I guess you can say that all your customers are important. But sometimes, you need to make a distinction between those customers who take priority over others. Certain circumstances necessitate that you choose specific customers, and treat them differently. In the business world, these customers could be your leads. The potential customers that you probably want to pay greater attention to because they become your customer base. The customers that you already have, however, are still important, so you can't forget about them either!
Maximizer allows you to classify your companies, contact, or individuals as leads or non-leads. There is a couple of fields that are important when thinking about leads. All of these fields can be found on the Company/Contact/Individual Details section of the Basic Information dialog.
- Sales Lead - if this field is set to Yes, the entry will become a lead.
- Account Manager - set the Account Manager to the user who the lead belongs to. So if you are doing a search and you narrow your query by searching "My Leads" only, then the search will only bring up Leads that have you assigned to as the Account Manager. More on searching for leads in a little bit later on.
There are advantages to organizing your companies as leads and non-leads.
- You can search your leads only. Having a narrow search will allow you to streamline the results and avoid clutter. When you open up most search dialogs, you will see a "Leads options" area.
- The Entries that are not leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = No.
- The All entries option will search all entries, regardless of the value of the Sales Lead field.
- The Leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = Yes.
- The My leads only option will only search records where the Sales Lead = yes, and the Account Manager = you (or the person who is currently logged into Maximizer).
- Leads have a different set of Key fields. Because you need to know different information about leads as opposed to regular entries, it is always good to have a different set of key fields for easy access to the important fields. You can create Lead specific key fields for Company leads, Contact leads, and Individual leads.
- You can sort your address book by lead/non-lead. A clever way of doing this is by adding an extra column to your column view and adding the "Entry Type Icon" field to it. If you sort by this column, it will group together all your leads/non-leads.