Lead

What is a Lead?

From a marketing standpoint a Lead is a prospect, it means it is a potential customer. It is usually the next step to the RPH.

Nevertheless for administration purposes a Lead is known as a “site”; and the same happens for an Account.

The structure for a site, no matter if it is a Lead or an Account, is a parent-children relationship. The Parent account can be found as “Management Company” or “Management Account” in the system.

For example, a company may have headquarters (parent account) and 3 subsidiaries (children). Each one of those subsidiaries are the children of the headquarter, and each child is considered a Site in the system, since the geographical address for each one is different.

This is an important aspect that needs to be considered when creating a new Lead. According to this, there are 3 different situations under which a lead can be created:

• The Lead doesn’t have a major account related to it, therefore it is self managed
• The Lead does have a major (parent) account related and the same is already registered in the system
• The Lead does or could have a major (parent) account, but this isn’t registered in the system

The structure is important for the business since the invoices for the services provided are most often created to the Parent account.

Leads menu

From the menu panel it is possible to access to the following functionalities:

• Create a Lead: this is the form to create a lead manually.
• View Lead list: list all the existing leads and allow the user to filter and search by different parameters.
• Merge Leads: Allows the user to merge 2 or more different leads into 1 in order to avoid duplications and have repeated information.
• Lead to account conversion: Allows to convert a Lead into an account.

(Screenshot)

Create a Lead

This option takes the user to the “New Lead” form. For more details on how to create a Lead and this form please redirect to the section in this document “How to create a Lead?”

View All leads

The system allows to list all the existing leads on the platform and quickly review if the user has activities or reminders related to any of them. The UI shows 3 different tabs,each one with different features:

• Lead List
• My Activities
• My Reminders

Lead List

On this tab is possible to see the list of the existing Leads in the database, filtered by specific parameters. There is also a search bar that can be used to refine the search by looking among the shown results.

Filters available are:

• Owner: filter by the owner of the Lead
• Quick Search: filter by predefined range of time
• Property type

It is also possible to activate the “Custom Search” that will enable more fields of filtering, such as:

• Status
• From date (creation)
• To date (creation)

Once the filtering is done, the system will show the results in a list. The user can search among the results by writing on the “Search” field (magnifying glass); the system will refine the results if there are matches with any field of the shown results.

The results can be extracted and downloaded to the local disk in different formats such as CSV, Excel, PDF or can be directly printed or copied to the clipboard.

Information of the Leads shown in this columns are:

• Management Company: parent account of the related company
• Company: company related to the Lead
• Contact: contact of the lead. Maybe an existent contact or a new one.
• Main Phone: contact´s main phone number.
• Mobile: contact´s mobile phone number
• Street: street declared for the lead
• City: city of location for the lead
• State: state (province), location of the lead
• Protected: informs if the Lead is protected by another user or not.
• Status: current status of the Lead.
• Last Activity: date of last change done over the Lead
• Date of creation: Lead creation date
• Owner: owner of the Lead.

From this list there is also access to the column “Options”, with more buttons that work as shortcuts to:

• Log a new call
• Create a new event
• Create a new tasks
• Send new email.

My activities

Enlists all the tasks, open or closed, assigned to the user that are related to any Lead.

My reminders

Enlists all the Events or Tasks assigned to the user that are related to any Lead.

Merge Leads

Is possible to Merge 2 leads into only 1 in case one is duplicated or for some other reasons, or directly delete 1 Lead if wished.

If the user deletes one of those Leads all related info will be moved to the other Lead and the selected Lead will be DELETED.

How it works:

1. The user select Leads
2. Select the values that you want to keep (include the Lead)
3. Select the Related info to keep in the selected Master Lead
4. After this, press Merge option to start the Lead merge process
5. You can use the option Delete After Merge to remove the Lead with the remaining related data

A special permission is needed in the system to execute this tasks, no matter the role of the user doing it.

Lead to account Conversion

A lead is automatically converted into an Account when the opportunity related is closed as won, but in case a user wants to convert the Lead manually is possible through this section.

The user should search for the Lead to be converted, and select “Convert” The system will save the record as Account and the Lead will disappear. As for the “Merge Lead” functionalities, a special permission is required.

How to create a Lead?

Just like in the case of the RPH creation, there are two ways in which a Lead can be created. One is the manual creation by the users on the CRM and the other one is automated and triggered by the system after the RPH conversion.

• Automated: Once the detective work is finished and the RPH has successfully been converted, the advertiser responsible for it will assign an Account Manager to such RPH and select the “Create Lead” option from the RPH lists.

• Manual: this option is available for those cases in which a Lead needs to manually be created by a user, accessible thru the bar menu.

The system has two ways to manually create leads:

• From the Lead menu, under the “New Lead” button
• And from the “Add Lead” button available from the “Lead List View” on the Lead module.

Either way the same form needs to be filled and is explained in detail in the following sections.

From this point the Account Manager will be in charge for the Lead and its successful conversion into an Opportunity.