Introduction to Lead Management in ERPNext
Hi everyone, I am Lynette Sharon. Welcome to Frappe School. Our first chapter in CRM is Lead Management. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to create leads, track various sources of leads, add contacts to leads, add addresses to leads, and even assign leads.
Let's say you're a part of the sales team at a company. As a sales executive, your one clear goal is to close deals. The key to closing more deals is to establish a process that will help you reach your customer at the right time with the right information. This is where customer relationship management becomes very useful to help you reach that goal.
Any potential customer from whom you may expect business is called as a lead, and the processing of this lead through various stages of information and contact is called as lead management. A lead can be any individual or business that is interested in the products or services you offer. A lead can come from various sources, for example, someone who has directly asked you for details about your products or services, or someone who has downloaded content from your website by signing up using their contact details, or even someone who has been referred to you by a mutual acquaintance.
To make the diversification process easier, you can assign various labels to the leads, like territory, domain, market segment, etc. Once you know a little more about your lead, their contact details, and their requirements, you can delve deeper and start checking if your products and services fulfill their requirements. Accordingly, you can qualify them and take a step further to turn them into a customer. This will help you analyze and pick the most suitable leads for follow-ups.
In this video, we will learn how to collect, classify, and prioritize leads to help attract more business.
How to Create Lead Sources
Before creating a lead, let us add lead sources. Lead sources basically define where the lead has been acquired from. Here's an example of how you can easily create them in ERPNext.
In order to view and create lead sources, from home, you can navigate to the CRM module and go to Lead Source under Sales Pipeline. Here you will see a list of any generic pre-formatted lead sources. You can add your own lead source like this. Once you have named the source, you can also add any other details as well. This lead source will now show up in the lead source list.
Manually Creating a New Lead
Let's now see how we can create a new lead and add it to our system. You can access the lead list under the sales pipeline in the CRM module. When you click on add lead, a lead doctype will open that will enable you to efficiently fill in details about this lead. If the lead is an organization, you can select the check box and then consequently add the name of the person or organization.
Now you can fill in the rest of the details as shown here. For example, the lead's designation, email address, and select a lead source. To manage leads more efficiently, it is also important to have a designated follow-up process. In the follow-up section, you can assign this lead to an individual in your company along with a follow-up date, which will make sure that the lead is contacted within an acceptable frame of time.
In the following sections, you can add more information about the lead and add their address details. The contact section makes it easy for you to note down their phone numbers, fax, and website details. Categorizing leads according to their types, what market segment they belong to, or what kind of request they are making can be essential to further recognize how this lead should be approached.
If your lead does not want to be notified about your company's newsletter or updates, the unsubscribe check box can be selected. In the same way, the blogs subscribe check box can be selected if you want the lead to receive blogs published on the website. Once you're done filling all these details, you can click on save and a new lead will be created.
Automating Lead Creation from Various Sources
Adding a lead to your system does not always have to be manual. Since leads can come from various sources, there are features in ERPNext that will help you add leads from different places like web forms, emails, or even any pre-existing spreadsheet data. Here's an example.
You can enable your email account, which will pull emails that you receive about your products or services and turn them into leads on ERPNext. To do so, from home, go to settings, and under the email notification section, click on email account. From there, click on add email account. Here you can add an email from which leads will be automatically generated. You can add other details like domain and service and check the enable incoming check box. In the append to field, type lead. Add any other details you may require and click on save. This will now automatically create leads from any email sent to this account.
Similarly, you can also map the lead form to a web form and publish it on your website. To do this, from home, go to the website, click on web form, and add new web form. Type in the title of the form, for example, Contact Us. Set the doctype as lead and upload it to your website. When visitors to your website fill this form, the information will automatically be added as a lead.
Another example, if you have spreadsheets that contain the data of various leads, you can use the data import feature to add them as leads. You can do this by going to the import data section in the settings module. You can click on add data import, add the document type, import type, and click save. Then you can download a template, select the required fields, fill in the template, and then attach it and click on save. This data will now create leads.
Conclusion and Next Steps
I hope this video was helpful in understanding what leads are and how we can work with them in ERPNext. You can read more about ERPNext at docs.erpnext.com. In the next video, we will learn about opportunity management in CRM. Thank you.
