Qualifying a lead is a process. Is there a fit? Are the parties ready? These are two dimensions that have to be evaluated on both sides, for the group that wants to buy and the group that wants to sell.

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, also known as Dynamics CRM, has its out of the box lead qualification process assume that a qualified lead is a ready lead, however this is not always the case. Never has this been brought more into focus for me than with a lovely group of people out of California that have one team that qualifies the leads and another team that evaluates if there is an opportunity. Enter the Dynamics 365 Lead Conversion Solution, the tool that allows you to determine at qualification time if you want to create a side of opportunity with your account and contact main course. Let me walk you through their process and how our solution is giving them options.  

--- 

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Microsoft has recently made updates that bring lead conversion without opportunity creation back into the product. If you are using Dynamics 365 for Sales Online, or a recent version of on-premise, you no longer need this solution. Check out this document for more info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/sales-enterprise/define-lead-qualification-experience

-----

The Current Process

Working in the alcoholic beverage industry, this group knows its target audience: businesses that sell alcoholic beverages. So once a quarter they download a list from the abc.gov website and use that to focus their lead prospecting efforts. Originally this process was managed primarily in Excel spreadsheets that required deduping, massaging, dividing and sharing of various Excel spreadsheet versions.   

Once the inside sales team is ready to qualify the lead, they note which outside sales team member will be the account owner and click the Qualify button. Since the Dynamics 365 Lead Conversion solution is in place all the inside sales person has to do is uncheck the Opportunity box and click the Continue button. The lead is qualified, an account and contact are created and an opportunity is not.   

The outside sales person assigned to the prospect is notified by email they have a new prospect. The same workflow that sent this notification email also creates a task assigned to this new owner, due a week later, as a gentle reminder to follow up on their new prospect.  

You may be asking yourself, why not just manage it in the background if their process is to not create an opportunity. Well, that is a great question. The main reason is other teams within their business are interested in the ability to create the opportunity at the same time. That part of their business only wants qualified leads where there is business so the team that determines fit is also the team that determines readiness. The C5 Lead Conversion solution gives you those kinds of options.