Question

I’m working on making a consumer CRM system for my boot-strapped startup, where we’ll use MySQL. We’re moving from an old paper and pen method of tracking leads and referrals, to a digital method for our dealers.

The database will have a standard fields, like lead name, spouse, jobs, referral type, referrer, and lead dealer. This is easy, almost child’s play.

Now is the part I’m having a hard time figuring it out. I want to track all the attempted contact dates and responses, and appointments that have been set or reset. The system is going to be web-based, with the front-end in PHP.

I thought about doing nested tables, but I don’t want to use Oracle or PostgreSQL, as I like the familiar setup of MySQL.

For the sake of feasibility, say I have 4,000 leads, and each lead is going to be called on average 30 times. So I’ll have 120,000 data points to track.

Would it be advisable to:

1. Make a two dimensional PHP array in the field, to keep track of these metrics.
2. Have a contact table with all 120k in it, that the application pulls when these metrics are needed
3. Have a contact table for each lead, which keeps track of all needed metrics

Answer 1

I would make one table for contacts. Add a column to record whether the contact was successful or not.

I would also use MySQL’s table partitioning by lead, if many of the queries will be to report on specific leads.

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But I second the comment from @Bryan Agee that you should consider carefully before implementing a CRM system from scratch on your weekends.