Capture and Convert a Lead

Every customer relationship starts as a name someone wrote down. A lead is that unqualified prospect at the top of the funnel — a contact captured from a referral, your website, an event, a walk-in or cold outreach, before they are a customer of record. The job is to capture the lead, work it through a short lifecycle as you learn whether it is real, and — once it is qualified — convert it into a PRM account (an organisation you do business with) so the rest of the PRM can hang off it.

Who / when: the business-development officer (the account manager) captures a lead the moment they hear of a prospective corporate client, HMO, referring doctor or partner lab, then works and converts it as the relationship firms up. Conversion is a one-time act per lead.

We will follow Bisi the business-development officer, who has just been introduced to a corporate client interested in a staff-screening contract.

1. Business-development officer — open PRM → Leads. This is the top of the funnel. Press “New Lead”.
2. Business-development officer — give the lead a Name (the person or prospect), and optionally an Account Name (the prospective organisation), an Email and a Phone.
3. Business-development officer — pick a Source — where the lead came from: Referral, Walk-In, Campaign, Web, Event, Cold or Other. The source is how you later tell which channels actually produce business.
4. Business-development officer — set the Owner — the business-development staff member who will work this lead. The owner picker only lists PRM staff (account managers and PRM managers). Press “Create”.

Note

If your PRM Settings have “Require an owner on every new lead” switched on, you cannot save a lead without choosing an owner. That is a manager toggle — see Work the Opportunity Pipeline and the module reference for the settings.

5. Business-development officer — as you make contact and learn more, open the lead’s “Edit” and move its Status along the lifecycle: New → Contacted → Qualified (or Disqualified if it is going nowhere). The status is your read on how real the lead is. You set these three by hand; the final Converted status is reached only by converting, never by editing.
6. Business-development officer — once the lead is worth pursuing, press “Convert” on its row.
7. Business-development officer — in the Convert Lead dialog, confirm the Account Name to create and choose the Account Type (e.g. Corporate, HMO, Referring Provider, Partner Lab). This is the kind of organisation the new account is.
8. Business-development officer — decide whether to “Open an Opportunity”. Leaving it ticked creates a first opportunity (a potential deal) on the new account in the Prospecting stage, where you can name it and give it an Estimated Value. Untick it if you only want the account for now.
9. Business-development officer — press “Convert”.

What happens next

Veona, in one atomic step, mints a new account (auto-coded, set to Active, inheriting the lead’s owner, email and phone), optionally opens the Prospecting opportunity you asked for, and stamps the lead as Converted with a link to both. Either everything is created or nothing is — there is no half-converted state. A converted lead can no longer be edited or converted again (a second attempt is refused).

No money moves here. Conversion is pure record-creation: it creates an account and maybe an opportunity, and posts nothing to the General Ledger. The only PRM action that touches the books is accepting a quotation, much later in the relationship.

Caution

There is no de-duplication on convert. If you convert two leads for the same organisation, you get two accounts — Veona does not detect that the org already exists. Before converting, glance at PRM → Accounts (search the org name) so you reuse an existing account instead of creating a duplicate. PRM has no delete, so a stray duplicate is set Inactive, not removed.

Follow the trail

• Next: Manage Accounts and Contacts
• Then: Work the Opportunity Pipeline
• Related: Log Activities · PRM module reference