Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Handling Leads and Opportunities

In CRM-speak, a suspect is a person or a company with whom you may do business someday. In all likelihood, your suspect hasn't yet heard of you. A prospect is the next level up. Your prospect has heard of you and may have even expressed some interest in doing business with you. Microsoft CRM refers to both suspects and prospects as leads.

An opportunity is a lead that has matured enough to deserve serious attention. But before you can begin to turn leads into opportunities, you need to enter your lead data (such as contact information, the source of the lead, and what the prospect is interested in) into CRM.

Note

Actually, you can promote a lead to an account record, a contact record, or an opportunity record, or to any combination of these three. The subtle benefit of promoting a lead to an opportunity is that you can forecast a sale associated with an opportunity. You can also link each opportunity to a price list, which helps determine the pricing in a quote.

You need to create an opportunity record before you close your opportunity (whether by winning or losing the deal). You create opportunity records manually by just typing them in, by importing them from outside files (such as Excel), or by converting them from leads. Importing data from Excel is discussed in Appendix A.

Workflow rules enable almost complete automation of your selling process, moving opportunities from one sales stage to the next. Workflow is part of the process of ...