Creating Leads & Opportunities

[hotproperty]

Hello,

1st post from new Sugar user!

I have a database which is a mixture of customers and prospects, this has been imported as Accounts and Contacts

From this I would like to be able to perform a search then convert the results to Opportunities or Leads, the searching is fine, but I can't see a way of creating leads/opportunities (other than exporting and importing again).

Thanks in advance!

Sugar Version: 4.5.1
OS RH Enterprise 5

[Markku]

Hi hotproperty and welcome to the forums!

I'd suggest you to read Andy's reply in this thread, hope it helps (see post #3´):
http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21384

You can not convert accounts and contacts to opportunities or leads. The workflow goes like prospects -> leads -> accounts and contacts.

Accounts can have opportunities (sales projects).

[hotproperty]

Ahh, I used the wrong phrase I meant CREATE an opportunity from an account.

We target COMPANIES not people, so for example we want to search our database of companies for all that are located in a specific town and then create opportunities from that list assigned to a sales person.

I've looked at Projects and Campaigns but can't see a way of doing this, unless I have missed something which is quite possible.

Does that mnake sense?

[andydreisch]

Hi hotproperty, there's not an automatic way to create an Opportunity from an Account, as would be the case if there were a "Convert" function associated with an Account (there isn't).

Of course, you can create an Opportunity and associate it with an Account via the Account -> Opportunities subpanel Create button.

Andy

[hotproperty]

OK, so what is the reccomended method for a company with a large number of customers to run telesales campaigns?

We have a database of 30,000 companies so manually creating opportunities is not an option

[andydreisch]

Maybe assigning Leads is the way to go. Do you actually need an Opportunity? Do you really need to maintain an Account? Or perhaps you can create an Opportunity (via an import) for each Account in advance, those not being worked having a status of "Pending" and the others "Worked", or whatever.

Sugar provides several flexibile options; you have to choose among the options that Sugar provides (and there are several) to determine the best course for your business.

Andy

[hotproperty]

Thanks, I'm starting to learn where the limits are which is good.

Do you actually need an Opportunity?

We target companies rather than people, so opportunities seemed the correct way.

Do you really need to maintain an Account?

The companies I am trying to import are not just prospects, some are existing customers, some are customres who's service has recently expired and there are are others that are prospects or have purchased some time in the past 5 years.

Or perhaps you can create an Opportunity (via an import) for each Account in advance

Didn't want to do this becuase we are not just going through all the companies that we have as a long list. WE need to be able to create a subset (via a search) then generate a campaign from that in some form.

It looks to me that we would have to either
a) export a list of accounts to excel and import back as opportunities
b) create a custom module

Not really keen on a) as its open to human error ( especially as the sales/marketing manager is likely to be doing this several times per week)