Why We Chose to Forgo Leads

The Lead Need

In an enterprise CRM solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365, the Lead is used for engaging with brand new “prospects”. It is separate from Contacts by design, as enterprise customers often have thousands of Leads, or more. Enterprise customers may also have hundreds of thousands of existing customer Contacts, so separating these types of “people” is important.

But for the smaller customer, or division of a larger enterprise, who typically deal with a smaller number of people, separating Leads often feels like an unnecessary additional step and overhead. So we simplified it!

State of Contact

Obviously, it would not make sense to just make everyone a Contact record. There is still a difference in how you would engage with Contacts for existing customers, vendors, etc., and how you would engage with someone who just submitted a “Contact Us” form on your website — even with a smaller number of people than enterprise.

In RapidStart Apps we have taken the Contact record and given it a dual purpose, identified by the Status. Contacts in RapidStart Apps are either an “Active” Contact, or a “Prospect” Contact.

Each of these types has their own Forms and Views, and a Prospect has a Business Process for moving them through your “qualification” steps, similar to what the enterprise Lead has. Once a “Prospect” has reached the stage that you want, you simply change their status to “Active”.

Qualification

There is another item that frequently came up in the past that we also address with our simpler approach. In enterprise solutions, when you Qualify a Lead, it simultaneously creates a new Contact record, a new Company record, and a new Opportunity record. This was often not the desired behavior. A common question we heard was:

“How can I have the system NOT automatically create an Opportunity?”

Maybe you are on-boarding new vendors, or service customers, for example.

In RapidStart Apps, when you change the Status of a Prospect to “Active” Contact, the only additional thing that happens is the creation of a Company record, or connection to an existing Company record if one matches. YOU decide if the next step is to create an Opportunity, or a Case, or a Project, or nothing at all at that time.