Opportunities vs. Leads vs. Accounts

[jasolution]

I'm seeking feedback on how others are using the system to track a single prospect throughout the sales process. My assumptions about how a prospect fits into the Sugar framework seem to match what the Sugar User's Guide says. Here are my assumptions:

Lead: A new prospect with whom I am not yet doing business (i.e., cold call, web inquiry, etc.)

Opportunity: A new potential sale for which a quote or proposal is going to be on the table. In many instances, this is a new sale to a lead with whom we've not yet done business (i.e., not an Account yet)

Account: A company with whom we are currently doing business

The Leads module works like I epxect it to. For example, I cold call someone and we schedule a meeting -- now this person is a Lead so I add him to my Leads module where an Account Name is NOT required. Since I've not yet done business with him or his company, I do not want to create an Account.

Next I meet with the prospect and determine that we can create a solution for him, so our next step is to create a proposal. At this stage, I consider this to be an Opportunity, so I try to add this to the Opportunities module. However, I cannot add an opportunity without associating it with an Account. Here's where the confusion starts.

According to the Sugarm User's Guide, an Account is an entity with whom I am currently doing business. But in the scenario above, I am not yet doing business with this company, so they're not yet an account and may not even become an account. However, to add the Opportunity, I have to create an account. If the Opportunity never goes beyond the proposal stage, the lead will never become an account. Now I have to delete the Opportunity and an Account.

The other problem this creates is a cluttered Account list. On average, each salesman adds approximately 5 new opportunities to the system each week, thus resulting in 5 new "Accounts" in our system. Since only 20% of these Opportunities turn into Accounts, Sugar reports that our company has far more "Accounts" than we really have.

I have two questions:

1) Is my understanding of how a lead/opportunity/account should flow through the system incorrect?

2) What methods are people using to keep their Accounts list "clean"?

Thanks!

Jason

[danad]

What we do is go ahead and create that account, but set the account type to be "prospect". Then, if you win the opp, they're a client, and if you don't, then you can either remove the account, or set the type to be "ex-prospect" or similar (you would need to add this type).

We never delete unsuccessful opportunities from the system, since I think it's a good idea to have all your records of your dealings - successful or not. I don't really treat accounts like the definition you provided - as far as I'm concerned, it's just a company document.

Hope this helps!

[DivineDesigns.ca]

I don't understand this either. Not only does it create a "messy" account list, but it makes it difficult to maintain a client database. A good client database is key to sending out email campaigns etc... I don't understand why you need to create an account to link an opportunity to. it doesn't seem to make any sense. Is there anyone else who can shed some light on this?

Danad's solution will work, but we are using that field to separate our clients into categories based on different "types" of clients - not to specify whether they are actually clients or not...

[leowolff]

Hello, Sugar gives you wings to fly the direction you want, not all the company will fit in the way Sugar was desing.. or eve CRM as a whole says it should work..

Our company has disable the leads module, and we register all client and prospects into account module (and we differ boths by filling the field called: type), we use oportunity module to link the proposes we sent to teh account module.

[ben.gillis]

In a CRM system a lead can be best to be thought of as a bucket to collect all the possibilities that come into your organization. The process of taking a lead and converting it into an account is to qualify it. When you have a lead you wait until the lead fits into one of three categories.

1. The lead is determined to not be a potential customer. In this case you would mark the lead inactive, or dead so that it does not show up as a lead anymore, but is still in the system for records keeping purposes.
2. The lead may someday turn into something, but for now there isn’t really an opportunity present. In this case you would leave the lead as a lead, and nurture it. you should mark you nurture leads in some way by ether adding a field, or adding to the status dropdown a nurture option.
3. The lead has an opportunity for which you are going to work on. In this case you convert the lead into an account with an opportunity and contact. This way only “real” opportunities make it into the Account Module.
As for your question about how to keep the accounts clean. I think you mean how do you separate customers from potential customers. To do this, uses the type dropdown. Mark those who are not customers as prospects so that you can easily filter them out or isolate them into marketing campaigns. You can use workflow to make this happen automatically upon creating an account.



Ben Gillis
SugarCRM Trainer
Plus consulting
www.plusconsulting.com/training.htm.

[blak3r]

Ben,

I completely follow you but you left out one important case which I am really having a tough time figuring out what to do with... the case where you need to create an Account because you have multiple contacts at that organization (but they're not really at the point where you create an opportunity)

There are two scenerios in which this happens:
Scenerio 1: You get a lead from a conference who know you call and says: I'm not the right guy. But, Bob is and gives you his info. This lead you at least have a reference for... so they're a little stronger.

Scenerio 2: You have a salesmen who is targeting specific accounts... They do research on the organization and then start calling.
In this case, you have a "Prospect" account which isn't really any closer to closing a sale then any other lead... I suppose research has at least been done so that's a plus. One of my salesmen has his wife do research on a given Hospital... she adds more then one contact and turns it over to her husband later.

But, in general having multiple containers for prospective customers makes things more difficult. it's now in a different bucket altogether which makes designing a workflows difficult in terms of finding who the person should call. Therefore, designing a workflow for your sales reps where they should call their leads becomes impossible since you now have multiple buckets... Accounts+Contacts and Leads.

In the end, you have to make tradeoffs... and decide what the system is optimized for:
- Optimize for workflow -- Salesperson thinks less about what they need to do / priorities... CRM helps them alot by creating call lists and reports...
- Optimize for experienced Sales person (allow them to stay as lead as long as possible)...
- Optimize for new sales person (simplify the procedures... at expense of overall efficiency).
- Optimize for reporting

Option 1: Move from Lead quickly... use them as an incoming queue only.
Move them out as soon as you talk to them and the data isn't invalid. Make use of rating fields etc in the Account instead of the Lead.

PRO:
* Optimized for newbie salesman...
- Easier to convey the business process... it's clear cut when you create an account.
* Single container for potential business --> Simpler processes/workflow.

CON:
* Lead Conversion is a hassle -- it takes a few steps to convert a lead especially if they're going to check for duplicate accounts!
* Leads are easier to work with most of the time... With Accounts+Contacts you have Account details in one view and personal contact information on another. This makes it a little slower to maintain... so it's really nice to leave them as Lead as long as possible. For example, Lead list view has the contacts phone number and everything... it's really easy to go down a list and call. With accounts you have to open the account, scroll down and then find the appropriate contact. While on the call you might learn something personal about the contact and you might learn some important things about the organization... After the call you have to open and edit both the contact and the Account potentially.
* Forces you to add more fields to account (like lead assessment and qualification) which are only relevant to prospects. Since you can't assume a prospect account is already qualified or interested necessarily... you need to add rating fields, and qualification fields. This is inevitable to some extent and can be worked around with plugins which hide subpanels based on
* Clutters up your accounts... even with the prospect type... Adds more things to get searched and makes things harder in general.

OPTION 2: Just create a new lead, type in the same account name manually (don't convert to account until opportunity).
PRO: optimized for experienced sales person...
CON: easy to forget to convert the other leads once you do finally create an account... I suppose this isn't the end of the world... but I see this leading to really crappy data... duplicate accounts getting created all the time --> more data problems.
* Still have two buckets... but at least the leads are almost always slower in sales stage then the account.

OPTION 3: Change the Lead details... over to the new person. (in other words change the phone number etc)...
This doesn't handle the case where you start with say a CIO who hands you off to his assistant. You want to keep the CIO in the system so that you can still send them marketing emails and have his contact information handy.
* Furthermore, it doesn't address Scenerio 2 mentioned above. Targeted Accounts where multiple contacts get inserted based purely on research.

Option 3b: Same as option 3... add note to description field about original contact, and add CIO email to target list.
Seems pretty good... but realistically... I doubt someone is going to add the CIO to the target list anyway...
In this case, I suppose how good your email marketing is...

Option 4: Create new parent container which is a clone of account...
Pros:
* Declutters Accounts.
Cons:
* Has all the Cons of Option 1, (working from leads is generally faster)...
Additionally you have:
* Issues with lots of plugins etc that don't support custom modules...
* Bad for reporting...
* Lots of custom development work to make relationships and all the other standard modules work.

----[ Less likely options... ]------------

OPTION 5: Add a new account type called... "Lead" or "Prospect-Lead"
Probably the worst option... all it accomplishes is gets around the hierarchal issue such that "Prospect Account" > "Lead Account".

OPTION 6: Ignore the problem altogether...
Explain to sales people there is no good solution... tell them this is a gray area case.
CON: + Lots of confusion, and lack of standard processes seem like chaos and will lead to imprecise data.
To some extent this is inevitable anyway... For example, what one salesmen considers "Hot" might be what another considers "Warm" in the case of a rating field. What happens when the sales people leave... Just have them convert all the leads which were high probability over to accounts...

OPTION 7: Create a mega lead...
Add to lead ability to store several contacts data... either a big text area or maybe like 3 boxes for Name, Phone, Email.
Pro:
* Would be quick for lead management.
Con:
* Doing that breaks standard things...
For example, email opt out for marketing campaigns wouldn't work. In our case our CRM talks to our PBX and displays the person's name on the caller id when the call in... These could be worked around but seems like a lot of work.
* No way to convert all the contacts in the Lead to contacts (at least not built in)...

Option 8: Design workflow (call lists etc) around a way that doesn't matter if there are two buckets.
For example, force rigid setting follow up tasks.


-----------[ NOTES TO BACKUP ASSERTIONS ABOVE ]---------------------------
Not really necessary to read perhaps...

Workflow Problems with Multiple Buckets which are roughly equivalent in terms of priority
* Taking the guess work out of what a salesperson should do each day -- Would be nice if you had ability to create a call list which would be a list of contacts and when you should call them. Would be nice to have the ability to generate a list such that any HOT leads/accounts which haven't been contacted in 30 days (and do not have do not call or a scheduled followup task) and in the same list have COLD leads but maybe have the total number of days contacted be 4 months... and have newly assigned leads have the highest priority.
* Employee leaves and trying to figure out who are most important accounts. You'll have Hot Leads... and you have Hot accounts... (ie accounts with opportunities closing)...
* Creating a report of say customers, prospects + leads who use a particular vendors products... (we collect information on potential partners our API works with...) To say create an email campaign for all of them you would need to create multiple reports which is kind of annoying. Or just to simply find out which partner is being used by most... there is no way to do that with a simple report. (I realize probably could get around this with complex reporting or custom dashlets... but there are often to many things like this to do that feasibly).
* On our Map module... you can only choose contacts from one module. So, we can't create a single map of all prospective clients which includes (Leads + Accounts) for a given radius around some event you're traveling to...

Cluttered Account Problem:
* Even with Account Type Prospect... and account type Customer... it just gets kind of gross.
* Another example: Things like the way you'd want a list view to appear for a prospect customer is completely different from say an actual customer... Vendor, Supplier etc.

Can't Remove Leads altogether...
* Web-To-Lead Forms are built in to sugar... there isn't a Web-To-Lead -- Account + Contact.
* May not have complete data to make an account.

Work from leads as long as possible (it's faster and easier)
* Lead Conversion is a hassle -- it takes a few steps to convert a lead especially if they're going to check for duplicate accounts!
* See the cons in option Option 1

---------------------

head is spinning... now. Thoughts?