Leads come from many different sources, depending on your sales and marketing processes. Your corporate Web site might generate leads automatically, or marketing personnel might import leads into Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a batch process. However, you can also manually create lead records. When working with a lead, you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM activities such as tasks, phone calls, and e-mail messages to track your interactions with the lead during the qualification process. The type of data that you capture about each lead depends on your business needs and any customizations your system includes, but most organizations track the person’s name and address information.

Many organizations also want to capture the marketing source from which the lead originated. If your organization captures the lead source for each record, sales and marketing managers can run reports to determine which lead-generation tactics are most effective. For example, you might find that a lead source such as the trade show circuit generates a large number of leads, but only a small percentage of them qualify as potential customers. Meanwhile, another marketing tactic such as a Web site might generate a smaller number of leads, but a high percentage of them qualify as potential customers. Understanding the source of your leads will help your company make better decisions on where to invest in future sales and marketing efforts.

In this exercise, you will create a lead to track a new prospect who found out about your organization from a Web site.

Note

BE SURE TO use the Windows Internet Explorer Web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web site before beginning this exercise.