Does anyone have the Opportunity & RLI Modules available in Leads? If so, what's the best way to set up?
Does anyone have the Opportunity & RLI Modules available in Leads? If so, what's the best way to set up?
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".
Hope this helps,
FrancescaS
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".
Hope this helps,
FrancescaS
