Leads are new people who may become your customers. You will want to make sure they are qualified before you start spending time to sell to them.
Deals are sales opportunities you work on. Most of your sales team’s time will be spent working to win deals.
You will use two different types of records to manage your sales: Leads and Deals.
Leads
Leads are people who may be interested in buying from you. Generating a steady stream of new leads is a key part of sales growth and is typically achieved through marketing activities.
Anyone who calls in for more information about a product, fills out an information request form in your website, visits your stand in a trade show, or is referred to you from someone else may be a lead. Information about new leads is usually limited and unverified. Through a process called lead qualification, you will categorize them as either disqualified (not worth your time), or qualified (promising). Your sales team will only be interested in qualified leads.
Once a lead is qualified, you may want to convert it into a contact, and possibly a company and a deal.
At the beginning of your sales cycle, you probably want to cast a wide net to get the maximum number of leads, even if you don’t know much about them. Web form submissions from your website or business cards from visitors at your trade show booth may be all you have. Do not create contact and company records for them right away.
Start with creating leads instead. Go through a qualification process, convert them into contacts and companies only when you have verified their information and their potential.
That way, your database of contacts and companies will always have unpolluted, high-value information.
Deals
Deals are the most important CRM records in managing your sales.
A deal is a specific sale you are trying to make to a specific customer. Sales professionals sometimes refer to deals as opportunities. It is good practice to give easily understandable names to your deals that make it easy to understand their scope.
A deal’s status can be open or closed. An open deal is one that is still being worked on. A closed deal is one where the customer has reached a final decision.
A deal will go through several stages while it is open. These will vary from business to business. Simply knowing the current stage of a deal can make it easier to understand what remains to be done and how much time is needed to close it. A deal in the “quote preparation” stage will probably require more time to close than one in “contract negotiation” stage.
If the customer has decided to buy from you, you can call it a won deal. If the customer has decided to buy from a competitor, you will call it a lost deal.
Keeping the status and stage of each deal up-to-date is one of the most critical tasks in managing sales in a CRM system, but there are also other important deal attributes that need to be tracked: The expected amount of a deal is the total value of the sale you hope to close. The probability shows the estimated likelihood of winning that deal.
TeamGram uses the information you enter about each deal to give you an up-to-date picture of your sales activities, how your team is performing, and what you can expect in the near future. It also helps you keep track of sales activities related to each deal, makes sure critical steps are not forgotten, and gives instant access to relevant information to help you win more deals.