A differentiation between Leads and Potentials makes sense as you usually expect that most of your Leads will not end up in a real business. By separating the Lead data we avoid to fill account and contact lists with relatively useless data.
Typical Leads for instance are contacts collected at trade shows or calls and emails from prospective buyers of your services or products. Such contacts should be entered as Leads and kept as Leads until a conversion to a sales potential indecates a possible business opportunity. Currently lost or useless Leads should be marked by their status as lost or useless and removed from the Lead list view by using the filter functions.
How do you enter Leads to organisations or contacts which are already on your customers list? This is for instance the case if an existing customer of yours is interested to know more about your other services or good.
It would be not a good idea to enter such a request as a new Lead. You would not be able to establish links to already existing data about this customer and Zum Einen gibt es dort keine Verbindung zu den schon im CRM vorhandenen Daten über Ihren existierenden Kunden und zum Anderen würde bei der Leadumwandlung eine neue Organisation angelegt werden.
It would be much better to add a new potential to the customer account. Add a new sales stage für potentials called “Lead” and mark this new potential with this sales stage. With the filter function of the potentials list view you can than select all portentails which are on the Leads stage.
Wir haben auch einige Kunden, die ganz auf das Lead-Modul verzichten (über Profile aus dem CRM entfernt) und nur Verkaufspotentiale mit der Verkaufsstufe “Lead” benutzen.