What is a Contact?

Updated 31 May 2026·8 min read

A contact is a person you have an ongoing business relationship with — current client, past client, banker, referral partner, vendor. This page explains what makes someone a contact, when to add one, and how to think about contacts using a real Pune financial-advisory example.

Meet Rajiv

Rajiv Sinha runs Pragati Capital Advisors, a Pune-based corporate finance advisory firm. He helps mid-market Indian businesses raise debt — term loans for expansion, project finance for greenfield builds, working capital lines, real estate funding. He’s a Chartered Accountant, spent eight years at Yes Bank as a relationship manager on the corporate desk, and started Pragati in 2016 because he could see how badly the borrowers he met needed somebody on their side of the table.

Pragati is twenty-five people now. Eighty active mandates at any given time. Over the last nine years they’ve helped clients raise about ₹2,200 Crore across 280 completed mandates. The repeat business rate is around 60% — clients come back for a second debt round, a working capital top-up, a refinancing, a project finance.

Rajiv’s TatvaCRM has roughly 1,400 contacts. They break down like this:

Type	Rough count	Example
Active borrower clients	~120	Mr Mehta — founder of a Pune plastics business, current ₹8 Cr working capital mandate
Past borrower clients (dormant)	~340	Mr Shah — raised ₹15 Cr term loan in 2022, no active mandate now
Banker contacts	~280	Ms Krishnan — VP Corporate Banking at HDFC Bank, Pune branch
NBFC and AIF contacts	~120	Mr Reddy — Director at a Mumbai-based real estate AIF
Referral partners (CAs, lawyers, consultants)	~180	Mr Patil — Pune CA who refers 2-3 mandates a year
Internal team contacts at borrower clients	~360	CFOs, GMs, junior finance staff at borrower companies

All of them are Contacts. None are Leads. The thing they have in common is that Pragati has a real, named relationship with them — past, present, or operationally important.

The 30-second answer

A Contact is anyone your business has an ongoing relationship with — paying clients, past clients, bankers, referral partners, vendors. Unlike a Lead (someone who might buy), a Contact is someone you already know. Every person who has paid you, will pay you again, or helps you make money is a Contact.

Lead vs Contact — the short version

A Lead is a person who has shown interest but you haven’t yet confirmed they’re a fit. A Contact is a person you already know, in the business sense — they’ve worked with you, or they’re actively helping you make money (a banker, a referral source, a vendor).

The threshold for a Lead becoming a Contact is usually one of three things:

They paid you — they’re a client now. Move them.
You qualified them seriously — they have a real funding need, decision authority, and active intent.
They’re not a buyer but they help your business — banker, referral CA, lawyer, vendor. They were never a Lead.

See the dedicated Lead vs Contact cheat-sheet for a fuller treatment.

Why a clean Contact list matters

Two months ago, Sneha — Pragati’s Relationship Manager for the West India zone — got a call from Mr Mehta. Pragati had helped Mr Mehta raise a ₹12 Crore term loan from Yes Bank in 2022 for a plant expansion. Now, three years later, Mr Mehta’s plastics business has grown faster than the original projections, and he needs an additional ₹8 Crore working capital line for the new order book.

Sneha hadn’t worked at Pragati in 2022. The original RM had moved to a competitor. On paper, this was a cold call from a stranger.

Sneha opens Mr Mehta’s Contact record in TatvaCRM. Everything is there. The original ₹12 Cr term loan with Yes Bank — 10-year tenor, 9.4% floating rate signed in March 2022, secured against the new plant and personal guarantee. The original mandate fee Pragati earned (₹6 Lakh upfront + 0.85% success). The CA who referred him in the first place (Mr Patil). The fourteen mandate-management meetings across the 18-month execution. The handover note from the previous RM — all eleven pages of it.

Sneha calls Mr Mehta back forty minutes later. She doesn’t open with “So, please tell me about your business.” She opens with: “Mr Mehta, congratulations on the new client at Mahindra — I saw the announcement last month. About the working capital ask — last time Yes Bank had given you a 10-year term at 9.4%. With RBI’s recent policy easing, similar tenor is now closing at 8.6-8.9%. Should we look at refinancing the existing loan alongside the new working capital line?”

Mr Mehta is, frankly, relieved. He had been bracing himself to explain his entire business history again to a new face. Three minutes later, the mandate is Pragati’s. ₹35 Lakh in expected fees. The CA who referred him in 2022 gets a thank-you call from Rajiv the same evening.

Why this matters

A Contact in a CRM isn’t just a name and a number. It’s a name, a number, and the entire history of every conversation, transaction, and connection that person has with your business. That history is what turns a follow-up four years later into a continuation, not a cold start. It is what makes a nine-year-old advisory firm feel like a long-term partner even when the original relationship manager has long since left.

What lives on a Contact record?

For Pragati’s use:

Identity — name, phone, email, designation, the borrower company they sit at (linked Company record).
History — every past mandate, every meeting, every WhatsApp summary, every phone call note, every document exchanged.
Status — active client / dormant client / banker / referral partner / NBFC RM / past employee at a client.
Owner — which RM at Pragati is the primary point of contact for this person. Mr Mehta now sits with Sneha.
Tags — “plastics sector,” “Yes Bank borrower,” “Patil referral,” “introduced at FICCI Pune 2022.” Whatever lets Sneha filter later.
Custom fields — for Pragati: borrower’s sector, last debt raised, current banker, credit rating, refinancing window dates.

A Monday morning in TatvaCRM

It’s a Monday in July. Sneha opens TatvaCRM at 9:15 from her Mumbai office. Her morning view shows three things:

5 contacts to follow up with today — commitments she made last Friday.
2 mandates in active execution — both pending banker term sheets.
3 quarterly check-in calls due this week with dormant past clients.

Sneha calls the first dormant check-in — Mr Joshi, a textile exporter in Bhiwandi who borrowed ₹22 Crore from a consortium in 2020. The mandate closed cleanly, Mr Joshi is up to date on all repayments, and Pragati hasn’t spoken to him in six months. Just a courtesy call.

Before dialling, Sneha glances at the Contact record. There’s a note from October 2024: Mr Joshi’s eldest son had just got married. There’s another note from March 2025: Mr Joshi had asked about a ₹5 Cr commercial property purchase but decided not to proceed because of weak rentals in the Bhiwandi market.

When the call connects, Sneha asks about his son’s family first, then mentions the property idea. Mr Joshi laughs. “Sneha, you remember? The wife forced me to drop that plan. But she’s now asking about a textile park land near Tarapur. ₹18 Crore deal. We need ₹14 Crore debt.”

Sneha blocks a Tuesday morning meeting at Pragati’s Mumbai office. Mandate confirmed by Wednesday. Twenty-five lakh in expected fees. Zero outbound effort — just a courtesy call to a Contact whose history was visible.

Six years ago, Pragati ran on a senior associate’s Excel sheet. Names spilled across rows. Repeat clients fell out of touch. The day Rajiv learned that a former ₹30 Crore borrower had just done their third round of debt through a competitor — because nobody at Pragati had called in two years — was the day he signed up for TatvaCRM.

Common confusions, cleared up

“Someone I’m sure will give us the mandate next month — Contact or Lead?”

Contact. If you’re confident enough to bet on it, treat it like it’s already happening. Move them to Contact, create a Deal for the expected mandate with a close date in the future, and work it from there. The Lead bucket is for unproven interest. A confident prediction is past that point.

“A client hasn’t come back to us in four years. Still a Contact?”

Yes — but mark them as dormant. Dormant contacts stay in the CRM for periodic re-engagement (the courtesy calls Sneha makes). They shouldn’t appear in your active client count. The day they come back for a fresh mandate, you flip the status to active and the history is all still there.

“A banker at HDFC who we’ve worked with on many deals — Contact?”

Absolutely. Bankers, NBFC RMs, AIF managers — anyone who shows up on the other side of your deals — belong in your Contact list with the right tag (“banker” or “lender”). They’re not customers but they’re critical relationships. Tracking which bankers you’ve placed deals with, what tenor / rate they prefer, what sectors they like — that’s where your real value-add lives.

“A CA who hasn’t referred a mandate in 18 months — still a Contact?”

Yes — and one you should call. Referral partners go quiet for a reason. Either they have nothing in their pipeline (fine), or they’re working with a competitor now (a problem you want to know about). Either way, an hour over coffee is the right next step — and TatvaCRM is what reminds you to make it before two years slip past.

“A CFO who has moved jobs from one client to another. Same Contact or two?”

One Contact, two Company links. The CFO is the same person — their relationship with Pragati continues even if their employer changed. TatvaCRM lets you track the move on the Contact record (employment history) and have the same Contact linked to multiple Companies over time. When they were CFO at the plastics business in 2022, that Deal sits under the plastics Company. When they took the same role at a pharma firm in 2025, new Deals sit under the pharma Company.

“Same person, different phone numbers from different times. One Contact or two?”

One. Merge them. Keep both phone numbers on the merged record — TatvaCRM supports multiple phones per Contact. This happens constantly with senior business owners who change personal numbers, or who switch from a Vodafone number to a Jio one. Don’t let it fragment your relationship history.