Everyone your business deals with — customers, prospects, suppliers, members — lives under People. It is the same database behind your enquiries, email marketing, sales and memberships, so a contact added here is immediately available everywhere else.

The organisation view and the tribe view

There are two ways into the same database, and which one you use decides what you see. A tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation — your own menu may name them something more specific.

A contact belongs to one tribe. That is what lets a tribe run its own marketing, see its own enquiries, and report on its own customers without the rest of the network appearing in the numbers.

Finding someone

The left-hand menu lists List All followed by each of your categories, so the group you work with daily is one click away. Above the list itself are the filters.

• Search by name, email or phone number.
• Industries and Tags narrow the list to a segment.
• Added takes a From and To date — useful for "everyone who came in last month".
• Sale Status and, in a tribe, Status and Assigned To filter by where the customer has got to and who is looking after them.
• Sort reorders the result.

Export downloads the filtered list as a spreadsheet. A large export is prepared in the background and emailed to you as a download link, so filter first and export what you actually need.

Adding a contact by hand

Create Person opens a form in four parts: personal information, contact details, address, and Categories & Classifications — the tribe they belong to, their categories, industries, lead source and tags. Any custom fields you have set up appear at the bottom.

Two fields are worth getting right at the start. Phone numbers are stored in full international form, so include the country code. And Mailing Lists Enabled decides whether this person may ever be added to a marketing send — off means off, whatever a campaign's audience says.

For anything more than a handful of people, import a spreadsheet instead of typing them in.

What a contact's profile holds

Opening a contact gives you their whole history with the business on one page: their details and status, the mailing lists they are on and whether their email address is deliverable, their enquiries, sales, calls, reviews, memberships and promotions, and your notes. It is the page to have open when they ring.

The lists that keep it organised

These are all set up once, at organisation level, from the bottom of the People menu.

Create your custom fields before importing a spreadsheet — a field that does not exist yet cannot be mapped to a column, and the data in that column is simply not imported.

Changing a lot of people at once

• From the list — tick the rows you want and use Update to add or remove categories and tags, or to stop those people being added to mailing lists.
• From a spreadsheet — Import People adds new contacts and labels existing ones.
• Correcting details in bulk — Update People overwrites the details of contacts you already have. It matches on the Gorilla Dash ID column, which is required, so export the list first, edit the export, and upload it back.

Who can do what

Tribe users have their own equivalents — View Tribe People and Edit Tribe People — which apply only to the contacts of the tribes they belong to.