As we worked with clients in the past few years, we have often seen users ask ( 1, 2, 3) when to create a Lead record and when to create an Account or Contact or Potential (aka Opportunity) records. The usual questions are:
- Should i import my prospects as Leads or Contacts?
- When should i convert a Lead to a Potential?
- What happens to all the data in the Lead, and the related activities, emails,..etc, when i convert?
- Can i convert a Potential to an Account?
Roots of the confusion
- Duplication of Data – Lead and Contact records for the most part have similar information (First name, Last name, Company name, ..etc).So, prospects could be imported as Leads or Contacts which causes confusion.
- Meaning of ‘Account’ – In a CRM, an ‘Account’ represents a Business (Organization). In an Accounting application, an Account is usually reserved to a paying Customer. Users influenced by the Accounting apps, do not tend to create an Account record unless the sale is completed. This is obviously not the way it should be. An Account (& Contact & Potential) should be created at the start of the Sales Cycle
- Process duplication – Potential (or Opportunity as other CRMs call it) is used to manage a sales opportunity and includes Sales Stage field to track the status of the sale. At the same time, Lead also has a Lead Status such as Cold, Hot, …etc and customers could add their own choices. Users could potentially use either Lead or Potential to track the sales process
Recommended Solution
The purpose of the Leads module can be served with Contacts module as well. The Leads Status field could be replaced with Contact Status field in the Contact and could be used in its place.
Future Plan
As we work on improving the usability, we are considering the following changes in a future version of vtiger CRM.
- Merge the Leads module with Contacts module (for existing installations, Leads data will be migrated to Contacts as part of migration script)
- Rename Accounts to Businesses
We would like to get your feedback on this. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Update: Links in the post broke with shift of forums site. Revised on March 22, 2016 to update the links.
