Prospects and Leads

Prospects and leads are a subset of contacts. They are also referred to as prospect contacts or unqualified contacts. Prospects and leads are the companies and people who have come to your firm's attention as potential sources of future business.

Prospects are contacts with whom you plan to cultivate a relationship in order to help your firm find new opportunities and ultimately win new contracts. You maintain prospect/lead data in the Lead Info Center.

The Lead Info Center makes it possible for you to:

• Enter lead name, company, address, and phone information.
• Schedule and manage activities with leads.
• Link leads with completed or ongoing marketing campaigns.
• Access files related to your leads.
• Export data to Microsoft Excel.

After you enter lead data in the Lead Info Center, it is accessible by anyone at your firm whose security role has access to the Info Center. Use this data to generate reports, schedule activities, or send broadcast emails.

Maintaining separate records for contacts in the Contact Info Center and prospect contacts in the Lead Info Center allows you to distinguish contacts who are associated with customer companies from contacts associated with companies on which you want to focus new business marketing efforts.

Qualify or Disqualify a Lead

Generally, your marketing and sales staff work with your leads to assess their level of interest in doing business with your firm. Through conversations, meetings, and/or marketing campaign activities, your marketing and sales staff determine whether a lead is qualified for further pursuit.

• For leads not worth pursuing, you disqualify the lead and mark their record as "disqualified." This allows you to quickly eliminate them from marketing campaign activities.
• For leads worth pursuing, you qualify the lead and convert the lead record to a contact record, a customer record, or an opportunity record. This allows you to maintain the data you gathered in the lead record when you convert the lead to an opportunity. If the opportunity becomes a contract for your firm, you can create the contract's record from the opportunity record.