Lead/Account Types

[jlfolland]

First, I am new to Sugar (using Splendid) and am quite impressed with what I see out of the box.

I am wondering what the best approach would be for the following. We interact with different types of customers:
1) Service provider. We sell directly to these service providers or sometimes we will sell directly to an end customer and contact the service provider to assist.
2) End customer. End customers can be divided up into several classes: residential owners, apartment/condo owners/managers, and commercial developers.

Additionally with service providers we have been considering the idea of giving them access to our CRM to provide them marketing assistance to help them make their sale. So, we may need to give them a login that would give them access to their customers, be able to create leads, among other things.

All of the above customers from our standpoint start out as Leads. So first, I have been thinking of simply adding a LEAD_TYPE field to the LEADS table and adding the LEAD_TYPE to search and results that way callers will know the type of call they are making. I think that would essentially solve the different customer type issue. Is there a better way to handle this?

The other issue is it possible to convert a Lead to account and give that account user privileges, such as, creating leads?

I would be interested to hear feedback on this or suggested reading material.

Thank you in advance.

Jonathan

[kbrill]

Adding the field is pretty easy in SugarCRM, not sure about Splendid. In SugarCRM you can use Studio to add fields to any module.

Converting a Contact to a user isn't built in but wouldn't be a hard modification to make. SugarCRM also has a customer portal product that essentially does just this. It gives your customers access to certain modules/records on your SugarCRM system.

[jlfolland]

Thank you Kenneth.

I just wanted to be sure that I was not missing something really important given our scenario. Ifeel comfortable proceeding as I had planned.

Thank you,

Jonathan