Leads: General Information

The processing of leads in MYOB Acumatica starts with adding leads to the system. This topic provides information about lead creation in MYOB Acumatica.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will do the following:

  • Become familiar with ways of creating leads
  • Learn about using sales territories for the distribution of leads between owners
  • Learn about lead classification
  • Learn about the synchronization of settings in leads, contacts, and business accounts
  • Create a lead manually
  • Import leads from a purchased list
  • Create a lead by using the MYOB add-in for Outlook

Applicable Scenarios

You may want to learn how to create leads in MYOB Acumatica in scenarios that include the following:

  • You have obtained some contact information about a potential customer.
  • You have acquired a list of cold leads (individuals or organizations who never contacted your organization or expressed any interest in your products or services) from a vendor or a public source.
  • You have started working with the system and need to import your existing leads from your legacy system into MYOB Acumatica.
  • You have received an email from a potential customer.

Marketing Leads in MYOB Acumatica

A marketing lead is contact information representing an individual or a company that has a potential interest in products or services your organization offers. Leads make up the organization’s marketing audience, which is the target for marketing activities, such as marketing campaigns or advertisements.

A marketing manager defines the organization’s marketing strategy, goals, and target audience, as well as acquiring and managing data on the marketing audience. When the audience data has been acquired, the marketing manager can create the needed leads in the system.

Lead Creation

Lead creation in MYOB Acumatica consists of any of the following general steps:

  • Creating leads manually
  • Importing lead data from external sources

As soon as leads have been added to the system and checked for duplicates, as described in Validating Records for Duplicates, you can assign these leads to owners either one by one or through mass processing according to the rules that have been specified in the system, as described in Assigning Leads to Owners and Workgroups, and the owners start working on these leads.

In MYOB Acumatica, you can create a lead in any of the following ways:

Assigning Sales Territories to Leads, Contacts, Business Accounts, and Opportunities

A sales territory is a territory that in most cases is determined based on the geographical location of the lead, contact, business account, or opportunity. By using sales territories, you can distribute the lead, contact, business account, and opportunity records between different sales territories and the sales representatives who are responsible for the sales territories.

To configure the sales territory functionality, you need to create each sales territory on the Sales Territories (CS204100) form, which is available if the Customer Management and Sales Territory Management features are enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form. You can assign each sales territory one of the following types:

  • By Country: A territory made up of a country or multiple countries
  • By State: A territory made up of a state or multiple states of the selected country
  • Other: Another type of territory that can be assigned only manually

After sales territories have been created on the Sales Territories form, the system automatically assigns a sales territory (excluding territories with the Other territory type) to records during record creation or if a user changes a country, a state, or both of these for an existing record. You can also assign countries and states of a country to an existing sales territory directly on the Countries/States (CS204000) form.

You can see the sales territory to which a record has been assigned on the CRM Info tab of the following forms:

You can manually specify a sales territory if the Override Territory check box is selected on the data entry form for a record. In this case, the sales territory is not updated automatically if you change a country, a state, or both of these in the address settings of the record. If another record is created based on this record, the system copies the state of the check box and the selected sales territory to the target record.

You can also use the sales territory ID as a setting on the Conditions tab of the Assignment Maps (EP205010) form, based on which the assignment of leads, contacts, business accounts, or opportunities to owners proceeds in the following cases:

  • The creation of new records if the Assignment Map option is selected in the Default Owner box of the appropriate form to define a class of leads, contacts, business accounts, or opportunities
  • Mass-assignment of records to owners by using the following mass-processing forms: Assign Leads (CR503010), Assign Contacts (CR503011), Assign Business Accounts (CR503310), and Assign Opportunities (CR503110)

Contact Information

On the Contact Info tab of the Leads (CR301000) form, you can specify such contact-related settings as the name, contact information, and address of the selected lead. Also, the Personal Data Privacy section of this tab holds information about the lead's consent to the processing of personal data if the GDPR Compliance Tools feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form. (For details about GDPR compliance tools, see Handling Personal Data.)

Synchronization of Settings in Leads, Contacts, and Business Accounts

In MYOB Acumatica, you can easily synchronize the contact-related settings of a lead with the same settings in the contact and business account related to that lead. With this synchronization turned on, changes to the contact information of any of these entities causes the settings in the related entities to be updated as well.
Tip:
The synchronization or overriding of settings applies to all the settings on the Contact Info tab of the Leads (CR301000) form, all the settings on the Details tab of the Contacts (CR302000) form, and the contact and address settings (of the primary contact of the business account) on the General tab of the Business Accounts (CR303000) form.

You can synchronize contact information in leads, contacts, and business accounts by using the Override check box on the Details tab of the Contacts form as follows:

  • If the check box is cleared and the business account related to the contact has not been extended as a customer or a vendor yet, the contact information of the contact on the Contacts form is synchronized with the contact information of the related lead and business account on the Leads and Business Accounts forms, respectively, and can be updated in both directions. That is, if you update the contact and address settings on any of these forms, the settings will be also updated on the related forms.
  • If the check box is cleared and the business account related to the contact has been extended as a customer or a vendor, the address settings of the contact on the Contacts form are read-only and can be updated automatically only in one direction, from the Business Accounts form to the Contacts form.
  • If the check box is selected, the contact information for the selected contact on the Contacts form can differ from the contact information of the related lead and business account on the Leads and Business Accounts forms. If contact information is updated on any of these forms, the changes are not applied to the other forms.

Flexible Classification of Leads

In MYOB Acumatica, you can easily categorize leads into different classes and gather different sets of additional information about leads of different classes. A lead class is a grouping entity for leads that can make the creation of leads faster and more accurate. When you create a new lead, the system can automatically assign a class to this lead and you can change the class as needed. For each class, you can create a set of attributes, which give users the ability to further classify leads within the class. An attribute is a characteristic or quality—such as number of employees, industry, or products and services a lead is interested in—that is important to your company but is not already tracked on the Leads (CR301000) form. For details, see Defining Lead Classes.

When a class for a lead has been selected, the attributes assigned to this class appear on the Attributes tab of the Leads form as additional elements that can be used to specify information about the lead.

Relations Between a Lead and Its Associated Records

As you work with a lead in MYOB Acumatica, you can track the records associated with the lead on the Relations tab of the Leads (CR301000) form. For details, see Managing Relations.

Ability to Add User-Defined Fields to CRM Forms

User-defined fields are site-specific elements that have been defined to track information deemed as important to the organization. A customizer—a user with particular access rights in the system—can add user-defined fields to the Leads (CR301000), Contacts (CR302000), Business Accounts (CR303000), Opportunities (CR304000), Sales Quotes (CR304500), Cases (CR306000), Activity (CR306010), Task (CR306020), and Event (CR306030) form. From any of these forms, the customizer can open the Edit User-Defined Fields (CS205020) form by clicking Manage User-Defined Fields in the Customization menu on the form title bar and specify a set of user-defined fields for the form.

For a lead, contact, business account, opportunity, sales quote, and case, the set of user-defined fields is applicable to either a particular class of the entity or all classes of the entity. For a class, each user-defined field can be defined as required or hidden; also, a default value can be specified for the field.

If user-defined fields have been added for a data entry form of a lead, contact, business account, opportunity, sales quote, and case, the original information in the Summary area of a record's form is displayed on the Document tab. The added user-defined fields are displayed on the User-Defined Fields tab. On this tab, by using these fields, you can easily specify additional information about records they are working with. For details, see Attributes and User-Defined Fields.

Copying of User-Defined Fields Between Records

The values of user-defined fields can be copied between related records—such as CRM entities, project quotes, customers, and vendors—when a new record is created from an original one. For details, see User-Defined Fields.

If both records have the same user-defined fields on their respective User-Defined Fields tabs, the system automatically copies the field values from the original record to the new one.

The system also copies user-defined fields when a user creates any of the following new records from the noted starting point:

  • A lead, opportunity, or case created by clicking the button on the table toolbar of the Leads, Opportunities, or Cases tab, respectively, of the Business Accounts or Contacts form
  • A sales order or invoice created by clicking Create Sales Order or Create Invoice on the More menu of the Opportunities form
  • A sales quote created by copying an existing one on the Quotes tab of the Opportunities form or by clicking Copy Quote on the More menu of the Sales Quotes form
  • A project quote created by clicking Copy on the More menu of the Project Quotes (PM304500) form
  • A service order created by clicking Create Service Order on the More menu of the Cases (CR306000) or Opportunities form
  • An appointment created by clicking Create Appointment on the More menu of the Opportunities form

In addition, the system copies user-defined fields if a user creates a new record by using the following dialog boxes:

  • Create Contact on the Leads (CR301000), Business Accounts (CR303000), Opportunities (CR304000), Sales Quotes (CR304500), Customers (AR303000), and Vendors (AP303000) forms. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new contact.
  • Create Account on the Leads, Contacts, Sales Quotes, and Opportunities forms. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new account.
  • Create Opportunity on the Leads form. The set of user-defined fields is determined by the class of the new opportunity.
  • Create Quote on the Opportunities form. In this case, the set of user-defined fields is determined by the selected type of the quote (Project Quote or Sales Quote).

For a record that a user creates by using a dialog box, the user-defined fields that are required for the new record will appear on the User-Defined Fields tab of the dialog box, even if these fields were not specified in or required in the original record.

If a user-defined field is not required on the new record's form, it will not appear in the dialog box. However, if default values for the fields have been specified in the original record, then the system will copy the default values automatically to the new record.

The user can change the values in user-defined fields of any record at any time if the record's current status gives the user the ability to edit the settings' values in the record.

Additionally, the user can select values for the user-defined fields when merging duplicate records. For details, see Record Validation for Duplicates: General Information.