Eliminating Leads Altogether

[juanrayon]

I have been experimenting with Sugar, and I have re-installed my prospect database two or three times, due to some hardware issues. My first installation followed the Sugar-recommended procedure of leads leading to accounts and contacts associated with those accounts.

I found the "leads" processes not as rich as the "accounts" processes. For example, I am told that you can't email leads (although I haven't tried that yet). Another problem is that you can't seem to organize leads by companies. It was always unclear when I should move my leads to account status. The "leads" process seemed to be an unnecessary step.

So I just identified every prospect company or lead company as an account. Then I create contacts associated with that account (although this is usually not necessary). I am now considering using the "opportunity" model associated with sales efforts relating to a particular account. I expect I will be able to have one database of accounts. I expect that I could then create codes within different fields to bring up sub-databases. For example, the "SIC" field could include a subcategory of prospects associated with a particular number; another category could be associated with a different number. The same could occur with, for example, the "industry" or "type" field. This would permit searches to identify multiple groups, by varied criteria, which I could determine.

I have done all this while working with a database of not more than 300 companies in a relatively small segment of my target industry. My company, however, is considering moving out of the Contact Plus Pro CRM program, which is a batch system. If we do this we would be migrating (probably through re-keying data) another 20,000 prospect companies and moving this into Sugar.

Am I missing something? Will we limit future functionality if we proceed as planned and eliminate "leads" altogether?

Comments, please?!

[malcolmh]

I understand what you mean about leads not being as rich as accounts and contacts. We have the situation, that talking to one lead, we get more informaton about other people and things in the organisation, which cannot be logged in leads.

Consequently we and a no. of clients don't use leads at all (except for perhaps inital contact purposes), we have created an additional account type "potential customer" and log all the information in accounts and contacts. System still works OK, one client is able to convert a target directly to a contact.

Hope this helps