Why is sugar based on three contact types (Target/Lead/Contact)?

Harald sums it up quite nicely. To his comments I will add some questions/comments on each of your points:

a) What exactly is the problem you are experiencing? As is, Sugar is rather account centric, so I am curious as to what challenges it is you are experiencing in applying that out-of-box paradigm to your specific needs.

b) There is usually a duplicate check that kicks in during this process, along with the ability to manually link to an existing record. The duplicate check is not much different than the one a user typically sees while entering a record via the standard creation process. Are you not seeing the duplicate check?

c) I am not sure I understand the problem. If we assume that a custom field of same type and name exists on both the Leads and Contacts module, Sugar will automatically carry over the content of the field upon the Lead being converted to a Contact.

Lastly, if you are better served by only using the Contacts module, that's also possible. For example, you could always create a custom "Status" field for the Contact entries that in turn helps you organize them based on their interest.

Harald sums it up quite nicely. To his comments I will add some questions/comments on each of your points:

a) What exactly is the problem you are experiencing? As is, Sugar is rather account centric, so I am curious as to what challenges it is you are experiencing in applying that out-of-box paradigm to your specific needs.

b) There is usually a duplicate check that kicks in during this process, along with the ability to manually link to an existing record. The duplicate check is not much different than the one a user typically sees while entering a record via the standard creation process. Are you not seeing the duplicate check?

c) I am not sure I understand the problem. If we assume that a custom field of same type and name exists on both the Leads and Contacts module, Sugar will automatically carry over the content of the field upon the Lead being converted to a Contact.

Lastly, if you are better served by only using the Contacts module, that's also possible. For example, you could always create a custom "Status" field for the Contact entries that in turn helps you organize them based on their interest.

Hi again, thanks for taking the time for those replies, I guess I didn't phrase my problem too well, probably because I haven't really defined it yet, let me tell you more...

We have been using Sugar Professional for about 3 years and it has been reasonably successful. It was introduced by our new (at the time) marketing manager but she is just about to leave us so I have been asked to look at a few things as I have some database design experience...

I already knew how the three contact types should be used in marketing operations, but the reason for my question was that I would have thought that a much better way of working would be to have all TARGETS/LEADS/CONTACTS in a single, common data file (and format) and to simply change a status flag (or similar) to indicate whether they are considered a TARGET/LEAD/CONTACT? Surely this would make it easier to “convert” between the levels or to market to the whole list (as we often do) without fear of too much duplication (it seems to me that after conversion records also remain at their previous level causing a duplicate?).

For instance if I recall correctly there was no INDUSTRY_TYPE field in the TARGET database, but this is an important field for us to select on when marketing, so we added one to the TARGET database, but this then has to be “handled” when converting to the LEADS database, which was not easy for a marketing person with limited database skills. Was this the right thing to do?

As has been suggested in the replies above I am considering converting all TARGET records with good contact information, i.e. valid email, telephone and useful profile information such as postcode, industry type and company size) to LEADS and market primarily to that group. Then the TARGET database would only be used if we want to add new names to the LEADS database, probably by going through a cleansing exercise.

So back to my original question, is there a good (technical?) reason why the three databases are separate? Or is it just the way it is.

Finally, regarding contact/account centricity, it seems to me that throughout the SugarCRM system, particularly in TARGETS and LEADS everything is handled at the individual rather than organisation level. This seems strange to me as surely most marketing activities are aimed at organisations rather than individuals? For instance I am much more likely to be trying to work with ACME CORPORATION than JOHN DOE, but everything in Sugar seems to revolve around the individual. Does that make sense?

Any thoughts?

Thanks again for your time.

Dale