Lead Processing in CRM

Leads facilitate your company's chance to do business. You can use leads to provide a streamlined link between marketing and sales, which accelerates the process between first interest and sales. Leads do not provide you with complete details of potential business opportunities, but they can help you to find out more about a potential business.

Lead Processing in CRM is designed to help automate the initial pre-sales process, freeing up your sales department to focus on the most valuable prospects and opportunities. By deploying lead management processes, you can do the following:

Improve both your response rates to customer requests and your understanding of customer needs
Create high-quality leads and increase your revenues
Streamline the capture, distribution, and qualification of leads across a multitude of channels through systematic and efficient tracking of the progress of those leads. This is achieved through a process of closed-loop monitoring, which allows your sales organization to improve close rates with reduced sales time and cost
Use strategic reporting functions to measure the success of leads with Lead Management, and to support medium- to long-term decision making. Strategic reporting is performed in the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component (SAP NetWeaver BI component)

Prerequisites

You have maintained your settings for leads. For more information, see Customizing for CRM, by choosing Transactions Settings for Leads
You have created a business partner with the role Employee. This is required to indicate the employee responsible when qualifying leads
If you want to use questionnaires to qualify leads, you first need to install the CAT (CRM Application Tool) server. For more information about the installation process, see Setting Up the CAT Server. For more information about questionnaires, see Survey Tool.

Process

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Create/generate lead
Lead Creation

You can create leads automatically or manually, with or without the use of templates:
- Automatic lead creation
  Typically, leads are created automatically in the Interaction Center, in the Web shop, through campaigns, or optionally through HTML surveys on the Internet. All steps in this process flow can be set up to run automatically, so that you can configure automatic lead creation to assign relevant business partners, products, and surveys too
- Manual lead creation
  During lead creation, you can manually assign an appropriate business partner, such as a sales prospect or contact person, to the lead. In the B2B context, the main business partner assigned to the lead is usually the sales prospect
Typically, lead creation is an inbound process, where information about the lead qualification level and lead product interest is usually available. In an inbound scenario, a business partner could contact you through different channels, such as by telephone, e-mail, or fax. If this business partner shows an interest in a particular product, the relevant employee (in Interaction Center, for example) can create a lead.

You can create leads in the following channels:
- The CRM system (manual)
- Partner Channel management, as in Channel Partner portals
- E-Selling, as in the Web Shop
- Internet, through links attached to surveys
- Telemarketing, as in the Interaction Center
- Response import (integrated in External List Management in CRM)
- Response recording
Lead Generation

Leads are generated to qualify the level of interest presented by business partners, with a view to transforming these leads into opportunities. Partners are assigned automatically by the system during lead generation, based on the target group. Leads are typically generated in an outbound scenario, where the company is active in seeking to contact business partners.
- Leads can be generated after a marketing campaign has been executed (as the result of activities defined for the campaign), or also during a campaign (ongoing process) in which case they are generated as soon as the campaign is executed, without generating activities first.
- In the segment builder, lead generation is independent of campaigns. For each target group, leads are generated based on a lead template.
Assign products or product categories
You can assign a product or product category as well as the quantity of the desired product to the lead by entering the product name in the description field or by entering a product number. You have the option of entering additional products for the lead.
Qualify lead (manually or based on a survey)
Lead qualification is an iterative and interactive process by which a lead may be processed several times over a given period. Leads can be processed manually or automatically.

Manual qualification

Depending on the level of information available about the business partner, your lead qualifier can directly qualify leads during the manual creation of leads. Your lead qualifier can also manually set a qualification level for the lead, which overrides any automatic qualification level.

Note

The partner employee can also set the status of leads manually on the basis of certain indexes or by directly talking to the business partner, or a mixture of both methods.

Automatic qualification

Typically, automatic lead qualification is supported by a questionnaire. Your lead qualifier can assign one or multiple surveys to a lead. These surveys consist of predefined questionnaires with single or multiple-choice questions, as well as space to enter free text. Based on the answers provided, a score is calculated and the qualification level set accordingly.

You can define determination rules to pre-select appropriate surveys based on transaction type, time period, system status, and classification - priority, origin, group, and organizational data. This helps you to reuse existing surveys more efficiently and ensure that the lead qualifier uses the most suitable survey for lead qualification.

For more information about assigning multiple surveys, see the Release Note Assignment of Multiple Surveys to Transactions. For more information about settings for questionnaires, see Customizing for CRM, by choosing Transactions Settings for Leads Questionnaires for Leads Define Determination for Questionnaires and Define Determination Criteria for Questionnaires .

End of the note.

Distribute lead to an employee or external partner

This process enables you to assign leads to a person responsible for qualifying and processing leads.

You can search for and select leads based on different criteria. For example, you can search for leads with the status Open and which fall within a particular date range. The manager can manually assign the responsibility of the leads to different internal lead qualifiers.
You can also configure an automatic partner determination procedure, such that the sales prospect, contact person, and the employee responsible for the lead are automatically identified. For more information about automatic partner determination, see Customizing for CRM by choosing Basic Functions Partner Processing Define Partner Determination Procedure .
o You can distribute leads based on rules. The rules could be based on the content of the lead and/or the attributes of the sales prospect to determine the best matching business partner (employee responsible, sales representative, channel partner).

Rules-based distribution can be set to occur automatically in batch jobs, or semi-automatically as distribution proposals, via the user interface in the Enterprise Portal.

The table below summarizes the main methods by which leads can be distributed, and the bases that facilitate distribution:

Lead Distribution Methods	Basis of Distribution
Manual	Manual assignment
Partner determination	Partner-determination rules
Semi-automatic	Rules-based
Automatic (Batch jobs)	Rules-based

In the partner channel management context

In the partner channel management context, the brand owner typically triggers a workflow to dispatch leads to channel partners. This workflow can be defined to include user interaction and is typically triggered by a certain status of the lead, such as Distributed to Sales Partner.

A workflow item is sent to the channel partner, who is required to accept or reject the lead object within a particular time period. If no action is taken within the required date, the workflow returns the lead to the dispatcher. The dispatcher can then dispatch the lead to an internal qualifier or to a different channel partner.

The table below summarizes the main channels by which internal employees and external partners can receive leads:

Receivers of Leads	Internal Employee	External Partners
Access Channel	CRM WebClient UI	PDF/Interactive Form

Note Note

When the brand owner dispatches a lead to a channel partner, the lead status changes to Distributed to Channel Partner. If the partner accepts the lead, the status changes to Accepted by Partner. However, if the partner rejects the lead, the status turns to Rejected by Partner.

End of the note.

Follow up on lead and create opportunity
The follow-up and update process includes the following:
- Follow-up surveys
- Updating lead qualification levels
- Monitoring lead statuses
- Transferring leads to a different qualifier
Furthermore, your administrator can archive leads after they have remained in the system for a certain period of time. Your administrator can also archive lost leads or delete them from the system.

After a lead has reached a certain qualification level, for example, Hot, it can be transformed into an opportunity and passed on to the sales department for further processing. You can set up appropriate workflows to automate the process of assigning statuses to leads, such as Lost, In Process, or Won. For example, when a sales representative accepts a Hot lead from the workflow and converts it to an opportunity, the status of the lead can be set automatically to Won.