There are many ways to set up Insightly for sales, and our customers are always amazing us with the ways they utilize the flexibility of Insightly to meet their business needs.
The central records for sales management are leads and opportunities. This article is an overview of how to manage these records in Insightly.
When you get information about a potential customer, whether it's from a meeting at a conference, a Web to Lead form or any other lead source, you’ll add them to Insightly as a lead.
You can utilize leads to qualify potential sales before converting them to Insightly contacts, organizations, and opportunities.
Once a lead is qualified, you’ll convert it to create an associated contact, organization, and opportunity. You’ll then manage the sales process through the opportunity record.
Tip
Keeping leads separate from contacts and organizations is important because it makes it clear who is and isn't qualified. Once the 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 suggestion for managing your sales workflow:
- Enter your leads on the Leads tab for sales contacts that have not been qualified as opportunities. You don't want to 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've 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 from the Actions menu.
You may want to use Insightly’s pipelines and activity sets to manage your opportunity workflow. You can view our Insightly video explaining those features.
Explore other videos and articles, too. They may spark more ideas for your own sales process.
Additional resources for Admins: