Types of CRM Records
Prospect/Account
A Prospect is essentially an unconfirmed Customer account.
You can create contacts, Quotes and Opportunities against a Prospect, but you need to convert them into a Customer in order to move onto the Rental Contract stage
Leads
An address and description for a potential business opportunity - usually very vague, unconfirmed ideas for new business
E.g. A job site for a new apartment complex.
This might involve your sales rep capturing information like:
Building Name: ST CLAIR APARTMENTS
Project Stage: Construction
Project Status: Construction Commenced
Local Value: 22,000,000.00
Development Type: New construction
Site Area (hectares): 0.9The outcome of ‘Completing’ a Lead may be to:
Create a Prospective Customer
Create a Job Site
Create a Project
Opportunities
Think of this as a trackable deal with a specific Customer
You have a Customer and Contact(s) and need to conduct initial discovery around dates, budget, scale before moving onto a formal quoting stage
Often has an estimated potential revenue amount
The outcome of ‘Winning’ an Opportunity may be to:
Convert it into a Rental Quote
Convert it into a Sales Order Quote
Convert it into a Work Order Quote
Personally I think Opportunities are the most useful but will depend on how many cold leads without an associated contact you want to track.
Both Leads and Opportunities can have activities logged against them (calls, meetings, etc.) to create a paper trail of progress.
Projects
A way to collate related contracts, quotes, sales orders, opportunities that may span multiple customers, share common job sites, but are all connected and should be tracked together.
Linking items to a Project allows someone managing those customers/contracts to more easily track the progress.
A common use case for a project would be something like a highway upgrade where there are many contractors with different rental quotes, contracts all working on the same thing.