Managing soft opportunities & prospects

[dpuryear]

We're a SugarCRM Pro v5.2 user.

Okay, so SugarCRM makes it a snap to manage your leads and ops.

However, we have a use case that we think may be common, and so we're hoping you guys can help!

Use case: Often, a lead needs to be nurtured over a long period, and there is no specific op.

I'm debating how to handle these types of leads.

I hate leaving a lead in the 'lead status' for months. It's just messy. However, we may want to revisit this lead later down the road.

Right now our lead followup process works like this:

1. we find the lead (conference, etc)
2. we call them and our sales person fills out a form identifying their environment and if the lead is qualified as an immediate opportunity for a service (we service several products)
3. if so, we convert the lead into a contact/account/op, all done as lead
4. if not, then if the lead is totally bogus we convert to Dead
5. if they aren't a hard/immediate op, but not bogus, then.. this is where I'm trying to figure out our workflow

I could convert them to a Contact/Account, but then they'll be lost in the shuffle.

I'm thinking perhaps we need to create a module (I created one already, Sugar makes that simple) that lets us assign a Lead/Contact/Account to either 'what they have' or 'what we think they may provide as far as ops later on'.

So, for what they have, we may have:

Site Qualifications (module)
* Active Directory Installed
* More than 5000 Users
* Red Hat Linux
* whatever

Basically, that's a multi-value list, similar to how you can use the Tags add-on.

Or, we could do future possible ops:

Possible Ops to Nurture:
* XYZ
* ABC

Or, are we missing a better way to manage this type of lead in SugarCRM?

[salesagility]

The most straightforward way to do this is to use the Lead Status drop down ... perhaps create an entry called "Future Possibility" .... then when you need to re-visit them ... filter on the drop down ... work them .... promote them to Contacts/Accounts if relevant or set status to "Dead" if not ... a lot cleaner than duplicating the data into another module