Apologies for the naive question, I am only just starting to use ACT!
We send out batches of letters to companies of c.20 each week then follow up with calls / emails etc.
We add those 20 companies to a Group and then add the Group to an Opportunity. I would like to track the progress of each contact by entering a stage e.g. First call, Follow up, Email etc.
What I have noticed is that I can only assign a Stage to the entire Opportunity - not a different Stage to each individual contact. This is very frustrating as clearly each contact will be at a different stage at any one point with in a batch.
Can anyone help by suggesting a better way for what I am trying to do?
You have only one opportunity for the contacts linked to the opportunity so the same stage will apply to all the linked contacts. You would need to create a separate opportunity for each contact to separately track different stages for each contact.
One option is to create a custom Contact field called "Stage" with an associated picklist via Tools=>Define Fields and place that field on your Contact Detail screen via Tools=>Design Layouts.
This way, a Contact will have a Stage and the Opportunity will have a Stage, and they could be different.
