CRM: Lead, Prospect & Client
What do these Roles mean?
Contacts are divided into three basic types: Leads, Prospects, and Clients. The Role of a Contact indicates what they currently are in your "sales funnel."
LEAD: A Lead is a potential Client whom you’ve met and exchanged contact information with, but have no concrete business plans currently in the works. Leads do not have login credentials for your platform Portal.
PROSPECT: The next step after a Lead is a Prospect. A Prospect has moved one step further in your sales funnel and is essentially a Lead who has been given the ability to log in to your platform. This level allows you to share private sales and promotional material, private messages, Estimates, Proposals, and other resources that might be appropriate at this stage.
CLIENT: When the Contact officially reaches the point of doing business with you, the Prospect can then be converted to a Client. After a Contact's role is established as a Client they can be sent Invoices and can be assigned to Projects.
Moving through the Sales Funnel
The roles of Lead, Prospect & Client are designed to help you organize the movement of Contacts through a typical Sales Funnel. The designed direction is Lead > Prospect > Client and this is the only direction the roles can be changed. You are able to change a Contact's role "into the funnel" from Lead > Prospect > Client --- BUT, you are not able to change a Contact's role in the other direction. The reason for this is that permissions are expanded as a Contact moves "into the funnel" and they are able to be assigned to more and more elements like Estimates, Invoices, Projects, etc. and after a Contact is connected to these elements, there is no ability to easily remove them from those elements. As such, changing the role of a Contact in the reverse direction is not allowed.
IMPORTANT: Note that you cannot change the Role of a Contact using the import functionality. The Role can be initially established via Import, but after that 1st creation of the Contact, a Role change can only be achieved manually or via a No-Code Automation.
How Role changes work
CONVERTING A LEAD: After you've had some interactions with a Lead and they've shown promise, or perhaps they have confirmed that they'll start doing business with you, you can move them to another Role.
Navigate to CRM > Contacts.
Use the Options menu button to convert the Lead to either a Prospect or a Client.
CONVERTING A PROSPECT: If you've been successful with a Prospect and they've confirmed that they'll start doing business with you, you can convert the Prospect to a Client. Use the Options menu button to convert the Prospect to a Client.
IMPORTANT: You can only convert Contacts in a progressive manner (Lead > Prospect > Client). Therefore, you cannot change a Client into a Lead/Prospect, or a Prospect into a Lead.