The Relationship Between Leads and Opportunities

[andybesy]

Hello Everyone,

We tend to consider existing customers to be contacts/accounts, and potential customers as leads.

We would like to be able to attach an opportunity to either of these, but it only seems possible for accounts, not for leads. This is a bit odd.

How do others view this: Do you convert a lead to an account as soon as their is a sales opportunity? Or do you record the details of the opportunity in the description of a lead and only use opportunities when the potential sale relates to an existing account?

Has anyone looked at modifying Sugar to allow opportunities to be attached to Leads? We can develop for PHP/MySQL, but I was wondering if anyone has looked at what might be involved.

Sorry if I am misunderstanding a concept here: i'm just starting to get my head around sales processes in SugarCRM.

Thanks, Andrew

Operating system type and version: Debian Linux (Sarge)
Sugar Suite version: SugarCRM Open Source 4.2.0d
Webserver type and version: Apache 2
PHP version: PHP 4.3 (libapache-mod-php4 4:4.3.10-16)
MySQL server version: mysql 4.1 (4.1.11a-4sarge4)

[kbrill]

Other than the manual way you described, you could do this one of two ways.

1) Rewrite the Views to allow an opportunity to be attached to a Lead, Contact or Account. I simply copied the code from notes or someplace that had a drop down selector. You also would have to modify the sql in the bean (opportunities.php)

2) add a relationship between opportunities and leads. That would be metadata directory.

This isn't a difficult mod, depending on how comfortable with PHP you are.

[andybesy]

Hi kbrill,

Thanks ever so much for your reply.

Since you posted I have been exploring the developer's forum, and have learnt that the relationships between modules within Sugar are dynamic. That's really wonderful!

So the plan is to learn how to define a new relationship between leads and opportunities, which I think should allow me to associate the two.

I guess it's appropriate to relocate myself off to the developer's forum for further discussion of this point. Thanks again for your help.

Andrew