At what point, make target a contact

[landed]

Is there any advantage to making targets contacts. I cant help but feel having two separate classifications confuses the situation ?

When should I make a target a contact, and how do I do this , I dont see a mass convert operation.

Thanks

http://landed.at travel and tours

[roblaus]

Sugar has three distinct categories for persons: targets, leads and contacts. They all have their own tables and also their own modules in Sugar if you wish. How you use them depends largely on your business and on your sales process. Here's a very brief overview:

Targets (sometimes called prospects or suspects): Usually these are people who you imported from purchased address lists, copied from telephone registers etc. You may use them for a phone or an email campaign but essentially you just know a name and an email/phone no. If as a result of a campaign some of these targets show interest in your products/services you may convert them to leads (a direct conversion to contacts isn't possible in Sugar)

Leads: People who showed some interest in your products/services, who registered on your website, who you met at a trade fair. Usually some sort of contact has been made or some sort of interest has been shown. If you get them to buy something from you, quite naturally you convert them to contact and company.

Contacts: Your buying customers or other people you have a closer relationship with.

BUT: You do not have to use two or three concepts, many people I know just use contacts and qualify them properly (assign attributes like cold, hot, warm or similar). In standard Sugar you limited somehow because webtolead forms will only create leads and opportunities can only be related to companies.

[kbrill]

BUT: You do not have to use two or three concepts, many people I know just use contacts and qualify them properly (assign attributes like cold, hot, warm or similar). In standard Sugar you limited somehow because webtolead forms will only create leads and opportunities can only be related to companies.

It seems wrong to keep non-customers and customers alike all in Contacts. While I don't doubt there are people using it that way I can't say that I would be behind making that an "approved" way of using the system by supporting it in the web-to-lead form process. If you don't use the 3 tier system (and many don't) you should at least use the two tiers of Leads and Contacts. Leads would be considered "Hot", "Warm" or "Cold" not Contacts.

As for Opportunities, while there is no way to change it in the UI, you can make a few, simple, upgrade safe changes to the code and have a system that will allow associating Opportunities with Contacts if you want. I have also seen companies that only deal with individuals convert the Accounts module into Contacts and solve the problem that way as you can easily convert Leads to Accounts in the base product. No code changes needed to use it this way.

[kbrill]

Is there any advantage to making targets contacts. I cant help but feel having two separate classifications confuses the situation ?

When should I make a target a contact, and how do I do this , I dont see a mass convert operation.

Thanks

http://landed.at travel and tours

The other post on this thread did a great job of describing the difference between Targets, Leads and Contacts. There is no way to 'mass' convert targets into leads, there is a 'Convert Target" button on the target DetailView and that will convert a target into a Lead, from there you would convert a Lead into a Contact, Account or Opportunity (or all three). There is not a way to convert a target straight into a Contact. If you have this happen alot maybe you should just use Leads and Contacts and skip the Target stage altogether. I know alot of companies that do that.