Dynamics CRM: The importance of the Lead entity

One issue I often come across with Dynamics CRM customisations is clients being puzzled about the Leads entity. I do have a share of clients that genuinely have no need for the Lead entity, but you’ll be surprised how many people turn a blind eye to Leads based purely on misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions. Then when we get to explain the real use of the Lead entity they would often go “oh, wait. We do want that!” So I decided to write this post about why I find Leads to be of such importance in Dynamics CRM.

Leads are records of a sales qualifying process. Basically, creating and qualifying a lead can provide useful information into marketing and sales. For instance, suppose you went to an industry event representing your organisation from where you obtained 150 business cards. You would like to then register those business cards into Dynamics CRM so you can follow up with some sales opportunities.

At this point, all you have is business cards. These cards represent potential clients, but not your actual clients. Sure you could go ahead and register them as accounts and/or contacts, however you’ll be missing important information about qualifying those records, and likely to have wasted your time if the potential client is not interested in a possible deal.

The Leads entity allows you to create just one record for each business card, instead of one record for an organisation and another for the person. Once a lead is created you can go on and proceed to qualify the record (that is, following up with the potential client and see if you can get an opportunity out of it). This qualifying process can be whatever you want it to be, based on your modus operandi or organisation procedure. For instance, it could be a series of phone calls, followed by some pre-sales meetings. You can create activities such as phone calls, emails and meetings associated to the Lead record, which will help you and your team (if relevant) to make better business decisions on how to approach potential clients. If you hit a dead-end, you can either qualify or disqualify the lead. Qualified leads can then be converted into an account record and/or contact record and/or opportunity record. Disqualified leads on the other hand can be given different status reasons such as Lost, Cannot Contact, No Longer Interested or Cancelled.

Another important aspect of the Lead record is its relationship with Marketing Lists and Campaigns entities. Combining with the lead qualification process, you can measure the effectiveness and efforts of your marketing campaigns. For instance, we could assess leads by source campaign, leads qualified/disqualified for a given period, the industry from which most leads come from, and so on. You could also create goals and metrics related to the Leads entity for your teams. For instance, you could set a goal of 30 leads to be qualified each month in order to track the effectiveness of your marketing team.

Finally, the Leads record also allows the automatic capture of leads coming from external websites. For instance, you could have a website that allow customer to provide their contact details in order to obtain further information. Upon registering their details, lead records can be created for your sales team to follow up.

Note: For further information on how the Lead entity works within the full scope of the sales process in Dynamics CRM, check out my first post in the series about the Dynamics CRM sales pipeline.