A Lead is an unqualified contact, usually generated from a marketing activity — for example, someone who filled out a form on your website or was met at a trade show, where it is not yet known whether they have buying authority.
Once a Lead is qualified, it can be converted into a Contact (who the person is), an Account (where they work), and an Opportunity (what they might buy).
Lead Source: records how the Lead was acquired, for example Website, Trade Show, Word of Mouth, Cold Call, or Campaign. Useful for measuring the effectiveness of marketing channels.
Status: tracks where the Lead is in the qualification process: New, Assigned, In Process, Converted, Recycled, or Dead.
Account Name: the company the Lead works for. This is a plain text field on a Lead — unlike on a Contact, where it is a relationship to an Account record — and becomes a full Account relationship on conversion.
Title / Department: the Lead’s role and team within their organisation.
Referred By: records who referred the Lead to you.
Do Not Call / Email Opt Out: compliance flags that carry over when the Lead is converted to a Contact.
Campaign: links the Lead to the campaign that generated it, feeding campaign ROI reporting.
Website: the company website of the Lead. Carried over to the Account when the Lead is converted.
From a Lead record you can view and manage related records via the Relationships section:
Activities: Calls, Meetings, Tasks, and Emails logged against the Lead.
History: archived emails and completed activities.
Documents: files attached to the Lead.
Campaigns: the campaign the Lead originated from.
For information on working with sub-panels and relationships, see Relationships and Subpanels.
For standard record operations including searching, editing, duplicating, merging, and importing, see Record Management.
Once enough information has been gathered about a Lead, it can be converted into a Contact, Account, and Opportunity.
Open the Lead’s Detail View.
Select Convert Lead from the Actions drop-down.
On the Convert Lead screen, work through each section in turn — Contact, Account, and Opportunity. Fields are pre-populated from the Lead’s data where possible; fill in the remaining relevant fields for each.
For each section, you can either create a new record or, if a matching record already exists, deselect the Create option and select an existing record instead.
Click Save to complete the conversion.
When converting a Lead, SuiteCRM automatically checks for duplicate records and displays a warning if a matching record is found. If the warning is not valid and you still wish to create a new record, click Create. If the record already exists, select it instead.
For details on the resulting sales pipeline record, see Opportunities.
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