Sales process from Leads to ....

Last post 07-29-2008 4:18 AM by Leon Tribe. 3 replies.
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  • 07-28-2008 6:34 AM

    • Arunas
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    • Joined on 07-28-2008
    • Posts 2

    Sales process from Leads to ....

    Hi all,

    I still do not clearly understand what MS team thinks about leads and how this entity should be used in sales process. I have particular example and maybe someone will show me how to set up process in MS CRM 4.0.

     

    Our company bought a database with details of the companies (number of workers, turnover of last year, Industry, names, phone and emails of managers.

     

    We have filtered some prospects from database and prepared customized offers of our services.

     

    Send the offers to prospects by email.

     

    Sales representative calls to the prospects by phone and collect more information about prospects (if they provide) - number of PC, Servers, Competitors. Also, they mark prospects, if they are not interested in our services. (From 200 of send emails, 30 are interested)

     

    With the prospects, who are interested, begins normal sales process - preparation of proposal, approval of proposal, preparation of agreement... 

    I understand, that from the last step I will use the Account, Contact and Opportunity entities.

    What I should use for earlier steps.

    If I will use leads, I have some concerns:

    I would like to redo the sending of emails after some time. Will I easily could filter disqualified leads and remove duplicates? How I will be sure, that disqualified lead later was not created manually in the Accounts, Contact and Opportunity, which was won.

     

    After some time, company calls to our sales representative. From CRM application point of view, representative would like to know, what activities with this company we had, what offers were send, information we have about this company. If we use Leads, the sales person should search information in accounts or contacts, if nothing found, he should redo search in leads.

     

    How I easily could get information about how often we send offers to particular company (still not our customer)? Where should I look for this?

     

    I see some cos. for using leads:

     

    We more easily import to leads than to account, contact and opportunity.

     

    The information is more easily updated on the leads (only one record) during phone call.

     

    We will have more accurate Account records, because not all information from bought database is accurate.

     

    The leads will be the first step in our sales process.

     

    Thanks for replies!

     

  • 07-28-2008 4:29 PM In reply to

    Re: Sales process from Leads to ....

    Generally speaking, a lead is an unqualified opportunity to make a sale. Once you've established contact and you have an idea of what you will be selling them and how much the deal is worth, the lead progresses to an opportunity. Ultimately though, it is up to you where you define the transition.

     In your example, you could import the database as leads, customising the lead form to ensure all information can be brought in (you could also use mapping to ensure the information transitions to the account/contant/opportunity records when converting).

    You sent up a campaign and mailing list for your leads which you've filtered out and you set up phone calls and send the emails. For those not interested you disqualify the leads.

    For those interested, you convert the leads to account/contact/opportunty records.

    When you want to resend the emails, you have the campaign and mailing list to work with. Filtering out the disqualifed leads from the mailing list should not be a problem with the filtering tools.

    Checking a disqualified lead was not later entered manually would be troublesome but I'm not sure I understand why this would occur.

    Checking for how often we send offers would be a case of looking at the entity activity history or looking at the campaigns they have been part of. 

     

    Leon Tribe
     

  • 07-29-2008 1:44 AM In reply to

    • Arunas
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    • Joined on 07-28-2008
    • Posts 2

    Re: Sales process from Leads to ....

    Thanks for quick answer. Maybe I will be a little bit annoying, but I want to understand. The problem I see with leads, if i use leads as early step of sales process, that leads is not grouped with one account record.I will try to explain. When I resend email with new offer, I would prefer to create new lead, not to edit disqualified leads. In this case we will have situation where the same prospect has several leads.Prospect, who has several disqualified leads in CRM, calls to our office and asks for offer for our services. In this situation, I think we need to create Account, Contact an Opportunity records and move on sales process. But sales person will miss information, we have in leads records.Or maybe you propose to have only one lead record for prospect and all activities to relate to this lead? 

    Arunas

  • 07-29-2008 4:18 AM In reply to

    Re: Sales process from Leads to ....

     I would use the same lead record and only disqualify it when they directly say they are not interested. If you send an email and hear nothing, they are ripe for a resend. So leads would fall into one of three categories. Closed and converted, closed and disqualified, and open. You can go to an open lead and see which activities/campaigns they have against them and you can also go to your mailing lists and work with them there. Conversion automatically attaches the lead to the created records so you can also trace information through this link.

    Leon Tribe 

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