This walkthrough will show how to use Intalio|Cloud CRM in a typical first-sale situation. We begin with a new Lead, generated by our marketing team. We'll then convert the Lead to an Account and Contact. Finally, we can generate Opportunities which ultimately result in our business goal: a completed order and sale.

Leads

What is a Lead?

A Lead is a potential Customer for your company. They may have expressed interest directly in your products or services. A Lead is usually generated by marketing although they come from a wide variety of sources, including from Opportunities later in the sales process. Leads contain the building blocks for both the person and the company you're considering, and so Leads easily convert into Customers and Opportunities. You can also schedule a follow-up Task with a Lead for any purpose, to continue the business relationship.

New leads can be displayed on your Dashboard, so you can easily view incoming prospects.

Our starting Lead has the basic company and contact information, and a short description of the circumstances that helped us find it. In this case, someone submitted a request for more information about our products after visiting our website. Our marketing department took the information they left and created the Lead, and notified their pre-sales team. From there, we'll follow how Intalio|CRM makes the sales process reliable and easy.

The common information for a Lead is readily available: contact name, their company, the status and source of the lead, and other optional information that might already be known. The Contact Information tab holds addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and contact preferences such as the best time to call.

Email and Attachments

Now that we've reviewed the Lead, we'll work to qualify them as a full Customer. This Lead, Mr. Fitro Koramah, requested more detailed product information from our website. We can easily fill that request by clicking the Send Email button along the top of the editor. If you've linked your Intalio|CRM account to a separate email account, a basic email form will appear with the Lead's email address already filled in. You can add your message and formatting normally.

Click on the email attachment paperclip icon to open the File Uploader dialog. From there you can select local files on your computer to add to the email, and press Upload to transfer those files to Intalio|CRM for delivery. Go ahead and close the window, and also send the email itself with the expected Send button.

Follow-up Tasks and Lead Conversion

Finally, let's schedule ourselves a Follow-up Task with Mr. Koramah. Follow-ups are easy ways to remind yourself to revisit almost any business object at a later date. For our Lead, we want to give him time to read the material, and then we'll contact him again (assuming he doesn't respond to us first). Click the Follow-up button, and fill out the form. The Scheduling section is obviously the most relevant, but you can use the Description section or Notes tab to add your own reminders and comments. Click the Save and Close button when you're done to return to the Lead editor.

If Mr. Koramah were to respond before we follow-up with them, whoever assists him would be responsible for updating the Lead in Intalio|CRM, and we would see that when taking care of our Follow-up Task. Let's see how to continue, and convert our Lead to a Customer.

If it's the Follow-up Task that prompts you to work further on your new Lead, then you can quickly open the Lead editor itself by clicking the "Regarding" link in the upper right, with the contact's name listed (e.g. Regarding Koramah, Fitro). If the Lead themselves contacts you earlier, you can open the Lead editor normally from the Intalio|CRM toolbar.

Either way, let's say that our Lead wants to make an order with your business. Your sales literature and other communication has persuaded him, and he'd like to become a full Customer. Intalio|CRM makes lead conversion simple, starting with the Convert Lead button. With the options on this screen, the status of your Lead will be automatically changed (so that they no longer appear in any active Lead lists), and optionally converted into an Account, Contact, and/or Opportunity. We'll take a closer look at all three of these objects, so check each of the boxes and press the Convert button.

Customers

What is a Customer, Account, and Contact?

Before we learn about the concrete objects for Accounts and Contacts, let's take a moment to explain the abstract idea of Customers. A Customer is not a true business object in Intalio|CRM. Instead, a Customer is an Account and a Contact, an Account alone, or a Contact alone. This abstract idea is used many places in Intalio|CRM - almost anywhere you can link to an Account, you can link to a Contact instead or in addition. The same goes for Contact links often being able to point to Accounts.

It's also logical to treat Accounts and Contacts interchangeably, since the context you're using them in will always determine if one or the other should not be available. For example, when assigning a primary Contact to a company's Account, it wouldn't make sense to assign another company (Account) - you'd want an individual or their department (as a Contact). On the other hand, new Leads and Opportunities can be derived from an Account; for example their business partners may want to develop a relationship with you themselves. The same goes for Contacts, where word of mouth may lead personally from a Contact to a new Lead or Opportunity.

So, when we talk about Customers, we're talking about either or both an Account and a Contact, and using whichever concrete business object is appropriate. We will also talk specifically about one or the other on occasion, indicating that there is only one relevant choice.

Accounts

Now that we know about how Intalio|CRM treats a Customer, let's take a look at the specific Account that was created during the lead conversion. All the information that was in the Lead has been moved to the appropriate location the resulting Account, Contact, and/or Opportunity. You can see here that the Account Name and No. of Employees have already been filled out, as well as a link to the Contact for Mr. Koramah himself. There's a second general link for all Contacts at this company in the list on the left, and a link for all associated Opportunities. The Contact Information tab and Details tab have other pieces of information. You can easily update any of this information, and associate the Account with any other relevant business objects (sub- or parent-Accounts, related Leads, marketing Campaigns, support Cases and Contracts, etc.). Depending on the relationship with the customer, you may want to assign them a Preferred User under the Contact Information tab, so that the same employee can regularly work with this customer.

Contacts

Looking at the Contact for Mr. Koramah himself, we see that the information associated with the original Lead has been transferred. His name, company position and role, and contact information are present, along with a links to his company's Account. Any Opportunities, Bugs or Cases, or other business objects associated specifically with him will be included in the lists on the left.

Contracts

Lastly, a brief note about Contracts. As we expect, these are the detailed legal agreements that influence any part of your business relationship with a Customer. You can attach digital copies of physical contracts if you like, as well as supply quick reference information about the requirements such as:

• term dates
• service level (these names are modifiable by your CRM administrator)
• physical storage location

Of course, you can also associate a contract with several other relevant business objects with the lists on the left.

Opportunities

What is an Opportunity?

Opportunities are a very broad concept in business, and similarly in Intalio|CRM. They're literally opportunities for your company to grow, but that doesn't always directly correlate with sales. An Opportunity can be a pending order, a proposed project, a new sales lead, a possible partnership, or many other things depending on your company and business model.

Most, but not all, Opportunities result in revenue, and Intalio|CRM helps you organize all those details. Estimated revenue and closing date, probability and rating, tracking numbers and fulfillment status are all displayed up front.

Creating Opportunities

We created an Opportunity when we converted our Lead to a Customer, but that's far from the only way to create one. Like all business objects, you can create new Opportunities on the fly from any related business object like an Account. Creating objects this way also links the two automatically, simplifying the associations. For example, from our Account for Koramah Shipping, we can view the related Opportunities (under "Sales" on the left side of the Account editor) and see the existing Opportunity. We can also add existing Opportunities, if they were created separately, or use the Add Opportunity button to create a new one that will be linked by default to this Account.

You can create new Opportunities (and most business objects) from scratch in several other ways. From the top of your browser window, you can use the "New …" menu to open a fresh Opportunity editor to fill out manually. You can also go to the Opportunities module and either click the Add Opportunity button, or use the Quick Add palette on the left. The Quick Add palette displays only required and extremely common business object fields, for creating new objects extremely quickly with the intention of reviewing them later. For example, you may frequently use the Quick Add palette to mark out several new objects while on the phone or in a meeting, and can then return later to provide more details than the bare minimum.

Converting Opportunities

Now we'll explore how Opportunities transition into your order process. While Intalio|CRM can technically be enhanced fairly easily with order management functionality, the reality is that differing legal requirements in different states and countries require adaptations to local legislative requirements, to provide sales order processing functionality. If you are interested, we'd like to work with you on creating a localized version for your country. If you're interested in working with us to develop Intalio|CRM to provide an end-to-end customer order system that complies with local laws and regulations, please talk with your Intalio Sales Manager or email our Demand Driven Development team.

If an order module isn't available for your country, Intalio|CRM supports exporting your Opportunities in part or whole to a local file. You can then convert this file with your existing order software to transfer in all your CRM data. Let's start by going directly to the Opportunity module. The most convenient way to do this is with the "Shortcuts…" menu shown at the top of your browser window, where you'll find the Opportunity module under the Sales category. This displays a list of all your current Opportunities by default, although you can filter the results. Mark the check boxes next to each Opportunity you want to export, and then choose Export from the Actions button along the top of the module.

Currently you can export to a comma-separated file (CSV) or a Microsoft Excel format. After making your choice and clicking Export, a file named Opportunities.csv or Opportunities.xls will be saved to your computer like any other download. You can then import it to most order applications.

Opportunities as Leads

On the Sales Overview flowchart, we also showed that Opportunities can become Leads. Opportunities don't necessarily have an expected value, although new Leads mean more Customers, more Opportunities, and indirectly more sales growth. While there's no "Convert Opportunity" dialog to create a Lead like there was from a Lead to an Opportunity, you can easily create a new Lead as a related object to the current Opportunity. Again, from the list on the left side of the Opportunity editor, go under Sales to Leads, and click Add Lead. Check out our Marketing Guide for more information on what information goes into making a new Lead.