Leads

A lead is a prospect: a company you are talking to that is not a customer yet. You can quote a lead just like a customer. When they accept, the lead becomes a customer automatically, with their contact, quotes and deals moved across. Leads are part of the CRM, in the MSP edition.

Open Sales and billing > Leads. The line under the title shows how many leads are open and roughly what they are worth.

The list and the board#

List and Board at the top switch between the two layouts.

• The list shows each lead's Company, Contact (with their email), Status, Score, Source, Industry and Est. value; add more columns, such as Fit, Engagement, Owner or Town or city, with Columns. Filter by Status, Open, won or lost, Source, Industry, Town or city, Owner and Tags, sort by the score, and save views.
• The board has a column per lead status, in the order set in Settings > Sales, then won and lost. Drag a card (or use Space and the arrow keys) to change its status. Dropping a lead on lost asks why; dropping it on won converts it to a customer.

The score says how worth a call each lead is: see Lead scoring, assignment and the board.

Lead statuses#

Lead statuses are your own list in Settings > Sales, under Statuses, shared with opportunities. A new install starts with New, Contacted and Qualified, then Won and Lost. Each status has a colour and says whether it is for leads, opportunities or both, and one is where new leads start. Won and Lost can be renamed but always mean won and lost.

You cannot set Won by hand: it comes from converting the lead or a quote being accepted. Sending a lead a quote moves it to Qualified. A status taken off the list stays on the leads that have it.

Add a lead#

1. Press New lead.
2. Enter the Company, and the Contact name, Email, Job title, LinkedIn and Phone. The email matters: when the lead accepts a quote, its domain decides whether they join an existing customer.
3. Choose the Source (where they came from, from your list in Settings > Sales) and the Status (usually New).
4. Check the Country and Currency (their quotes start in it), and enter the Estimated value: the first year, before tax.
5. Add the Website, Industry, Headcount and Address. Size, industry and area feed the lead's fit score.
6. Choose the Owner. Leave it on By the assignment rules, else you and your lead assignment rules choose.
7. If you know it, enter their Current provider and Their contract ends: the owner is reminded to get back in touch before it ends.
8. Add Notes and press Add lead.

Custom fields you add for leads in Settings > Custom fields show on the form, the page and the list.

From a card reads a photo of a business card into a new lead form for you to check before it is added. It uses the AI provider you set up in Settings > AI, with text recognition on the server as a fallback. See Setting up AI.

The lead page#

The header shows the company, status and contact, with the Source, Estimated value, Owner and when it was Added. From here:

• Convert to customer (see below).
• Edit (e) to change the details.
• New quote to quote them. The quote is for the lead, and its proposal goes to the lead's contact.
• Send email and Call: see My mailbox and sales email.
• The ... menu: Mark contacted, Mark lost... (with a reason) and Delete lead.

The Score card says why the lead scores what it does. Opportunities lists the deals you are working on with the lead, with New opportunity, and Quotes lists the lead's quotes with their status and totals.

The Activity section is the lead's timeline: log a call (L), meeting (M), note (N) or task (T), and see the emails, meetings and activities on its deals rolled up beneath. Open tasks come first, with a tick and a snooze. See My sales day and activities. The lead's History keeps what Tenvara recorded about the lead itself: added, changed, quoted and converted.

Marketing shows whether the lead can be sent marketing, and why not; see Marketing: consent, lists and attribution.

Import leads#

Import on the leads list takes a CSV of leads or of deals, from a data provider's prospect list or another CRM's export.

1. Choose Leads or Deals and choose the file.
2. Check the mapping: the columns are guessed from their headings ("Company", "# Employees", "Lead Owner", "Deal Stage"), and your custom fields can be mapped too. Save the mapping under a name to use it again.
3. Set the tags every row gets, who rows with no owner go to, the source for rows without one, and the status new leads start at.
4. Run the dry run. Every row is checked and the counts say how many would be made, matched, skipped or refused, with each row's reason. Download the rows with problems as a CSV, fix them and import them again.
5. Import.

A row whose company is already a customer is skipped and named. A row that matches a lead (the same email, the same company domain, then the same company name) fills in that lead's empty fields and adds the tags; nothing it has is overwritten. Deals go on the customer or lead their company is, else on a new lead, at the stage named in the file. Importing the same file again makes nothing new, and Undo removes what an import made.

To bring a whole CRM across, see Importing from Zoho CRM, HubSpot or Pipedrive.

Convert a lead to a customer#

Accepting a quote converts the lead on its own. To convert one by hand, for example when they sign up without a quote:

1. On the lead's page, press Convert to customer.
2. Choose A new customer (created with the lead's company name, set to onboarding) or An existing customer and pick it.
3. Press Convert.

The contact becomes a contact on the customer, the lead is marked Won, and its quotes, deals and timeline move to the customer. A new customer takes the lead's website, industry and headcount, and its address becomes the customer's main site.

When a quote converts it#

When a lead accepts a quote, Tenvara looks at the lead's email domain:

• If exactly one customer has that email domain, the lead joins that customer.
• Otherwise a new customer is created. That includes free-mail addresses such as gmail.com or btinternet.com, domains no customer has, and domains more than one customer has.

The contact is added to the customer (or matched to an existing contact with the same email), and the lead's quotes move across. See Acceptance and what happens next.

Tip: Ask for a work email address when you add a lead. A lead with a personal address (gmail.com and the like) always becomes a new customer when they accept, even if they work for one you already look after; convert those by hand to An existing customer instead.

Leads also appear in search (Cmd+K or Ctrl+K).