A Lead represents a potential business opportunity. You can think of leads as a bowl full of business cards. You have their contact information, but the lead hasn't yet decided if they want to formally evaluate your business, and you haven't yet determined if they're the right fit to work together.

In this module, we'll tackle the following:

Understand leads

Define your leads strategy

Create a lead

Understand Leads

A Lead is a person you might do business with. Before you can engage in said business dealings, you must "qualify" the lead to determine it's mutually beneficial to move forward. 

As we saw in the first module, you'll locate your leads by clicking the leads icon from the left-hand menu:

You may decide to use Leads in Copper: 

For example, a sales representative for a software company meets John at a conference and gets his business card. John might have customer potential, but the sales rep won't know until they chat by phone. In this scenario, John would be a Lead until he's qualified and converted into a Person. (More on converting lead records later).

Or you may decide not to use Leads in Copper:

For example, a recruiter receives a resume from a job seeker. This job seeker meets the qualifications for a position the recruiter is trying to fill, so it's time to move this job seeker through the pipeline, starting with a phone interview. You can't move a Lead through your pipeline. It must be qualified first. In this scenario, the recruiter firm may decide adding leads is unnecessary. 

Define your Leads Strategy

To determine whether it benefits your business to use leads, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I jump into a sales pitch with prospective customers, or do I store information about them in order to vet them first?

• If your sales process starts as soon as you're aware of a prospective customer/opportunity, you don't need leads.
• If you qualify prospective customers/opportunities before moving them through your sales process, leads help you keep track of this prospective business.

2. How many prospective customers/opportunities do I receive at a time?

• If you receive one at a time, you may not need leads, as you can qualify these individually when they come in.
• If you receive a lot at any given time, leads can help you keep track of prospective business you need to qualify at a future date.

Create a Lead

You've decided leads work for your business. Try creating your first lead now! This will help you train your users to do the same:

1. Sign into your Copper account and click 'Leads' in the lefthand navigation panel.
2. Click the blue 'Add New' button.
3. A box will appear to create a record for this lead. The only mandatory field is 'Lead Name.' The rest of the default fields are optional. 
4. Click 'Save' in the box when you're done entering details about your lead.

Congratulations! You'll see your lead listed in the Leads page now. You can click the lead to pull up the details when you're ready to edit the record or convert the lead. Here's what you'll see:

To the left, we have all the details you filled out when creating this lead, plus any info we pulled from their publicly-available social media. You'll also see a blue 'Convert lead' button here, which takes you through the steps of converting a qualified lead into a person with an associated company or opportunity record (we'll tackle that in the next module). In the center, you can track your interactions with this lead. To the right, we have the associated records and files that lend context to this lead.

Advance to the next step: Define your People, Companies and Opportunities