Hi,

I've tried to follow a relative simple"from lead to order" process in Sugar and a list of feature requests arised. Before officially filing them, I'd invite everyone to take a look and comment.
Note: during the process I've encountered some difficulties due to bugs - they've been also mentioned.

Scenario: A customer sends an email asking if we have a product or solution for his problem. A sales rep processes the request together with the customer, makes an offer, the customer accepts it and orders.


Step 1: Receive and read email

Problem: Wrong timestamp in the inbox list if message is text-only
Resolution: Bug 8944; will be fixed in 4.5.0c

Challenge: How can the user recognize at a glance that this is indeed a new lead and not another kind of request (e.g., support case) before reading the message?
Suggestions: The quick view box (the arrow next to the message subject) shows the first few lines of the message, which help deciding about creating a new lead, but they may not be always sufficient to make the right decision.
In this case, the message can be opened, read and a new lead created.


Step 2: Create new lead

Challenge: When creating a new lead from the inbound email (DetailView) page, the name and email address of the sender are no longer visible. The user must flip between two pages or have two tabs in his/her browser to copy/paste the information.
Feature request: when creating a new lead from the inbound email (DetailView) page, the name, organization and email address of the lead are automatically taken from the sender information. The "Lead source" field shall be automatically set to "Email"

Feature request: the lead shall have also a number (L0001, L0002, etc) and a description (e.g. 40 characters or less) like "Antivirus software", "Family car", "Mountain bike", etc. that is also visible on the home page.


Step 3: Qualify lead
The sales rep clarifies the exact requirements of the customer, his budget, etc. This is done via email or by phone (if known). If replying by email, the sales rep can define and use an email template which inserts the lead number in the subject and has a standard text in the body.

Example:

[L0001:]

Dear $contact_first_name

Thank you very much for your inquriry.
etc.

Problem: when replying to a message, the date and time of the reply overwrites the date and time of the original message in the lead's history
Resolution: Bug 9193

Problem: attachments are not sent
Resolution: Bug 8947; will be fixed in 4.5.0c

Problem: when creating a text-only message, it still contains an HTML part which is empty
Resolution: Bug 4475, 7755 (?)

Problem: cannot forward message to a lead
Resolution: Bug 9213

Problem: the "View Summary" function of the lead / contact history displays partially wrong date and time stamps for email messages
Resolution: Bug 9194.

Feature request: The subject of the template (the lead number) is inserted at the beginning of the reply subject

Feature request: if the incoming message is text-only, the reply shall also be automatically text-only

Feature request: The reply shall be automatically linked to the lead
Resolution: Bug/Feature 7984

Feature request: After reading the reply from the customer, if the lead qualifies, to be able to quickly change the lead status to "In Process" or a custom status

Feature request: threaded view of the messages (incoming and outgoing)


Step 4: Convert lead
The customer accepts the solution and asks for a quote. In order to create and send it, the lead must be first converted into a contact / account; an opportunity is also created for forecasting purposes.

Problem: when "Create account" option is checked, the email address of the lead is automatically copied into the new account's email address, which can create problems when automatically linking incoming messages to contacts / accounts / leads.
Resolution: Bug 9218

Feature request: when "Create account" option is checked, the address and phone entered or already available in the "Create Contact" window will be automatically filled into the new account information. The account type shall be set to "Customer"


Step 5: Create and send proposal

Feature request: When creating a quote from the Opportunity's DetailView page (using button "Create" in subpanel "Quotes"), to load the quote detail view page after saving it (and not back to the opportunity detail view), in order to print or email it.

Feature request: when saving a quote, the linked opportunity shall be updated as follows:
- amount automatically updated to the total amount of the quote (excl. taxes)
- sales stage set to "Proposal/Quote"
- probability set to the value corresponding to the sales stage

Feature request: the subject of the email generated by "Email as PDF" button shall include the reference corresponding to the original lead (e.g., [L0001:]) and also a user-defined default text (instead of "Quote for:" )

Problem: if the company name under the shipping address contains special characters like umlauts (äöü), the automatically generated file name of the proposal contains underscores ("_") instead of the special characters.
Example: company (account) name is Müller => Proposal_M_ller_1.pdf
Resolution: Bug 8584


Step 6: Proposal is accepted and converted into order

Feature request: the incoming message is automatically linked to the quote, opportunity and contact based on sender's email address and the lead reference in the subject

Feature request: The window generated by button "Select" in subpanel quotes of the "Inbound Email" page shall display only the active quotes linked to the sender's email address.

Feature request: a "closed won" button that updates the quote's status to "Closed Accepted" (or similar), asks if the linked opportunity shall be also updated to stage "Closed Won" and if yes, it updates it and sets the probability to 100%


Thanks,
George