully help me with.  And possibly it is not possible to do these things, in which case… feature request!

1) Filter contacts that are linked to companies with certain attributes - We have multiple contacts for companies.  We have a tag called “Customer” for Companies.  We also have “Authorized” as a tag for contacts.  How do I have a filter for all contacts that are linked to companies that are “Customers” and also “Authorized” themselves.  Or perhaps we have a tag for a company called “Product 1”, which indicates that company has Product 1.  How do I filter, to send an e-mail or get a spreadsheet, of all the “Authorized” contacts, who’s company has “Product 1”, perhaps to send an update on that product.  We may also want to filter these levels for fields/custom fields, not just tags.

2) Filter companies that have one tag but not another.  For example, if a company has tags: “Product 1” and “Customer”.  I want to filter all companies that are Customers but do not yet have “Product 1”.  They need to be told how great Product 1 is!

3) How do I take item 1 and 2 and have a wonderful combination.  I want to send an e-mail to all my contacts that have companies that are customers, but do not have Product 1.

What I have been attempting is going tag crazy and to label my contacts with the same tags as companies.  However, this is getting tedious to maintain.  Also, this doesn’t help when what I am filtering on needs to be a custom field instead of a tag.  Also, the tag “Doesn’t have Product 1” is also more confusing than helpful, though I suppose I may need to do it that way for the time being.

I would love any insight/tips/new features.  I did read through a lot of forum topics before doing this, and I don’t think this has been addressed, but feel free to point me to the appropriate topic if this is covered already.

Thanks!

If I understand correctly it seems like you want to filter both ‘contacts’ and ‘companies’ at the same time which I don’t think you can do. I’m assuming you have figured out how to filter by tags in either contacts or companies? (see screen shot if you haven’t). Sounds like you would like the same thing as Kevin did on Mar 1.

Perhaps, by needing/wanting to filter contact and companies at the same time you are trying to do too much, and are making the system too complicated than it needs to be? Take this comment lightly, since I don’t exactly know what we need to accomplish, but in the end try to keep everything simple (which you were probably trying to do so I certainly don’t fault you, but in the end it might be more pain than it’s worth). Just really try and remember ‘what will this get me’? Remember that it might make sense and be easy for you, but maybe not so much for colleagues who might not use or ‘get it’ as much as you.

With that being said, I can also see the use of being able to filter by contact and by company, and might be quite simple (or not!!!???) to implement.

Perhaps you could make something work by exporting the contacts/companies into Excel and then sorting from there? A bit tedious, though.

Yeah, I may be trying to make it too complicated, and I have figured out the filtering as you show in your screenshot.  The problem I am coming into is that I can get a list of the Companies I want.  (Clients).  Now, what if I need to send an e-mail to all those “Clients”?  The only way I can find to do that, is to create a tag on the Contact (not the company) also called client.  Then I can email to the contact. 

Now, we have companies with several contacts.  Some of these contacts are just relationships we like to track.  Others might be an employee that had one question once upon a time.  The logical solution is to create another contact tag called “Authorized”, or “Owner”, or “Peon”.  There will be cases where I want to send an e-mail to the Authorized person, but not the owner, or the peons and not the owner, etc.

The number one place I want to do this is in exporting lists to Constant Contact.  Currently, I have to manage excel spreadsheets.  But I want to make it easy for all our users, and keep those lists current often.

To keep with my first example, using the screenshot above, what if one of my tags is “Product 1”.  The only way to e-mail my contacts that use product 1 is to have a tag for companies and contacts, both containing product 1.  This is where I was saying things get complicated, because everything I do for a company, I then need to replicate for every contact linked to that company. 

A way to “solve” this might be to use the “and search for” function.  If we had more options.  For example… Show “All Contacts—>Category Tags—>Authorized” and search for “Related To” “Company with Category Tag—>Product 1”.

One thing we got used to with GoldMine (which we haven’t been able to fully cut off from yet), is that we can filter on multiple pieces of information.  I want to see Clients, that use product 1, but do not use Product 5.  Then we can send an e-mail to them all on the fly.

Summary:
I think I am trying to +1 Vedran, dave@vm, and Kevin Drexel, and then add a way to send e-mails to contacts based on information in the company they are linked to.  Unfortunately, I am very long-winded.

Thanks all!

Dave,
I’ve initially used tags the same way. But recently I decided to add “company status” (similar to your list) as a form field under “Company”, where I put all this information.
And I’ve started using tags as a marker for certain activities (usually time-limited) i.e. “April marketing promotion”, allowing me to mark all companies relevant to this specific promotion.

Though I still use tags to separate different categories of project blogs.

When I first made the comments above, I was pretty new to Solve.  Now that I have been using it, I’m finding more and more times where I wish we could select contacts based on tags or fields on a company.  It is very difficult to manage as it stands now.

More examples: I want to track customers that are in different states.  Customers are always companies.  If I give a tag to a company, for example, NJ, and want to e-mail all my NJ customers.  There is no way to do so.  The only way is to also tag contacts with the NJ code, which makes things tedious and difficult to keep up with.

Also, I want to send e-mails to “Owners”, which is a tag for contacts, of “Website” and “Customer”, which are tags for companies.  There is no way I can see to do this.

It would be nice if we could do filters such as these to send to constant contact.

The tags work great for managing lists, or exporting to excel.  But for e-mail communications and exports to constant contact, it is limited.