CRM · Daily operations · 7 min read

Capture and edit a lead

Record a new lead, understand what the system fills in for you, and edit, export, archive or delete leads.

Before you begin

You need crm.manage and membership of a sales team as Representative or Team manager. A lead with no team is visible to administrators only, so choose a team unless you are an administrator.

Steps

1. Open CRM > Leads > Leads and press New lead.
2. On the General tab, enter the Subject, for example Villa fit-out - Palm Jumeirah. It is required and holds up to 180 characters.
3. Choose the Market: B2B or B2C.
4. Enter Company / organization, Contact name, Email, Phone and Job title as far as you know them.
5. Choose the Lead source. You can type a new source. It is added to the Lead sources list when you save.
6. Choose the Country and City. For GCC countries the city must belong to the country.
7. Set the Priority (Low, Normal, High, Urgent).
8. Choose the Sales team and Owner. The owner must be a representative or manager of that team.
9. Add Tags if you want them (up to 20).
10. On Qualification & forecast, enter Expected value, Expected close and anything you already know about budget and decision maker.
11. Press Save.

What happens next

• The record gets the next reference, for example CRM-000012, with kind Lead and status Open.
• The owner is you unless you chose someone else. The stage is the first active stage that does not need qualification, and the probability is that stage's starting probability.
• If you gave a country (and city), the system picks the most specific matching territory. A city-specific or child territory beats its parent.
• The lead score is worked out on every save. Open Criteria & score to see each rule and whether it matched.
• The system looks for possible duplicates by e-mail and by phone (phone numbers are compared without spaces, symbols and leading zeros). If it finds any, a yellow box says "Potential duplicates - review before conversion". Nothing is merged for you. See Duplicates and merge.
• New lead sources and tags join the lists on Configuration. An archived entry with the same name is not brought back.

Worked example

You capture a lead with e-mail, phone, a decision maker and a customer need, but no budget and no close date. With the built-in scoring (e-mail 10, phone 10, budget above zero 20, decision maker 15, need 15, close date 10, customer 20) it scores 10 + 10 + 15 + 15 = 50. Adding a budget of AED 100,000 and a close date and saving brings it to 80.

Edit a lead

1. Open the lead and press Edit, change the fields, then Save.
2. If someone else saved the record while you were editing, you see 'This record changed. Reload it before saving.' Reload, repeat your change and save.

Only the owner, a team manager, an administrator or a colleague with active cover can change a lead. You cannot edit a closed or archived record; reopen and unarchive it first.

Do not contact

Switch on Do not contact to stop calls, e-mails and meetings being planned against the contact. Only internal tasks are allowed then.

Export, archive and delete

• Export on the list downloads crm-records.csv with the records you may see and the fields you may read.
• Archive is for closed deals. Open the record and change its archive status. An open deal cannot be archived: 'Close the record before archiving it.'
• Delete works only for an untouched lead. The record, its events, activities and duplicate candidates are removed, and the audit keeps the number. When you tick several rows and press Delete, each is sent as its own request, and the ones that were kept are listed.

Good to know

• You cannot delete a lead that was qualified, closed, reopened, merged or quoted. Archive it instead.
• Pressing Save twice does not create two leads.
• Subject, e-mail and phone have length limits. The e-mail format is checked by your browser.
• Two leads from the same source cannot share the same external id; the second is refused with 'Expo EX-77 is already CRM-000010.'
• Add note records a note in the history. It does not change the lead.