Contacts, Leads, Prospects, Opportunities, Deals, Oh my!

Contacts, Leads, Prospects, Opportunities, Deals, Oh my!

I've implemented three CRM's in previous companies, and led the effort for two of those.  I'm pretty familiar with sales pipeline management.

For my current company, I chose Zoho One because of the broad range it includes for other business processes, and am generally quite happy.  So now it's time to dig into Zoho CRM And I find myself a bit befuddled.

In other implementations, a "Contact" was just that- a name and some contact information.  Could be anybody whether interested in doing business or not.  Could be someone I met at lunch who gave me their business card.

A "Lead" was somebody who had expressed interest in a product or service I was offering either online or in person.  A lead who got serious and a deal potential surfaced would be promoted to "Prospect" and that deal is now in the pipeline.  Salesforce CRM used to call this an opportunity.


Zoho's knowledge base has an article, "Working with Leads," that has this diagram.  This looks familiar and as I would expect:  Leads who qualify are converted to prospects, and when a deal closes, become customers. 

But where in the product do I track my prospects?  And how do I convert a lead to a prospect? I don't see that terminology anywhere.  And when I chatted with their support folks they told me that "Contacts" are people who are serious about doing business.  Are Contacts meant to be what other products and this diagram call Prospects?

Are the Prospects in the Zoho diagram above tracked as Contacts in the product?  (That would be very weird to me)  If so, can I rename all references to contacts so they say Prospect, matching what's above? 

But then this begs a question:  Where would I track other contacts such as partners?  They aren't going to buy anything from me- they're just people I need to contact.  (That's why other products I've used called them contacts.)

Last question- many lead capture forms only require a first name.  I see Zoho requires a last name but not a first.  Is there a way to undo that requirement?  The Fields editing dialogue won't allow me to change that.

These seem like strange quirks to me but I am open to learning a new sales pipeline process if there are advantages.  Many of you must have encountered the same thing.  Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have.



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