Stages a Lead goes through from inception to being executed
Intro:
Web3Box CRM has the concept of Statuses for leads, like Contact Made, Proposal Sent, Shipped, …etc.
Lead Statuses
However, several customers asked for Stages concept. And we created the interface and functionality that will be explained below.
To make it easy to follow, I will split the article into several topics.
How leads arrive into your crm
A lead will be added manually or will be added by an external script that connects your landing page to the crm. Most of the leads will probably come from the landing page and some will be entered by you from your meetings, connections or referrals.
If you have lots of leads from an existing crm system, or from your own source you can easily import them all into Web3Box CRM.
What actions can be applied to a lead
Now, the new lead will probably be automatically marked as “Added“, that being the very first status you can set to a lead. This status tells you “what is going on” with a lead. I will talk a bit more about statuses in the next topic. Moving forward, you may send an email to the lead with a Thank You message, and change the status to “Contact Made”. Later on, you may follow up with one more email, with a phone call, or with a meeting and continue to change the status based on your progress. Anytime when you do an action (email, phone, meeting, etc.) you will change the lead status. All your activities will be recorded and linked to the lead.
How to group those statuses into stages
A lead stage is nothing else but grouping more than one action into a group of actions, then naming those groups of actions. The names for stages can be: [Added] -> [Negotiation] -> [Legal] -> [Execution]. You will be able to edit the names later on and also change the order when they occur.
Under each of these stages you can do a set of actions: change the person who manages the lead (from the rep, to financial or to top management), change statuses, send emails, add notes, assign activities, change priority or category, export the details, etc.
Once all actions are executed for one stage, you will move the lead to the next stage by clicking a button [“Move to “Stage-Name”]. You can always come back to previous stages and do more actions if needed.
View Lead Stages
Be sure the statuses are followed by your team
As you know, sometimes you need help from your supervisor/manager regarding some decisions you have to take in order to keep moving the lead from stage to stage until completion. You also know very well that these people are busy 
and it is hard to engage them.
Here is what we did to help you with this process. Let’s say you are in the [Legal] stage, where you assigned the lead to your company’s legal representative. When you do that, the assigned rep will receive an email notification saying that a lead requires attention.
Now, many times the managers forget to check the lead into the crm because they are busy. For this situation, we added one more layer of alert. You can set an interval of time (days) and during this interval, if no action was made on the lead, an email goes out with the same alert to the same person who was supposed to take action. You can set this interval to 10 days or 20 days or … 2 days. If still nothing, then you will call your boss :).
Lead Stage Reminder
As a side note, the stages are graphically represented into the Stage Funnel. The Funnel image will quickly give you an idea about what stage your leads are in.
View Lead Funnel
I hope you enjoyed this article, your comments are welcome.
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