Leads

Question

We are a B2B finance company and our leads are businesses, rather than people. So we don't necessarily need to log a contact straight away. Is there a way of changing the lead layout so we can log the company name as the lead name and not the contact. We can then add multiple contacts to the account once we progress things through the pipeline. 
 
 Many thanks 
 
 Rachel

Rachel Craft · Answer

Hi Rachel Craft , 
 We're also a B2B Company and when I selected SugarCRM as the replacement for our old CRM in 2010 one of the major drivers was the Studio and the process tool (which is now so much better with the BPM function). 
 The Sugar default model for Leads just didn't fit our business process, and it was easy to customize Sugar to meet our needs! Today, we don't use the Leads module, and I've "hijacked" other modules to adapt to our business processes... 
 In the Accounts Module I have a drop-down named "Record Type" for Prospects, Bill-To, Ship-To, Drop-Ship, Vendor, Factory, Rep Group, and "Internal" (for internal BPM use). The multiple Ship-To and Drop-Ship Accounts are attached to the appropriate Bill-To Account with the existing Relate field. 
 For convenience, there's also a Relate field in the Contacts Module for "Record Type of Account". 
 I am a BIG fan of Sugar! We don't have any custom code - everything is done with Studio and BPM. The one add-on I installed is the https://www.sugaroutfitters.com/addons/last-activity-dates - This add-on replaced a lot code I'd written for last email and last call that was only updated when records were saved.

Rachel Craft · Answer

Hi Rachel Craft 
 From what you're saying I'm guessing these are all businesses that have not yet been contacted/spoken to by your team yet, therefore the reason for no Contact names? 
 If that is the scenario, the correct (best practice) would be to have these as a Target (named Prospects in the URL), then use the convert Target option to become Lead once a Contact is established. 
 What I suggest is to configure the Account name as ' Required Field' and also make it searchable. 
 Also make Last Name default value to TBC - or whatever else you prefer. Without this, you won't be able to click into the record from list view. 
 Then also add the Account name into the 1st position in the list view layout 
 Hope that helps.