Leads vs Prospects in Distribution

Lead: Much like a business card.  We have limited data but appears to be a consumer of products that we are capable of supplying.

 
Prospect:  There has been confirmation that this company is indeed purchasing products that we are capable of supplying-They are currently spending money with our competition 

Hi Tim Phillips , very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Have you built a custom module for Prospects in your CRM instance? I'm curious how your process works to automate routing for Prospects.

We have not yet officially launched SurgarCRM.  We are still in implementing.  This was a critical issue for us when selecting a new CRM.  I was very disappointed in HOW we are having to work the journey from Lead to Prospect to Customer.  We were told, through our many pre-sale meetings with Sugar, that this was standard and not a problem.  What we found out is that it is not standard and we had to come up with a work-around solution. We did not build a custom module for Prospects. 

 The journey process that we have worked out, and are currently testing, is as follows.  Lead:  we work to confirm the lead fits our target prospect profile.  Simply state, if they are spending money with our competitor, they are a confirmed prospect.  We then convert the Lead to an Account, but the account type is Prospect.  From that account type prospect, we are able to create sales opportunity.  Once the account type prospect commits to placing orders with us, we will change the account type to Customer.  

It is somewhat confusing at first, but once everyone understands the terminology, it really isn't that big of a deal.  Please let me know if you have additional questions.  I am happy to share.  

Leads vs Prospect
No right or wrong term, however here are some interesting facts that may help you decide:

Back in the old days, Prospectors went searching for gold. They didn't know if they'd find any, but with experience some of them knew what type of terrain or rivers to look for.

Similarly, 'old school' sales, Prospecting was a term used for various types of cold calling, hoping to find somebody that may be interested in what you're selling.

So it stands to reason that even modern Social media marketing is in fact Prospecting.

The remainder I'm sure everyone here knows, but for completeness;
When somebody responds to the ads i.e filling a form, it would be considered a 'Lead'. Some would call this 'unqualified Lead'. Moving on, if a sales person contacts these they become 'sales qualified' and either Closed Lost or Converted into an Opportunity.

All the modules and basics for the above is included in SugarCRM out-of-the-box. Some may have not noticed that if you click on the menu for 'Targets', and look at the URL it is in fact /#Prospects.
(I personally rename Targets to Prospects because Targets get users confused thinking they are part of Target Lists.)
When you create a Target/Prospect, you also get the option to convert it into a Lead.

I think the lines between Lead and Prospect became blurred because some started treating the act of Prospecting and the term Prospect to mean different things, and some as the same thing.

I believe this is possible because so much content on the web is generated by copying or refactoring existing content, depending either on which came up top during initial Google search or preferred source.

Ultimately the choice is yours, although I prefer the old fashion terminology because it makes sense to me, and also because it's mostly out-of-the-box with SugarCRM.

Tim Phillips 

Tim Phillips said:

I was very disappointed in HOW we are having to work the journey from Lead to Prospect to Customer.  We were told, through our many pre-sale meetings with Sugar, that this was standard and not a problem.  What we found out is that it is not standard and we had to come up with a work-around solution. We did not build a custom module for Prospects

This confusion is common.

if you click on the menu for 'Targets', and look at the URL it is in fact /#Prospects.
(I personally rename Targets to Prospects because Targets get users confused thinking they are part of Target Lists.)
When you create a Target/Prospect, you also get the option to convert it into a Lead.

Hope that helps.

Hi Tim, thanks for such a thorough response. I'm sorry to hear that, and I appreciate your candor. It's helpful to understand how you've set up the process. aadil ahmed may also find this interesting, as he's approached the solution slightly differently. Aadil, do you want to share how you've set it up?

I shared this insight around the Prospect to Lead to Customer process with our executive leadership team at Sugar so they have eyes on this particular industry process. Thanks again for helping me understand.

To add to Vincent Amari 's explanation, specifically the out-of-the-box comments, we have a podcast episode ( Season 1 Episode 2: What's the difference between Targets, Leads, and Contacts in Sugar?) and a getting started Help Article (https://support.sugarcrm.com/knowledge_base/getting_started/introduction_to_contacts_leads_and_targets/) on this topic that may help as well. Also, here's the documentation section on Renaming Modules (https://support.sugarcrm.com/documentation/sugar_versions/13.3/sell/administration_guide/developer_tools/#Configuring_Module_Names) if anyone would like to investigate this process further. 

I hope this helps!