Using Insightly to manage sales
How the CRM’s pieces fit together for a sales process.
The sales workflow
The central records for sales management are leads and opportunities. When you get information about a potential customer, whether from a meeting at a conference, a Web to Lead form, or any other lead source, you add them to Insightly as a lead. Leads let you qualify potential sales before converting them to Insightly contacts, organizations, and opportunities. Once a lead is qualified, you convert it to create an associated contact, organization, and opportunity, then manage the sales process through the opportunity record.
ℹ️ Keeping leads separate from contacts and organizations makes clear who is and isn’t qualified. Once a lead has expressed interest in your business (for example, requesting a demo of your product), you can consider it qualified.
Managing your sales workflow
Our general suggestions for managing your sales workflow:
- Enter your leads on the Leads tab for sales contacts that have not been qualified as opportunities. Do not enter them on the Contacts tab.
- Create your opportunity by entering it into Insightly or converting a lead. A best practice is to set up a naming scheme, such as using the customer name, the product or service, and a closing date. For example: Company Inc. | Spring Fling Tickets | April 2016.
- If you created your own opportunity without converting a lead, add and link the contacts (people) and organizations (companies) when an opportunity is won. Converted leads create these records and links for you automatically.
- If the won opportunity involves some sort of work, create a project from the opportunity using the Actions menu.
You may want to use Insightly’s pipelines and activity sets to manage your opportunity workflow.
Additional resources for Admins: