Leads and the pipeline
What a lead is, the stages it moves through, and how divisions and salespeople fit in.
Everything in the Sales Lead Portal revolves around one record: the lead. Understanding its fields and its status makes the rest of the app self-explanatory.
A lead’s fields
- Customer - picked from your ERP’s customer search, or entered manually if they’re not in it yet
- Division - which part of the business the enquiry belongs to
- Work required - a free-text description of what’s being asked for
- Approximate value and initial probability - your best early estimate of the deal
- Contact date - when the enquiry first came in
- Sales person - who owns the lead (defaults to you, if you’re not an admin)
- Linked job - set once the lead is won and your ERP has a real job for it
Status stages
A lead’s status is driven by its most recent logged activity, and moves through these stages in roughly this order:
- First Contact Made - the enquiry has just come in
- Site Visit
- Data Logging
- In Design
- Designed
- Quoting
- Quoted
- Presented Quote
- Follow Up Contact
Everything above ends one of two ways:
- Sold - the lead is won
- Lost - the lead didn’t go ahead (a reason is required, and probability is zeroed - see Change a lead’s status)
A lead can also be put On Hold at any point, and picked back up later.
The Leads list groups leads into four buckets for quick filtering: In Progress (every stage above that isn’t Sold, Lost or On Hold), On Hold, Sold and Lost.
Divisions and salespeople
Divisions are set up by an admin and represent the parts of the business you sell into (e.g. Electrical, Plumbing, Drainage). Every lead belongs to one.
Salespeople are the users who own leads. An admin sees and can filter by everyone’s leads; a non-admin salesperson only ever sees their own - see Sales user permissions.
See also
- The dashboard - filtering and charting the pipeline
- Change a lead’s status - moving a lead through these stages