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Leads and Prospects

Leads and Prospects


Which one comes first?


Leads and Prospects

Anyone involved in retail knows the importance of managing your leads and prospects properly. It can make or break your business.

When you’re working with a mass of data this can be overwhelming. Firstly, there’s the challenge of sales prospecting and lead generation. In addition, managing all your data can be time consuming and complicated. That’s why Odoo products are so valuable for modern retail and any business.

Remember, when you streamline your sales process it will benefit your profit margins. Optimizing your systems and processes is worth it!

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Let’s Define: The Prospect and Lead Difference


No, these words do NOT refer to the same thing. There’s a clear prospect and lead difference you need to understand for effective management.

Depending on the software you use, a prospect will either be the first or second stage of a sales funnel. Some people say ‘first comes the lead, then comes the prospect’. Others claim the opposite! But a prospect suspect and sales lead will always refer to different steps in the sales process.

Let’s clarify the prospect and lead difference with clear definitions.


What is a Prospect?

Prospect is from the Latin word prospectus which means a “view or outlook.” A prospect is still a way of looking ahead and expecting good things. It’s similar to ‘potential’ because it’s something that might be but isn’t yet.


What is a Lead?

Now, for ‘the Lead’, vocabulary.com, gives the following definition:

an indication of potential opportunity or “a good lead for a job”. It’s something that provides direction or advice for a decision or course of action.

From this, we can assert that a Prospect is more likely to generate a sale than a Lead. First, we approach a contact, by phone or email, to determine if there is any interest. If the answer is positive, then it will become a Prospect.



Sales Prospecting and Lead Generation with Odoo

Odoo never had the definition of Prospect, only Leads and Opportunities. However, these are simply terminologies. What matters is that you have a process and all your sales team members understand each other and how your setup works.

Since Odoo 9.0’s release, CRM concepts were simplified. You had the Lead as a lower probability of sale and Opportunity as a higher probability of sale. But now the Leads will only be visible if you explicitly set it that way. Both of them had the possibility of having different stages and there you could assign different probabilities of selling.



Odoo Leads and Opportunities in Practice

The default setting (for v9.0 and v10.0) is having only Opportunities visible. The first time you see this, you may get confused because there’s no ‘contact_name field’ (you still have this field on Leads). But you’ll see that the name of the contact should go on the

Opportunity name. Use these helpful tips to optimize Odoo for your sales team:

  • Add necessary details such as “Mark Jones, needs SUV”.
  • Only create a contact for individuals that go beyond a certain stage that definitely will require a real contact form created. An example of a relevant ‘stage’ will be when someone specifically asks for a quote.


Lead and Prospect Stages in Odoo

From 9.0 on you have a simple Kanban board that allows you to drag and drop contacts on the correct stages. You can also customize the stage probability and sequence configuration.

This is a valuable tool that provides useful information, such as:

  • The priority level
  • Expected revenue
  • Assigned salesperson

You can also click on the green dot (grey if not set, red if overdue) to set the next action.

Odoo - Kanban board

Odoo Pipeline is a Kanban board that allows you to easily drag and drop contacts over the various defined stages.



Final Words

You can see that Odoo provides user friendly features that can transform how you manage sales from now on. Get each prospect suspect and sales lead organized and boost those sales figures!

If you want to find out more, talk to our team.

Contact ERPGAP

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