Hi Amy Hodgkin. I'm sorry this question has been unanswered for so long. Can you provide some more details about what it is you are trying to achieve? Opportunities, RLIs, and Leads are all different modules, so I'm not sure what you mean by having Opportunities and RLI modules available in Leads. Are you just looking to have them available as subpanels in the Leads module? Please try to give some more context and let's see if we can answer your question!
Hi Ruben Sanchez. I think the place to start is by reviewing the Relationships documentation. Only certain relationships can have a subpanel available. By default, it looks like there is a many-to-one relationship between leads and opportunities, so there are many leads for one opportunity. Subpanels are only available on the "many" side of the relationship. So if you created a one-to-many relationship or many-to-many relationship between leads and opportunities, you should see the subpanel appear.
Let me know if that doesn't answer your question and I'll see what else I can suggest! Thanks!
I think the concept in Sugar, out of the box, is to go through the Lead Conversion process when you start working an Opportunity. The idea is that once you start "working the Lead" it becomes a Contact. You will notice that if you convert a Lead and create an Opportunity during the Lead Conversion process, a link is added to the bottom of the Lead's record view with the related Contact, Account and Opportunity that were created/selected during the conversion process. This is the 1 side of those 1:Many relationships.
The idea is that once the Lead is converted, you will create more Opportunities with those Contacts/Accounts rather than with the Lead. The Lead in Sugar is meant to be just a starting point with a finite life span.
If you want to work Opportunities before the conversion process and only convert your Leads once you do business with them (Win an Opportunity) then you will most likely need to add a custom Many-to-Many relationship. However, I would be careful with doing that because you will now have two relationships between Leads and Opportunities (a M:M and a 1:M) not only that, but having opportunities that are not related to Contacts will almost certainly affect how Sugar tracks your Lead to Order (aka Won Opportunities) process and reports forecasting and more.
Working with a heavily customized Sugar instance for the last 12 years, I have found that just because you can customize, doesn't mean you should. And often it is worth taking a good look at your business processes and determining if perhaps you are better off changing the process rather than the application. Right now I'm going through all my customizations to see which ones I can do away with as we find ourselves in a position to leverage existing features that we did not have access to before (Doc Merge, BPM etc).
One suggestion I would have is that if the idea of working Opportunities in Leads is to keep your actual Customers separate from those you are actively seeking to work with but have not bought anything from you, your best approach would be to add a classification to your Contacts/Accounts records, perhaps a simple flag (checkbox) which marks them as "Customer". You can have a simple BPM or logic_hook that marks them as "Customer" once you have an Opportunity marked as "Won".
Thanks Lydia Manger! As you mentioned, it was possible to access the 'Leads' module in Studio, got to relationships, and create a new 1:Many relationship between the 'Leads' and 'Opportunities modules. The Leads module can now process any related opportunities on a lead record and the opportunities subpanel appeared for all leads. And thanks to Francesca Shiekh for the thoughtful message. Great points for us to consider.
