Sales
CRM Basics: How Contacts, Accounts, Deals and Tasks Fit Together
Learn how contacts, accounts, opportunities, activities and tasks fit together through an original CRM record-correction exercise.
What you will learn
- Identify the person, organization, buying attempt and next action in a CRM record.
- Separate completed activity from future work.
- Correct common relationship and data-unit mistakes.
CRM records are easier to use when each one represents the right thing. A contact is a person. An account usually represents an organization. An opportunity or deal represents a particular buying attempt under the system's conventions. Activities describe interactions; tasks describe work to do. Learn those relationships before memorizing fields.
Learn the concepts, then check your system's schema
Salesforce's configuration training introduces accounts, contacts and opportunities as distinct objects. These are useful common CRM concepts, but products use different terminology and relationships. For example, a fundraising product's “deal” may represent a round rather than a generic sales opportunity.
This lesson is tool-neutral. It does not claim that every CRM or Finta has an identical opportunity schema, lead-conversion flow or object model. Check the current product documentation before importing or reorganizing records.
Use stable identifiers where your system supports them. Two people with the same name are not automatically one contact, and two opportunities at the same company are not necessarily duplicates.
A fictional account, people and buying attempt
| Concept | Fictional record | What belongs here |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Northline Design | Organization identity and verified company context |
| Contact | Mina, operations lead | Person, role, communication context and relationship to the organization |
| Contact | Jon, finance reviewer | A different person, not an extra opportunity |
| Opportunity | Northline's reporting-software evaluation | Specific need, scope, stage and decision context |
| Activity | Discovery conversation completed Tuesday | What happened, with the actual date and relevant record |
| Task | Ask Mina to confirm the evaluation reviewer | Next action, responsible owner and a meaningful due date |
One organization can have several people and separate buying attempts over time. Keep the history rather than overwriting the old attempt whenever a new conversation begins.
Correct these four record mistakes
- “Send proposal” entered as a completed call: it is planned work, so record a task. A sent proposal becomes an activity only after it actually happens.
- One contact named “Mina and Jon”: separate the people so roles, permissions and interaction history can be understood.
- A second opportunity created because another stakeholder joined: relate the new person to the existing evaluation if the buying attempt is unchanged.
- An old “closed” outcome replaced with an active stage: preserve the concluded attempt and follow the system's accepted reactivation or new-opportunity convention.
These are invented practice cases. Real corrections need the appropriate owner, permission and a reversible plan. Do not bulk-merge records on name similarity alone.
A useful check is whether another person can answer: Who is involved? Which organization and buying attempt does this concern? What actually happened? What is the next action? If the record cannot answer those questions, adding more fields may not help.
Copyable AI prompt
Try this with Aurora AI in Finta, Codex, or Claude. Use only material you are authorized to share, and review the draft before using it.
Classify [authorized fictional or redacted CRM examples] as person, organization, buying attempt, completed activity or future task using [our documented CRM conventions]. Identify relationship errors, duplicate hypotheses and missing evidence. Explain corrections without inventing data. Do not merge records, change ownership or rewrite historical outcomes. Return a proposed correction plan for human review.Make entry standards small and testable
Agree a few essential fields and definitions before requiring dozens of values. Record unknown information as unknown. A guessed role or close date creates more confusion than an honest blank with an owner question.
Check relationships when a person changes employers or a company changes its name. A historical conversation may still belong to the earlier relationship context. Preserve the source and date rather than rewriting history to match the current organization.
Use the B2B sales guide to understand the wider process and Finta's CRM page to explore its current product model. The lesson's concepts should help you ask better implementation questions, not assume that a field or automation exists.