Cold Call Lead Management

[alrs]

I'm playing with sugarcrm, and I'm confused as to the best practice regarding lead management for *really* cold calls. I want to add leads with nothing more than business name/address/phone number, but sugarcrm seems really dependent on having someone's last name.

[alejandrops]

same problem here, I just repeat the company name in the last name.

[atheimer98]

I took our company the route of just using Accounts and contacts and creating a account type field to discern
the stage of the 'lead'. Our sales process revolves around an Account and several contacts connected toit. Our sales reps cold call the account phone or one of the contact's phones on the initial call. I do however use the leads module for incoming cold leads, emails, web form request since it let's me assign those leads easily for my team. I'd be happy to describe my process more as needed.

[djacobson]

Not sure what you mail client is, but using the Outlook plug in, you can easily add leads or contacts with bare minimum of information and have it sync into sugar as well.

[netron]

I'm playing with sugarcrm, and I'm confused as to the best practice regarding lead management for *really* cold calls. I want to add leads with nothing more than business name/address/phone number, but sugarcrm seems really dependent on having someone's last name.

same problem here.
we just ended up giving really cold call leads a firstname and lastname of "xxx"

[bcss]

I'm playing with sugarcrm, and I'm confused as to the best practice regarding lead management for *really* cold calls. I want to add leads with nothing more than business name/address/phone number, but sugarcrm seems really dependent on having someone's last name.

My experience tells me it may not really beneficial to put in a large number of really 'cold' leads in CRM, particularly the conversion ratio is very low, say less than 0.5%. How do you think?

Since completing a CRM input is really time consuming, sometimes we would prefer a workaround that only some selected 'warmer' leads are added to CRM immediately, a large number of too 'cold' leads optionally added to database in batch by a separate script.


Rgds, Dove

[sma350]

I don't like the solutions generated thus far to this questoin. I have the same issue and my sales support can easily dump me leads into "Leads" hence the name and I want to quickly call through them then convert to Opportunity, leave as a Lead if future contact efforts will be made, or Delete. Not liking SugarCRM for this yet. Any Sugar folks have suggestions how to do this well in sugar.

[titobustillo]

The way I do it: i develop a custom module for leads (one to many relationship) to store the status of the cold lead. When customer is interested on receive prices, we convert the lead in account and opportunity. Using the custom module allow us to work several times with the cold lead in the future if he has no interest today.