The Leads table is the initial point of entry for sales leads. Leads may self-register at your website or may be imported from a lead generation program. The initial qualification is done in this table, which contains all the fields desirable for managing sales.
Once a lead is qualified, it may either be fully worked in this table, or converted into a contact, an opportunity, and a company/account record, and the sales process may be managed in those records.
Leads can be created directly using the web form, or, once an inbound email address is set up, via email. New leads may start out as Qualified, Uncontacted, Contacted, or Left Message in the workflow. The Leads table is set up by default to allow those in the Guest group to create records, allowing "click to register" lead generation hotlinks, and the embedding of the lead creation form in a web page.
Naturally leads may also be imported from a spreadsheet from a lead generation program.
Admins and members of the Sales and Marketing groups can create, view, and edit Leads. No other groups have access to the table by default.
When a lead's status changes to Converted, Agiloft converts the information in the record into three new records in the three other tables: Company, Opportunity, and Contact. This order of creation is important because both the Opportunity and Contact records will contain links to the original Company via the new record. If the Company record is not created first, the Contact and Opportunity records will be unlinked and orphaned, disabling reporting features.
Data fields containing information relevant to the company, such as address and billing address, company website, industry, annual revenue and number of employees, map to the Company record. Sales-specific data fields, such as key requirements, earliest and latest possible close date, and sales actions taken, map to the Opportunity record. All data from the lead referencing a specific person at the company map into a new Contact containing the individual's desk and cell phone numbers, email address, email preferences, and so on.
Records in this table are owned by the individual assigned sales rep, so each record is associated with a particular user login. Only members of the Sales, Marketing and admin groups can view or edit Leads.