Lead becomes a contact?

[abrassell]

I'm extremely new to Sugar so please bear with me. I have purchased a database of information and have imported it into Sugar as leads. Are these leads supposed to automatically become contacts? What is the logical progression in Sugar when you begin from a lead?

Thanks,

Al

[andopes]

Hi, Al.

I the CRM work flow the Leads is one of the start up of the life cycle of a client.
Explaining.

You purchased a database of informations. In the CRM it should be a list of Prospects, because you know nothing about them.
You contact all of them and the Prospects that returned a feed back can become a Lead, because you already know something about him and it demonstrate some interest in your product or service.
When he wants a commercial proposal he can become a Contact and an account, once the Lead has account and contact fields.

Cheers

[sugarcane]

Hi Al,

Once you process and speak with the various leads in your system and any of them progress to becoming what you consider to be a Contact (if they become a client, customer, or you are ready to create an opportunity in the system for them etc), then you can click into the Detail view of the Lead and click the 'Convert Lead' button. This will take you to a new screen which will auto populate with the information from your lead, and you have the option to fill out the rest.

If you had an Account name populated in your lead, you will notice a checkbox that is checked to automatically create a new account. It is a best practice to uncheck this box and search the existing Accounts to make sure the account is not already in the system, so that you don't create duplicates.

When you are done, just click the save button and the Lead will convert into a Contact (you might receive a warning if the system finds another Contact that is a potential duplicate. it will ask you if you want to proceed with creating the new contact). If you created a new account, you will also see the new account that was created. The status on the Lead will then change to 'Converted'