OpenERP also offers statistical reports to keep track of your Lead Management. The Sales → Reporting → Leads Analysis report allows you to check various leads-related elements. You can look at processing
CHAPTER 4. MANAGING YOUR LEADS 39 delays, number of responses given and emails sent (if you use the email gateway feature). Sort your leads analysis by different groups to get accurate, grained analysis.
These are some analysis possibilities of the Leads Analysis report. 1. Leads by State and per Month
To analyse the leads by status, group the leads by qualification level (Stage) and status (State), this can also be done for individual months (first group by Month).
2. Leads by Origin
Analyse leads according to their state (open, lost, won) and their stage (e.g. cold / hot or new / qualification / ... ) and find out how many leads belong to each state / stage.
3. How effective are your Campaigns?
Group by Campaign to easily find the number of leads by campaign and the total number of leads. You can also select a specific campaign in your filter.
4. Leads by Priority.
Group by Priority to see which leads are hot, warm or cold.
41
Optimizing your Sales Cycle through
Opportunities
5
While a lead represents the first contact with a prospect yet to be qualified, a sales opportunity represents a potential contract. Each opportunity has to be followed up by a salesperson (or sales team) spending time to qualify the opportunity, and this either by making a quotation or canceling the opportunity. Leads are generally handled by the dozen, with the automation of certain responses or emails. Opportunities, on the contrary, are usually tracked one by one by the salespeople, because an opportunity involves a negotiation process with the customer to be.
Just like for leads, OpenERP provides specific features to handle sales opportunities efficiently. All opportunities can be found in the menu Sales → Sales → Opportunities.
With opportunities, you can manage and keep track of your sales pipeline by creating specific customer- or prospect-related sales documents to follow up potential sales. Information such as expected revenue, opportunity stage, expected closing date, communication history, next action date, next action, and much more can be stored.
Opportunities can be connected to the email gateway: new emails may create opportunities, each of them automatically gets the history of the conversation with the customer. You and your sales team(s) will be able to plan meetings and phone calls from opportunities, convert them into quotations, manage related documents, track all customer-related activities, and much more.
Attachments
By default, you can keep attachments in OpenERP to make sure all linked documents are directly accessible. At the right side of the screen, under Attachments, click the Add button to start linking documents to your opportunity. With the Browse button, you can search for the file to be attached in your directories. You can add attachments in the same way for leads, for instance. If you also want those documents to be indexed (not for pictures), you should install the Knowledge Application.
5.1 Converting Leads into Customers or Opportunities
If the salesperson thinks that the lead has been well qualified and that there is a real opportunity, following the contact he had with the prospect, he can easily convert the lead into a partner / opportunity using the button Convert to Opportunity.
Clicking the Convert to Opportunity button offers several possibilities, allowing you also to avoid duplicate partners:
creating a partner,
• You can convert to an opportunity, and create a new partner if it does not exist yet, or merge the contact with an existing partner,
• You first create a partner, and later you convert the lead to an opportunity.
To create only a partner, click the button Create next to the Customer field. You can also decide to add the contact data of the lead as a new contact to an existing partner.
OpenERP shows a window allowing you to select: • whether you want to create a new partner,
• whether you want to link this contact to an existing partner (merge).
OpenERP opens a partner form containing the information from the lead. At this stage you can complete the contact details or add any other information for the partner.
The partner created is automatically attached to the lead, which enables you to keep complete traceability from the lead. To find this information, you should take a look at the Communication & Historytab in the lead.
Instead, you can also combine the step of creating a partner and directly the lead converting into an opportunity through the Convert to Opportunity feature.
Convert to Opportunity
When you click the Convert to Opportunity button and the email address of the new contact is filled out, OpenERP will check whether this email address corresponds to an email address of an existing partner. If so, OpenERP will directly propose to merge the new contact with the partner found.
When you click the Convert to Opportunity button and the partner already exists, OpenERP opens a window allowing you to select:
• whether you want to create a new opportunity,
• whether you want to add this lead to an existing opportunity (merge).
OpenERP shows the title of the opportunity (taken from the lead description) and the partner. Make sure to enter the estimated revenue and the success rate (probability) of converting to a sales.
CHAPTER 5. OPTIMIZING YOUR SALES CYCLE THROUGH OPPORTUNITIES 43 Figure 5.1: Converting a Lead into a Sales Opportunity
Figure 5.2: From Lead to Opportunity: Details