Creating and Managing Leads

Leads are the first step of the sales and marketing cycle—they keep opportunities flowing into our sales funnel. Leads are prospects or people that may be interested in your product or service. The goal of working with them is to move them through the sales cycle and assess them as either unqualified or qualified for workable opportunities. Understanding how leads work is beneficial as it familiarizes you with how a lead starts off the sales cycle and how to move from a lead to the next step in the sales cycle. This is what we will explore in this chapter.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

• What are leads and what are they used for?
• What is Lead Status and how is it used in the sales cycle?
• What is lead conversion and what happens when you convert a lead?
• What is web-to-lead and how is this feature used?
• What are lead auto-response rules and how do you set them up?
• Lead settings and lead processes

In this chapter, we will learn the skills needed to create a lead, as well as learning what a lead record contains. We will also learn how to move a lead through the initial sales cycle, how to convert a qualified lead into an opportunity in order to move to the next step of the sales cycle, and how to create web-to-lead forms.