Leads and Prospects
Which one comes first?
Depending on the software you use, a prospect might be the first stage or second stage of a sales funnel. Some people say that first comes the lead, then comes the prospect. Others claim the opposite!
So we decided to find out more about this subject and got the following definition of 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 like potential in that it's something that might be but isn't yet.
in www.vocabulary.com
Now, for the Lead we have the following:
An indication of potential opportunity “a good lead for a job”. Something that provides direction or advice as to a decision or course of action.
in www.vocabulary.com
From this, we can assert that Prospect is more likely to generate a sales than a Lead. First, we approach a contact, by phone or email in order to determine if there is some kind of interest. If the answer is positive, then it will become a Prospect.
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 of your sales team understand each other. Since Odoo 9.0 release, CRM concepts were simplified. We 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.
The default setting (for v9.0 and v10.0) is having only opportunities visible. First time I saw this, I got a bit confused because I didn’t see a contact_name field (you still have it on Leads), but after a while I found out that the name of the contact should go on the Opportunity name with other info we need like e.g. "Mark Jones, needs SUV". We are supposed to create a contact solely for the ones that go beyond a certain stage, like asking for a Quote, that surely will require a real contact form created.
From 9.0 on we have a simple kanban board that allows drag and drop of contacts on the correct stages. You are also able to customize the stage probability and sequence configuration.
This is a great tool that provides useful information like the priority, expected revenue and assigned salesperson. You can also click on the green dot (grey if not set, red if overdue) to set next action.
Odoo Pipeline is a Kanban board that allows to easily drag and drop contacts over the several defined stages.
