From Target to Lead to Opportunity to Quote

Hi Brian Curran,

In my experience with Sugar, the design of Targets represented people you intended to contact to gauge their status as a business Lead. If they passed whatever threshold, then they were converted to a Lead. Those who transcended lead status and became customers would be converted into Contacts/Accounts.

Quoting a sale, in my experience, is a function of relationship with Contacts/Accounts.

While this process from Target to Quote does fit my experience, I would not say this has been necessary with every quote. Existing customers simply need to have a new quote made related to their Contact or Account record.

I hope that helps.

Contributing to Patrick McQueen 's brilliant answer I may say:

A Target means someone which doesn't know you and you don't know him/her as well. Think about a mailing you got somehow.

A Lead means someone which may be interested on something you offer once he/her contacted you or he/she is someone whose business fits your customer profile and, finally, you have enough information about him/her.

On converting a Lead, by default, it is mandatory to create a Contact and you can also create an Account and an Opportunity as well. Eventually you can customize your ConvertLead feature so it become mandatory to create an Account and an Opportunity if it fits your business rules.

Regards

Great answer!

Related to the initial question: Yes you are doing too much.

There is no generall definition of the modules and how they are used because it changes from instance to instance.

But normaly I would say

Targets

A kind of very short information like just an email address or phone number. Far away from having contact to a real person that is able to tell you his interest related to your business.

Commonly used by marketing department to qualify if the information is valid or thrash i.e. running a mailing and check if the email address reaches the target or not. Or a phone number that is used by a callcenter to check if someone picks up the phone.

Not used in most of the CRM solutions.

Data quality: very poor

Leads

A set of address fragments i.e. a company name or a business card. We have some information but we had no contact with a real person for now or we had but essential information are missing until we can create a full qualified Account and Contact record.

The definition of the needed data to have before being able to convert varies per instance and your own business requirements.

Used by Marketing and Sales. Tools to enrich the lead record data: markeing emails, phone, manual website research, addons like HINT etc.

Main reason to use this module: qualification of the data we need until we have reached something like

• "we need to have contact to a person that is able to sign contracts"
• "there must be at least one outspoken interest in one of our products"
• "those fields must to be filled out before converting"
• ...

Some CRM solutions now convert the Lead into an Account but set the account type to "Prospect" to avoid a Prospect remains a lead record until something has been sold. I would recommend doing this too.

So to come back to your question:

Review your companies needs to the data that has to be in in your CRM. If you use the modules similiar like I described, you need to check if there is a need to "qualify" something at a point you are about to set up a quote. And why is it a use case to do it in one rush (hasn't had it been happen before?)

I hope that helps!

Cheers

Björn Canales Pfisterer

Technical Support Manager

provalida GmbH

To add some context: we sell complex systems, usually to integrators. We rarely deal directly with end-users of our products.

We don't use Targets. Leads come in from web forms, phone calls, and trade shows. These are converted to Contacts and Accounts if we think there is a current or future chance of a sale. If there is a project being proposed, an Opportunity is created, and eventually one or more Quotes will be generated.

If someone is looking for something simple, i.e. replacement parts or small value products rather than a full-blown system, we may just skip the Opportunity and generate a Quote. We have an extensive Customer Journey attached to our Opportunities and that involved process isn't needed if the customer is just looking for a power supply or something similar.

Thank you everyone, that really has helped me to understand the process better.

We have been dropping off mailers door to door (B2B) and collecting business cards, compliment slips and letter headings before adding them to Sugar as Targets.

Some of the people we spoke to were interested in what we had to offer and asked for more details along with a quote. However, we still added them as a Target first before converting them to a Lead so I now know we can skip the first step in future.

We may be able to drop the Opportunity element too, because if they're a Lead and want a quote then why don't we just send one? Or, am I missing something about Opportunities?

As I said, we sell complex systems to integrators, who then resell them to end users, install them, integrate them with other companies' products, etc. Our Opportunity process involves identifying all the parties involved, determining customer needs, designing one or more solutions with our products, refining those solutions, forecasting the expected revenue and an expected purchase date, and even getting an Application Story - a description and photos of the installation for use in future sales and promotions activities. If you're not collecting this type of information or going through a customized selling process, maybe you don't need Opportunities. 

Steve Jaspar I'd love to connect with you as we have a fairly similar use cases. We're in the process of re-accessing out process and would love to discuss.