Managing Leads

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you can get lead A potential customer who must be qualified or disqualified as a sales opportunity. If a lead is qualified, it can be converted to an opportunity, account, and/or contact. information in the Sales area. Your organization The top level of the business hierarchy. The organization is divided into business units. There can be only one organization per deployment. might refer to leads as inquiries, prospects, or sales opportunities. All activities Actions to be performed, such as tasks, or communication items that are sent or received, for example, e-mails, phone calls, letters, faxes, and appointments. The status of activities is tracked and the activity history is stored in the system, so users can view the open and closed activities. are logged and a running history of every activity with the lead is kept, once it is completed.

You can enter leads individually. In addition, you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to import lead lists into the database, perform the common qualifying activities, and convert leads to opportunities Potential revenue-generating events or sales to accounts that need to be tracked through a sales process to completion., if they qualify To verify that a record fits specific criteria and should be converted to an opportunity, account, or contact, or be added to a marketing list..

Each disqualified lead A lead record that was not converted to a new account, a new contact, or an opportunity associated with an existing account or contact record. is retained in the database for business-reporting purposes. For example, you might want to analyze the success of different list sources or assess how much time the sales force spends prospecting leads.

Importing leads is the quickest way to add them to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. You might already have prospects in Microsoft Office Outlook or Microsoft Office Excel that you can import using the Import Data Wizard, and then use the leads list to view or open leads to ensure that all the information imported successfully.

You can track information about prospective customers, and then qualify and assign inquiries. Because leads are tracked separately from customers throughout the sales cycle, you can focus on building your customer base.

Understanding How Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities Relate

Account and contact records represent established customers. Leads are potential or prospective customers. Opportunities are not a specific customer, such as a lead, contact, or account, and therefore require a customer record to be added to the opportunity.

How you can use lead, opportunity, contact and account records to facilitate the process of generating new customers is described in the following scenario:

A Sales and Marketing team uses methods to gather leads. For example, the sales and marketing team holds a seminar and gathers business cards from participants. Personal names, businesses names, addresses, and phone numbers are gathered from the seminar and then entered into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as lead records. The lead records are assigned to the sales staff based on certain criteria, such as the lead's ZIP Code/Postal Code.

Next, sales staff contact the leads to qualify them. The salesperson may initiate a telephone call to the lead and ask questions such as "Are you interested in purchasing our products?" and "When do you intend to purchase?"

Based on the information collected from the previous lead qualification process, the salesperson uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to either disqualify the lead or convert the lead into three new records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online:

• An account for the business
• A contact for the person who the sales staff is working with
• An opportunity for the potential sale

The contact that is created has the account configured as the parent account An account record associated with one or more other account records..

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