You can use leads to facilitate your company’s chance to do business. Leads enable you to provide a streamlined link between marketing and sales. This helps to accelerate the process between first interest and sales. Leads do not provide you with complete details of potential business opportunities, but they can help you to find out more about a potential business.
Leads are business transactions that describe, store, update, and manage the potential interest of (and interaction with) a business partner in a certain timeframe. Leads represent a potential chance to do business.
Use
Leads are used to qualify a business partner’s interest in a particular product or in making a purchase, with the aim of both establishing and then subsequently influencing this interest. The qualification process can be performed on the basis of direct contact with the business partner, or on the basis of an automated collection of indexes. After a lead has reached a certain status, it can be passed on to Sales as decision support for creating an opportunity.
Structure
Each lead has the following:
– A status, for example, lost, in process, or won.
– An origin, which describes the source of the lead.
– A type, represented by the lead group, which describes a certain classification used for evaluation purposes.
– A priority, which describes the urgency with which the lead is to be processed.
– A qualification level, which describes the potential level of interest demonstrated by the business partner.
A lead can be connected to the following objects:
– Business Partners
The business partner relating to the object lead or opportunity is known as a prospect. If a lead is turned into an opportunity, this same prospect is also transferred to the opportunity. Depending on the type of prospect, a contact person may also be defined. Business partners in turn can be assigned to products within leads.
– Organizations
– Parties Involved
These are business partners involved in the lead, for example, sales prospect, employee responsible at channel partner, contact person, and so on. For any particular partner function, you can select an alternative by clicking Edit List in the Parties Involved assignment block, selecting the partner function and clicking Propose Alternatives. You can select an available alternative partner function from the Partner Selection dropdown list.
– Follow – up documents
Leads can be generated on the basis of any type of activity. Conversely, you can generate activities from a lead, for example, to document a phone call that you make with a business partner.
– Multiple notes and attachments
When processing a lead, you can use the assignment block
Note: to add a note for internal use, for example, to record details of your most recent interaction with the business partner.
Documents can also be attached to a lead. These could be, for example, documents relating to the marketing campaign from which the lead can be generated.
– Surveys – for lead qualification
– Attributes – typical attributes related to leads, such as description, origin, and qualification level.