Information Services and Systems
Business Systems Group
Information Services and Systems
User Guide
CRM Glossary of TermsDocument / CRM
Version / Version 1.1
Authors / Robert Martin
Date / November 27 2007
/ Business Systems Group
Information Services and Systems
Leads.
When buying in a mailing list or taking somebody’s business card with no firm possibility of work arising, these people (or businesses) need entering or importing into the CRM system as Leads.
A Lead is someone, or an organisation, that DMU hasn’t done business with yet, or even entered into meaningful dialogue with.
A Lead IS NOT yet a customer.
Once meaningful dialogue has been entered into, the lead can be qualified and converted into an Account, a Contact or an Opportunity (or any combination of the three!)
A Lead that is not interested in doing work or asks to be taken off our mailing list should be disqualified.
Lead Lifecycle
Qualify. Convert a Lead into an Opportunity, a Contact or an Account or any combination of the three.
Disqualify. Rather than delete Leads that are not going to progress onto becoming an opportunity or a customer record, we disqualify them.
This effectively hides the Lead record from all searches so that the Lead cannot be sent marketing materials, etc. We should disqualify leads bought in on third-party databases after that list expires as a matter of good practice.
It is possible to re-activate a Lead if the possibility of working with them comes up in the future.
Customer Records.
The CRM system holds information on two types of Customer Record. Contacts and Accounts.
Contact. A Customer record for a person. A Contact may or may not be related to an Account record another Contact or Opportunities . A Contact may only have one parent Account.
Account. A Customer record for a business or organisation. An Account may have zero, one or many Contacts and Opportunities associated with it. An account may have Parent or Child Accounts (eg, PepsiCo and Walkers)
Accounts and Contacts
Opportunity. A possibility to do work with an Account or a Contact. In other words, there may be many opportunities to work with a Contact, an Account or any combination thereof!
Simple model of the three entities that can be created from a lead and their relationship.
Relationship Roles.
Due to the flexibility of CRM, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities may be created by qualifying a lead, or created directly without a lead ever existing.
Marketing List. A marketing list is comprised of Leads, or Contacts. It is generated by manually picking Contacts or Leads or using a search in Advanced Find .
Activity. Examples of Activities are emails, phone calls, invites, appointments or faxes between DMU and a customer. Internal activities can also be recorded within CRM.
Meaningful dialogue. Sending a letter or an email does not constitute meaningful dialogue. Until a Lead has responded in a positive way, they stay a Lead and are not Qualified. Leads who respond in a negative way should be Disqualified.
Campaign. For example a mailshot or bulk emailing. Creates an activity against each Lead or Contact included in the Campaign.
Quick Campaign. Created on the fly, possibly using Advanced Find, this could be used to compile a list of activities against people that could be contacted to follow up some previous activity, for example.
Event. Something that people physically attend, such as a seminar, exhibition or open day. The attendees would be the members of a Marketing List and be derived using Advanced Find
Advanced Find. CRM’s built in tool to help the user find exactly the customers who match given criteria. For example, all Contacts where the county is Leicestershire or Derbyshire and the job title is Marketing Director.