Managing Leads, Contacts, and Accounts

Introduction to Leads, Contacts, and Accounts

A core function of the Customer Management system is the process of turning your prospects or leads into customers and orders. In the opentaps CRM subsystem, prospects are created as a Lead first in the [Leads] tab. A lead is one person at one company and cannot have additional contacts associated with it. After you have qualified your lead, perhaps by a follow up call, you can mark the lead as "qualified". Then, when the lead is becoming a customer, you can convert your lead into an account and a contact. You can then add additional contacts to an account.

Note that if you have several leads from the same company, the system lets you create them all as different leads, then you can convert them all into the same account. The lead conversion screen also lets you select an existing account for new leads, as needed.

There is no formal requirement in the system about when a lead can be marked qualified or converted to an account—you can do this whenever it fits your company’s selling cycle or process. Conversion to an account normally means that a business transaction is occurring.

In the following sections of the manual we will walk through the use of the Leads-Contacts_Accounts group of processes and the specific applications involved.

Tab pages > The Leads Tab