Working a lead: follow-ups, people and conversion
Keep the notes, tasks and people on the lead itself, and convert a second lead from the same company onto the account you already have.
Open a lead from CRM → Sales → Leads. Below its details are two grids that belong to the lead: Notes & follow-ups, and Contacts. Add to either in place — nothing has to be converted first.
- Notes & follow-ups: Add, choose Task, Call, Meeting, Email, Visit or Note, give it a subject, a due date and an owner. Open ones are listed first; mark one done when it is.
- Contacts: add everybody you know at the company — name, title, email, phones, LinkedIn. The grid also lists, read-only, the person named on the lead and the people on any other lead for the same company name or web address, each with where it is recorded — see A company's people, wherever they were recorded.
- Convert when the lead is real. If this company already has an account — the same name, or the same web address — the lead converts onto THAT account: its people become the account's contacts (anybody already there with the same email is not added twice) and its follow-ups move onto the account. Only a company you have never converted before gets a new account.
The list itself can be searched, filtered on any column (Add a condition), sorted, given the columns you want (Columns) and saved as your own view (Views → Save this view), which opens on today's data each time.