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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / What opinions are ther...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

What opinions are there on the best practices for managing prospecting?

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Posted on by cgb 1,075

What are the best practices for managing prospecting?  Is it required to use leads to track prospecting activities, or can "activities" such as phone calls and emails be used if the accounts you are prospecting to are already in CRM?  Please let me know your thoughts!  Thank you in advance!

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  • Suggested answer
    ScottDurow Profile Picture
    ScottDurow 21 on at

    Many organizations do not use leads at all but if you need to capture very low quality information about a prospect (e.g. Web form submissions, business cards, marketing list import)  then  leads. You then can qualify the lead into an opportunity and associated account/contact when you have contacted them and have more info. If you already have an account in CRM then you can qualify the lead against this and associate the new opportunity against the account and track activities against this. If you know from the start that the account already exists you can go ahead and create an opportunity against the account directly without using a lead at all. Some organizations even choose not to use lead but have an opportunity status of lead and always create account/contacts. I've found leads to be useful because they are a good place to put temporary data with a single record representing the account/contact and opportunity.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • cgb Profile Picture
    cgb 1,075 on at

    Thank you Scott.  Have you seen clients use activities on accounts to track prospecting volume/touchpoints?

  • Suggested answer
    pmdci Profile Picture
    pmdci 1,032 on at

    Hi there,

    I have some blog posts that might help you with your query.

    The importance of the Lead Entity - Gives an explanation on why using the Lead entity is a good idea.

    Having activities bound to a lead record are extremely important if you want to assess the efforts invested for the qualification of the lead.

    Here is another post you might find useful:

    Diving into the sales pipeline - Part 1 - A tutorial series that explains how to customise a sales pipeline process in Dynamics CRM 2013. The first part explains the sales process in Dynamics CRM so it might give you a good glimpse on the importance of the lead entity. There is also a 2011 version available here.

    Regards,
    P.

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