Overview of Lead Management

Leads provide a way for your sales organization to capture the potential interest in your products. After your organization qualifies the information and determines the lead is worth pursuing, you turn it into an opportunity and the sales process begins in earnest.

Use the Contact time zone field to capture the preferred time zone of a contact pursued on your lead. The contact time zone is based on the contact address and helps you know the preferred time to call or email a prospect or customer. You can also use the functional who columns to capture the record history of a lead. The columns let you accurately report on leads that are imported from other systems.

Other lead management features help to align marketing and sales objectives from lead generation to lead execution. Lead information is generated from a variety of sources and captured from:

• A company's existing contacts

• Marketing campaigns

All leads then undergo the qualification and assessment process and are qualified either manually by a salesperson or automatically based on predefined rules. Finally, qualified leads are converted into opportunities.