Capture and qualify a lead

Personas: Sales rep (owns the lead; works from My Leads or the CRM group) · Modules: Leads & Opportunities A prospect showed interest — you record them as a lead, work them by phone and meetings, and when they are real you convert them: into a customer, into a deal, or both. Nothing about a lead touches your customer master until you say so.

Before you start: to work from My Leads in the Personal shell (/services/web/personal/), an Employee record whose Username equals your login must exist — that is who Owner resolves to. The Lead number series (LD) ships with the suite.

1. Capture the lead — Sales rep

1. Open Leads (CRM group in the application shell) — or My Leads in the Personal shell, where the list shows only your own leads and the owner is set to you automatically.
2. Click New Lead. Fill in the Date, the prospect's Name (this becomes the customer name if you later convert), the Contact Name, E-mail, Phone, the Country and then the City (the city list narrows to the chosen country), and the Source (Website, Referral, Trade Fair…). In the power list you also pick the Owner — the rep working the lead.
3. Save. The lead is numbered immediately (LD… — the number is its title) and starts in status NEW.

2. Work the lead — Sales rep

1. Log every touch as an activity on the lead: a dated entry with a Type (Call by default; also Meeting, Email, Task), a Subject, a Note and a Done flag. Who logged it and when is recorded automatically.
2. After the first real contact, click Mark Contacted (available only in NEW). Status: CONTACTED.
3. When the prospect is worth pursuing, click Qualify (available in NEW or CONTACTED — you may skip straight past Contacted). Status: QUALIFIED.
4. A dead end? Disqualify works from any open state (NEW, CONTACTED, QUALIFIED) and sets DISQUALIFIED.

3. Convert — Sales rep

Two buttons on the lead do the conversion; either one flips it to CONVERTED — there is no way to set that status by hand.

1. Convert to Customer — creates a real Customer from the lead: its name, e-mail, phone, country and city carry over (the contact person's name does not — add it on the customer if needed). Do this first when the deal will need a quotation: an opportunity must have a customer before an offer can be generated from it.
2. Create Opportunity — opens a deal from the lead: same name, same Owner, same company, dated today, and linked back to the lead so the funnel stays traceable. The new opportunity starts in PROSPECTING with its own OPP… number.

What happened behind the scenes

• Number series Lead (LD) stamped the number at create; the opportunity got its own from the Opportunity (OPP) series.
• Lead status path: NEW → CONTACTED → QUALIFIED → CONVERTED (or DISQUALIFIED). CONVERTED is set only by the two convert actions.
• Dashboard effects: the lead leaves Open Leads on convert/disqualify; Leads By Source and Monthly Leads count it from day one.

Variations and refusals

• Every lifecycle button is guarded: pressed outside its allowed statuses it refuses with the reason (e.g. Mark Contacted on a QUALIFIED lead).
• You can qualify straight from NEW — Contacted is not a mandatory stop.
• A converted or disqualified lead offers no further stage buttons.
• Both conversions can be run on the same lead — typically Convert to Customer, then set the customer on the opportunity (the Create Opportunity action does not carry a customer, since the lead has none).

See also

• Leads & Opportunities — the module reference
• Work an opportunity pipeline — what happens after conversion