Old Contact->New Target->New Lead->update Contact?

[emmettPower]

Hi,

I wonder if somebody can help me out here. We have a bunch of contacts from current and previous clients. They have been used to populate a target list for a mailing for a new product.

After the mailing some of those targets have expressed an interest so should be converted into leads. But if we manually create a new lead record for that contact we are duplicating the data already in the contact record.

We can skip the lead record altogether and create an opportunity and link the contact to that opportunity but that destroys the logic of the target/prospect distinction.

I understand the Sugarcrm new business workflow of:

New Target->New Lead->New Contact

but, unless I am missing something, it doesn't seem to allow the scenario of:

Old Contact->New Target->New Lead->update Contact

that I would have thought was typical in most businesses. After all don't most businesses do most of their turnover with existing Accounts/Contacts?

And the Target list can be populated with existing Contacts, but the Lead record can't be populated in the same way.

Any suggestions as to what I am missing or if anybody has a suggestion for how this workflow can be mapped would be very, very helpful.

Thanks

Emmett

[zalkind]

I have the same question with 5.0 CE

[brechtp]

Does merging not solve this problem?
Receive New Lead> Find Duplicates > Merge
This was my plan - I haven't got to the point of implementation yet, but I thought that this is what it would look like.