About Contacts
Contacts in AgencyRoot are organized into three categories or statuses:
Prospects
The prospect status is for people that you are actively seeking new business from. The prospect status should be your largest group out of the three if you are maintaining an effective sales pipeline.Customers
The customer status is reserved for people that you are actively writing policies for. Contacts that are in a Customer status will have a policies section show up on their contact page.Contacts
Contacts are the catch-all for anybody else you want to keep track of but don't fall into the prospect or customer categories. Examples of contacts might be bankers, landlords, spouses, underwriters, adjusters, and sales reps.
Contact Segments
Segments are highly customizable groups that can be added to contacts for a wide variety of purposes. To manage segments, go to Agency Admin > Contact Segments. Some example uses for segments might be:
Identifying Product Fit
Perhaps you have several customers that have livestock, but you currently are not writing livestock policies for them. Creating a livestock segment would allow you to instantly have a list in the future should you decide to send a marketing email about updates to livestock plans of insurance, livestock updates in the farm bill, or market directly to write livestock policies.Identifying Special Groups
Beginning Farmer and Rancher (BFR) and Written Agreements might be good segments to add to identify those groups of individuals that need special attention every year. Instead of searching through all your contacts every year and racking your brain to remember who all had a written agreement, just create a segment.Refining Your Prospect Groups
Agencies may choose to use segments to refine their prospecting pipeline into "Cold Leads", "Warm Leads", and "Hot Leads", or simply identify "Key Targets". Perhaps you identify key areas of interest such as "Crop Hail Rates" that you can use to market-specific information to them.
Linked Contacts and Entities
AgencyRoot uses individuals as the primary record source (you can't talk directly to an LLC!), but entities that individuals make decisions for can certainly have policies that you'll want to manage. The Linked Contacts and Entities functionality is located on the Contact page.
Creating Entities
Entities can be created from a contact's page or imported from an AIP. When importing an entity from an AIP on the Contact Sync page under Agency Admin, you'll select the primary contact they're associated with (which must exist in AgencyRoot prior to adding the entity from the AIP).An individual contact's access permissions control access to entities they are associated with. An agency employee with access to John Doe will also have access to Doe & Doe, Inc.
Linking Contacts
Similar to entities, an option exists to link individuals together for purposes like Landlord/Tenant situations, or maybe a son or daughter has POA for their father's individual policies. Linking these together will allow you to manage all communications and policies from one contact page.Contact & Entity Relationship Types
In addition to linking a contact to a contact, or a contact to an entity, one or more optional relationship types can be added. Examples include Landlord, Power of Attorney, or custom types like ‘Referral Source’. Relationship Types can be managed from Agency Admin > Data Entry & Processes > Relationship Types.
Below is the Contact Training Video for more details: