Nearly every ...., no, on every marketing project I've ever done, the question comes up "How do I market to both leads and contacts?" or even more commonly asked "Why would I want leads in my list of contacts?" It's actually an easy question to answer, but still doesn't ring clear for a large portion of people. The confusion lies in the historical context of the terms versus the way they are used in a great CRM system.
Historical view of business data:
Lead = a company or a person at a company that we think we want to do business with. We "Convert" them to contacts.
Contact = a person that we actually do business with
Account = a company or organization that we actually do business with
Opportunity = a potential sale of our products/services to an account and/or contact
The problem with that logic is that to run a great business CRM system, we need a single pane of glass in our customers whether potential or actual to maximize their customer experience and our growth potential with them. We can't keep "Potential" customers in a different dataset as "Actual" customers and expect to know what's always going on with them effectively. We also end up with another issue: We either end up with a ton of garbage front-end-of-the-funnel data in our list of opportunities, or we implement some process to filter data and ensure our sales team only puts "Good" opportunities into the system. This, of course, results in the front end of the funnel data being stored in a variety of spots (Phone calls, leads, appointments, emails, etc.) making it even harder to have a single pane of glass into a customer.
To get around this problem, we have to change the historical context above to run our business better within software applications.
Better view of data for modern businesses and their apps:
Contact = a person
Account = a company or organization
Lead = a non-qualified interest/potential interest in our products/services from a contact/account
Opportunity = a qualified interest in our products/services from a contact/account. (Often converted from a lead with the qualify button)
This model not only will work better for you combined sales and marketing efforts, but will also best align to just about every plug-and-play add-on and integration tool that is built for Dynamics 365 CE and the Dataverse.
So, how do we make that work in Dynamics 365 for both our sales and marketing team processes without making them enter a bunch of records at one time?
For sales users, it's as easy as letting them key in just a lead (Make sure to require email to make matching easiest) and then having a Power Automate Cloud Flow look for a matching contact in the system and associate it to the lead on save. If there isn't a match, it creates one and then associates it to the lead. This gives us a perfect scenario of a contact having the abilility to have many leads, so that we can see many points over time along with a history where that contact raised their hand or we tried to make them raise it regarding a product or service of ours.
For marketing users, a form submission should almost always create a lead since a contact is actually raising their hand. This lead also matches to a contact with the same Flow mentioned in #1. Then they can be nurtured along in marketing while sales does their part on the lead to see if it can be qualified into an opportunity. An exception would be a newsletter signup form with just an email address. Those should probably just remain contacts in most scenarios until more information is collected.
With the structure above, an organization can much more effectively sell, market, and service their contacts and accounts within our business applications and close-the-loop reporting from marketing and sales activities becomes much more attainable.
**** NOTE: INFORMATION PRESENTED IS ACCURATE AS OF DATE OF PUBLICATION****
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