I often identify a company as a potential client before I have a contact and email address at the company. If I captured them somewhere I could periodically review and filter them by a) the value I think I could bring and b) the likelihood of being accepted versus my competition, and then focus on the ones with the highest combined benefit and likeliness of success.
Is there a way to manage these potential leads in SuiteCRM? So far as I can tell, the SuiteCRM workflow starts with an email address. I could use a spreadsheet to manage them outside of SuiteCRM until I have a contact, but then I would lose the benefits of having all the information in one place (i.e. a lot more work with less synergy).
Try searching online and reading about Targets, Leads, Contacts.
That is basically a pipeline progressively taking people (or companies) from a single email address into someone you’re in touch with, to someone who is your established customer.
Thanks @pgr. But what if I don’t have an email address yet? I’m indirectly researching startups for potential clients by reviewing job postings that indicate they are at suitable stage, but I don’t have an identifiable lead and contact email address yet.
Conceptually, I’d like to enter these companies as “pre-leads” with suitable data fields for sorting and filtering, and then invest the effort to identify a lead for the ones that look most promising.
Am I missing something and it is possible to create a lead before having an email? Do I need custom code or a new module? Is the best workaround to simply keep using a “pre-lead” spreadsheet?
It’s quicker to just try things on a demo SuiteCRM than to ask here and wait for my replies
Targets are exactly those “pre-leads” you’re mentioning. The email address is not a mandatory field, you can leave it blank. You can also go in Studio and add custom fields.
Pay attention to the conversion process, meaning, the process that converts a target to a lead, and then a lead to a contact. If fields (including custom ones) have the exact same name, they get transferred to the converted record.
Excellent @pgr, thank you for your explanation and reference. I will need to read the reference a couple more times until it all sinks in. I had stayed away from Targets, understanding they were generally unqualified email addresses for use in campaigns, but now that I understand them better I see targets could be the solution for me. It’s hard to get started sometimes when one doesn’t even know what one doesn’t know. Now off to my demo site to experiment…
