Question

Best practices for leads / opportunities?

  • 31 July 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 98 views
A

Hi everyone,

 

We’re fairly new to Copper and trying to perfect it to match our needs. We are mainly B2C but also do some B2B work.

This is our process on 90% of our work:

  • Lead received from a vendor via email or their portal
  • Lead information is added to Copper via the leads area
  • Lead gets contacted to be qualified
  • Either the lead is marked as junk lead or converted to an opportunity from where our sales team follows up and continues the process

On this portion, I feel pretty comfortable. We also get referrals from other contractors / vendors that we work with and also referrals from previous customers. As an internal policy, we don’t go through qualifying these customers because of how they’ve reached us. These are created as opportunities right away and we go through our sales process.

My questions / doubts are:

  • Should I be creating these as leads at first? And then converting to opportunities to get better / more accurate reporting?
  • Am I doing myself / my team a disservice by not actually qualifying these referrals?

Thanks in advance!

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1 reply

alex
Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Hey @Alext - great question! We see this type of thing come up regularly.

Regardless of the source (short of "past customer"), you really should be continuing to follow your normal lead creation and flow.

Just because a lead comes in from someone that you trust, doesn't automatically make them qualified. You really should have a streamlined lead qualification process, that you can bring anyone through. This keeps your opportunity/people/company section clean, which is you're core CRM, and honestly, it's easier and quicker to convert a lead to create a person + company + opportunity with all the necessary details for each, compared to manually creating one of each.

You should absolutely be qualified these referrals though. We regularly get referrals from great partners of ours, and even then, there's like a 20% chance they are actually qualified for our services. So that would mean without qualifying first before converting, 80% of unqualified leads would be making their way into the core CRM.

Do yourself and your team a favor and treat anything new as a Lead and really focus on nailing down your lead qualification process in the lead section (hint: most people convert a lead into an opportunity WAY too soon).

Here's a more detailed post we've published to further get across when to use Leads vs Opportunities:

efficient.app/post/copper-best-practices

Alex (efficient.app)
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