What Is a Contact Record?
TL;DR
A contact record is the single row representing one person in a CRM or a prospecting database. It holds identity fields such as name, job title and company, reachable channels such as work email, phone and LinkedIn URL, and state fields such as verification status, owner and last activity.
What fields does a contact record hold?
Three groups with different lifespans. Identity fields (name, job title, normalised role, seniority, employer) change when the person changes jobs. Channel fields (work email, phone, LinkedIn URL) change when the employer or the mailbox changes. State fields (verification status and date, owner, tags, last activity, consent and suppression flags) change every time you touch the record.
Confusing the third group with the first two is a common modelling mistake. State is about your relationship with the person rather than about the person, so it cannot be enriched from an external source and it must survive a re-enrichment that overwrites everything else.
What makes a contact record usable for outreach?
A verified channel, a role you can write to, and a company you can qualify. Any one of the three missing makes the row something other than a contact: no verified address means it is a research note, no role means you cannot judge authority, no company attributes mean you cannot tell whether it fits the profile.
Two more fields decide whether it is safe to send to rather than merely possible: a verification date recent enough to trust, and a suppression flag. A record that bounced or unsubscribed and was then re-imported from a fresh list is the most expensive row in a database.
How does a contact record differ from a company record?
A contact record is one person and a company record is one organisation, and they are linked rather than nested. Several contacts point at one company, which is why firmographics belong on the company record: storing headcount on each contact means updating it in several places and having it disagree with itself.
The link is also what makes account-level work possible. Filtering companies by firmographics and then choosing people inside them by role is only expressible when the two records are separate, and a flat structure that repeats company fields on every contact cannot support it.
Frequently asked questions
One verified channel and enough identity to write to the person, which in practice means a verified work email plus a name and a job title. A row with a name and a company and no channel is a target rather than a contact.