Lead Management
Leads are companies or individuals who represent potential customers. In NetSuite, leads are the first step in the sales cycle that progresses to prospect and then to customer.
Sales organizations evaluate leads through a qualification process that measures their ability and willingness to purchase. When a lead is viable, it is ready for assignment to a sales representative. The representative nurtures the lead through marketing campaigns until the lead becomes a prospect. For more information, see Lead Qualification and Lead Nurturing.
Lead management has the following primary types of users. Each type of user needs to understand your lead management workflow.
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Inside Sales Representative – Inside sales representatives are responsible for qualifying leads that enter into your NetSuite account. They track information related to the ability and willingness of leads to purchase on the Qualification sublist (under the Sales subtab) of lead records. When a lead is qualified, it is converted to a prospect and assigned to a field representative.
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Field Sales Representative– Nothing is more important to a sales team than a steady supply of quality prospects. After an inside representative qualifies and converts the lead record, the prospect is assigned to the field representative. With the knowledge uncovered by the inside representative, the field representative can begin negotiating a sale.
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Sales Manager – Sales managers monitor the conversion rates of their sales representatives and ensure that they apply proper sales resources. Through reports on lead conversion and sales activity, managers can evaluate and measure the effectiveness of representatives who report to them.
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Sales Operations – The sales operations team performs the behind the scenes setup work required to get your sales team up and running. They set up sales territories to assign new prospects to sales representatives automatically. They can set up workflows and email templates to notify sales representatives when leads and prospects are assigned. They also set default customer statuses that determine how leads, prospects, and customers are converted and categorized, as well as other sales preferences.
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Marketing Manager – Marketing managers can track the lead source of each lead to determine ROI and cost per conversion through campaign ROI reports. Additionally, marketing managers can use email campaigns to nurture leads. Tracking campaign response can give information about a lead's interests and help representatives convert them to prospects and customers.
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Account Administrator – Administrators have two primary roles in setting up lead management in your account. First, administrators can enable and configure the Lead Conversion feature. Second, administrators can create and customize the roles assigned to sales representatives. Much of the setup that a sales operations team does in a large organization is handled by an account administrator in a smaller one.
The following topics include information related to lead management:
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Lead Conversion including the two primary conversion workflows
For information about generating leads through marketing campaigns in NetSuite, see Capturing Leads.