Lead , Account , Contact And Opportunity

CRM Lead

• It is a identification of person or entity which has an interest to purchase or willing to purchase a product or service. It is basically unqualified and there is no relationships with contacts or companies.
• Leads must be qualified as a potential customer before it becomes contact and/or opportunity.
• Leads are not synchronized with the outlook CRM client
• Examples are listed below
  Website questionnaire submitted by online visitors
  Imported contacts from third party tools
  business cards from event, campaign and trade show.

CRM Contact/Account

• CRM Contacts/Accounts are the people/companies that you or your company will have or already have an on-going relationship.
• In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, both Account and Contact are considering customer as some some business deal with individuals, companies or both.
• If a customer is an individual, then the contact entity is used. If a customer is company or firm, then account entity is used.
• Contacts/accounts can be synchronized with the Outlook CRM client, Therefore, Account/contact information are available in outlook contacts too.
• Examples are listed below
  Existing clients
  Potential clients going through the sales process.
  Vendors
  Any contacts where company needs to record activities and relationships.

CRM Opportunity

• CRM opportunity is the kick off of company's sales process with potential or existing customers.
• The status of Open, Won or Lost can always be found in the related account or contact record.
• All metrics related to opportunity are measured here such as:
  Estimated Revenue
  Probability
  Sales Stages
  Rating (Hot, Warm or Cold)
  Follow up activities

What Does CRM Really Mean ?

CRM's acronym stands for customer relationship management which is a combination of enterprise strategies, business processes and information technologies that are used to learn about customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger and good relationships with them. It uses technology to organize, automate and synchronize business activities (sales) in order to assist with marketing,customer service and technical support.

Benefits of CRM system.

1. Achieve a 360-degree(holistic) view of the customer relationship .
2. Automate common business processes (selling products or services) to reduce manual tasks and common work flows.
3. Deliver a more consistent customer experience by improving customer interactions.
4. Enable executives to measure and report on key metrics related to their business,therefore they can make better business and strategy decisions.

Many CRM software packages such as SAP,Siebel, MS Dynamics CRM and so on , exist to help companies to manage their customer relationship process. In contrast, it stores all customer information in easy access format. With a Typical CRM system, The leads are created into the system and salespeople comment about their sales throughout their sales process which is then easy for a company to create report according to the data in database. And also, CRM brings all of a company's data sources to provide a real time view of customer.  

Customer relationships are the life blood of any organization. Customer relationship management should not rely on just one person.