Start Here 👉 Contacts 101

Leadfwd's data architecture is similar to a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) with a single database (a.k.a. list) for storing 'Contact' records. All of your contacts that you import into Leadfwd will be stored in the Contacts database.

Our centralized database enables you to import a person once, but engage the same person multiple times from multiple platform channels (Sequences, Automation, Email Campaigns), without storing contacts separately into each channel or campaign. This also ensures you have a single-source of truth and timeline for your entire engagement history with every individual contact across the entire platform.

Email Address Required

The unique identifier that Leadfwd users for records is the contact records email address. The Contacts database automatically de-duplicates and duplicate records (by email address) are never permitted. 

Active Contact Plan Limit

Every Leadfwd plan will be assigned an 'Active Contact' limit. This is the maximum number of unique Contacts, with a record status of Active, that your database will support at any single time. The record status 'Active' enables the contact record to be eligible for processing and tracking by the Leadfwd application. This does not infer that the record has taken some type of action or that you have taken any action with the record, it's more of an on/off switch. When a contact record is set to 'Inactive' that would be considered the 'off' switch and the will not be tracked or eligible for any processing by the platform. Learn more about record status

Custom Data Field Properties

The Contacts database can be horizontally scaled with 'Custom Data Field Properties'. Some examples of default data field properties include Name, Company Name, Title, City, State, Country, Mobile Phone, etc.

Account Owners can add an unlimited number of custom data field properties (text fields, numeric fields, date fields). When a new custom data field property is created, it is appended as a data field for all new and existing contacts. Values can be added to new custom data fields for existing contacts by import a spreadsheet or manually updating fields.

Default System Field Properties

The Leadfwd Contact database comes with some pre-built system fields that cannot be modified. These data field properties can be quite valuable for managing different stages of your contacts lifecycle.

These system fields are considered 'smart' fields and are automatically updated by the Leadfwd platform. You can leverage these fields for building Workflows and Segments or filtering Reports, but they cannot be updated directly by the account owner or platform user. 

How will you and your team organize Contacts?

Why is this important? Scale. Disorganized data clutter doesn’t scale and it quickly eats up time, to the point where it's unmanageable. 

Plan your data

1. Ensure each team member can easily access and engage contacts they own.
2. To make targeting and outreach consistent and stable. You don’t want to be guessing as to whether or not you’re actually reaching your intended audience.
3. To ensure that alert policies are reaching the right team member, when a prospect is exhibiting buying signals.
4. To track and visualize what’s working and what’s not, so you can optimize every aspect of your sales engagement program.
5. You can’t automate faulty data. Workflows and Sequences rely on data integrity to execute their missions. To truly maximize automation, you need a consistent and organized data system.

Contact Ownership - How do team members keep their contacts organized?

There are multiple methods you can employ to organize and separate contacts for each team member. The most popular approach would be Segmenting contacts by the Owner and setting the data field property when you import Contacts or by using an Automation Workflow. 

• Segments
• Tagging Contacts
• Owner Data Field Property
  • Utilize user email address and owner naming convention (example, use the team members email address in the Owner field)
  • Automation to create segments automatically

Segment and Tag: Contacts - How does the team owner intend to track contacts? 

• Account Persona (industry, geolocation, etc)
• Key Contact Persona (title and role)
• Source (LinkedIn, Prospect Search, External Data Tool, CRM, CSV)

Where will team members work from?

• Inside the CRM using Leadfwd Sidebar
• Inside their Inbox or Browser using Leadfwd Sidebar
• Inside Leadfwd directly in-app

What data properties will our contacts need for our outreach program?

• Email address is required for every record in Leadfwd.
• LinkedIn automation tasks require a valid Linkedin profile URL in the [linkedin_url] data property field.
• SMS touchpoint steps require a valid E.164 formatted mobile phone number in a data property field. This field is then defined in the Sequence action step settings.
• Voicemail drop touch-points require a valid E.164 formatted phone number (ideally mobile) in a data property field. This field is then defined in the Sequence action step settings.
• Direct Mail touch-points require a complete and valid physical address to POST to the external provider (Lob, Handwrttyn, etc).