Bradley Kieser wrote:
We have imported leads into the system. Now we want to include them in a campaign.

How do we do this?
The groups build tool doesn't acknowledge leads, it only see contacts. These are not yet contacts, they haven't become our clients yet. They are leads... possible clients... hence the campaign (to convert them into clients)!

convert them in contact, than convert them to Account when they became customers (you can also create market segmentation for Accounts (large, medium, small end so on)

Hmmm... I think that this is a bit of a hole in centric. Leads are not customers. They are pre-customers. Potential customers.

You need campaigns to convert leads into customers ... so the campaign tool really, really needs to work with leads.

Guess will need to make the code changes and contribute the change unless this is a version 5 feature already planned?

Anyone from centric care to comment?

Bradley, i think that be able to run a query for email targetting on leads could be an interesting features, leads are a sort of "pre-customers", but "contacts" are not automatically customers.

We work this way:
leads are only a repository of people to be qualified.
when they are qualified they (can) become contacts (they could be "prospects" (potential customers) or just competitors (for example).
We have build our segmentation (it is important to run query against them).
We use contacts list to create "action list" that are used for telemarketing and email servicing with links to our web site for our products and services.

When we start business (Alleluia!!) with a contact, this in promoted to "account".
Account have another segmentation according to business dimension, organization and so on.

Bradley Kieser wrote:
Hmmm... I think that this is a bit of a hole in centric. Leads are not customers. They are pre-customers. Potential customers.

You need campaigns to convert leads into customers ... so the campaign tool really, really needs to work with leads.

Guess will need to make the code changes and contribute the change unless this is a version 5 feature already planned?

Anyone from centric care to comment?

Lucio, that's clearly the way to use centric for targetting leads at the moment.

But I have a problem with adding contacts to the system when they are not actual business contacts (i.e. clients, competitors, suppliers, etc). If they are only POSSIBLE clients, such as a lead is, then you expect a high rate of failure. Depending on your industry, this could be as much as 95% (sometimes even more).

So adding them as contacts means then going and cleaning down the contacts... extra maintenance for no benefits at all.

The whole point of using centric is to make CRM efficient, else we may as well be using spreadsheets.

So while I think we will need to use the system like you do, I think that this is quite a big hole in centric and needs to be fixed asap. We will almost certainly be looking at coding to do just that and will contribute it here.

Thanks for your comments. They have been very helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to write them here.

All,

This is a good thread, and we know that the Leads module is not our greatest strength. We will be adding many features to Leads in 5.0 which you will be able to see in the roadmap that we will publish in the next few days.

We will also be adding significant capabilities to the Communications module, and I think the combination of these two will solve many (most, all?) of your problems.

I ask for your patience for just a couple more days, and the Centric CRM 5.0 roadmap will be published here on the Community site.

-Tom

Bradley, in my opinion centric lead module today is definitively not appropriate to process a high volume of leads with semiautomatic procedure like mailings.
Simply you cannot do this.

For example, if you have a lot of leads from a source (trade show, or people lists from somewhere) and you want to fire a mail survey to qualify them and then start to work them like contacts, Centric do not permit this process on leads.

It is clearly a seriuos limitation for some kind of business.
No excuse.
This process could be usefull to a lot of business and will became more and more usefull of course.

The same thing can be said on the "collaboration" side of Centric.
Shared calendar, integrated email mailbox for users, the possibility to check someone availability to schedule an appointment are very important funcionality for some kind of organizations and business
(my company, for example)

I have a customer looking for a solution to book technical assistance for teams of technical people outside the office and we have problem with centric because the "group" concept is still not extended to calendar, activities and so on.ù
We cannot solve this process today.

Still Centric is the best crm solution available in java in my opinion.
But it suffer for a very small support community.

The reason why i try to give support, for what is possible for me, is to give a contribute to the grow of the community.
The sme for the Italian translation that my company, Antica Bottega Digitale, has produced.
i think that a strong and factive community is the best success enabler for Centric and Dark Horse Ventures.

Bradley Kieser wrote:
Lucio, that's clearly the way to use centric for targetting leads at the moment.

But I have a problem with adding contacts to the system when they are not actual business contacts (i.e. clients, competitors, suppliers, etc). If they are only POSSIBLE clients, such as a lead is, then you expect a high rate of failure. Depending on your industry, this could be as much as 95% (sometimes even more).

So adding them as contacts means then going and cleaning down the contacts... extra maintenance for no benefits at all.

The whole point of using centric is to make CRM efficient, else we may as well be using spreadsheets.

So while I think we will need to use the system like you do, I think that this is quite a big hole in centric and needs to be fixed asap. We will almost certainly be looking at coding to do just that and will contribute it here.

Thanks for your comments. They have been very helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to write them here.

Hi Tom,

That is GREAT news and I am eagerly looking forward to reading the roadmap when it's out there.

Another thing that I would add that's directly related to using the campaign tool is that attaching a survey as a means of registering client interest is absolutely terrible. We need to embed links directly into the body of the email that will register unique interest per recipient.

So we need to be able to say "Click on this link" or similar and it needs to generate a response on our side so that we can then take further action.

I.e. all the power of the survey, but embedded in an email.

OR....

Be able to make surveys look like emails, mixing questions with text, graphics, etc.

This is absolutely critical to us and will be for any heavyweight users of the system.

Hope that these comments help and are useful to the team!