One of the most important and foremost steps in the sales process in any business is lead generation, as the quality of leads generated ultimately determines business growth and revenue. It is also one of the most tedious processes as it involves keeping up with large volumes of data. You need to collect as much information about the leads as possible in order to effectively follow up with them, convert them to qualified customers and strike business deals with them.  The less data you have on a leads, the less likely it is for you to convert them. Conversely, the more complete your data is on your leads, the better informed you are about their needs. This way, you are better placed to have more meaningful conversations with them.

Data such as the name of the lead, the company they are with, team/company size, region, branches, previous transactions, their requirements and so on are crucial for lead conversion. This is why lead generation could be a tedious process — because there is just a lot of information to process and you may drown in this complexity and miss out on recording appropriate details in your CRM for follow up. Remember, a missed lead is equal to a missed opportunity.

Adding to this complexity is the fact that there could be several sources of leads for you such as webforms, emails, calls, social media and third party references. You need to make sure that leads via all these channels are added as individual lead records in your CRM system. While all of these sources are important, at this juncture, we are going to talk only about emails. If you are struggling to keep up with the pace of email enquiries and are looking for a more efficient way to record email enquiries in CRM, then Zoho CRM's Email parser is for you.