The Secondary Contacts feature was introduced in Version 7 back in 2005. It can save you a lot of time and improve your efficiency

Secondary Contacts are a good way to store useful information about customers without cluttering your Act database.

Creating secondary contacts is easy, just head to that tab on your contact page and click New Secondary Contact. You can fill in the fields with as much or little information as you’d like. The contact field is the only required field. If you only know the persons first name always follow it with a space and ? i.e. Bob ?

You may notice some names in the Act Demo Database reference or parody classic films and media. Hence why we now have our volleyball Wilson.

Promoting a secondary contact into a primary one is also easy. These contacts can be added automatically using all the primary fields data from the parent record, or you can enter in new data.

There are many situation you may find yourself in where secondary contacts can be useful to employ.

For example, you might only be communicating with one contact from a company you work with, however, you know of a few others you may end up communicating with later on. Making them secondary contacts is a simple way to store their information for easy access later.

In the next situation, many companies are B2C (Business to Consumer) selling insurance, cars, investments, etc. In that environment it is common to know them and their families personally. Keeping family members as secondary contacts is a good way to maintain close contact with the customer, as well as keep tabs on future prospects once those kids grow up and need the same product you’ve sold their family.

You might also run into customers with assistants, who you might have to talk to in order to reach your customer. Making secondary contacts for these people saves their info without cluttering the main database..