Our sales flow is setup more based on POTENTIALS (opportunities) than true LEADS (i.e people) so this makes converting LEADS to DEALS tricky without creating duplicate contact information. But we still want to associate the potential with the leads module to track back to campaigns etc. Yep - adding that manually if we create a Potential directly can work, but on a larger scale we need this to start at LEAD cycle.

"Hey did you hear some guys are building a mall over there next year ?"

Potential Name = "New Mall over there"

Lead Name = ?...we need to find out

Account / Company = ?...maybe we know the developer but need to find out consultants details etc which MAY already exist in CRM

When converting a lead to deal the unique email details of the person (if this details are known) are not typically available while the opportunity is researched so duplicate import trick doesn't work.

Has anyone successfully added POTENTIAL NAME to the Leads Module which then maps to the POTENTIAL module when converting and looks up duplicate COMPANY ?