Lead Zeppelin

We just added Deals this past weekend to Lead Zeppelin. What’s the difference between Leads and Deals? Well, Deals may not be for everyone, it really depends on your business.

You see, some online CRM apps have Deals (aka Opportunities) and others have Leads, and some have both. Now, if you’re a financial advisor, for example, you may just need to use Leads, and mark them as Customer or convert them to a Contact once you’ve closed them.

On the other hand, if you’re a contractor and find yourself submitting bids to customers more than once, you may want to use Deals. You’re really trying to sell the project, or Deal, to the person (a Contact). Even in this scenario, you’d probably want to qualify a lead first (making them a Contact), before you’d write a proposal for a project for them. Make sense?

We do want to keep Lead Zeppelin as simple as possible, but we felt that Deals were an important inclusion for some of our customer types. Please, let us know what you think in the comments.

If there’s one thing I’ve heard from our customers, is that when it comes to lead generation and nurturing, they admittedly suck at follow up.

Now that we’ve rolled out a simple CRM that meets the needs of many small businesses, especially with our own integrated web-to-lead forms, the next feature was obvious. Tasks!

We already automagically fire off a confirmation email to your prospects immediately after they fill out your form helping you look more pro. After you’ve contacted and qualified the prospect, you can now add follow up tasks such as emailing or calling them. Depending on your sales process, you may have other steps along the way, like meetings, reviewing proposals and more.

We added a much-needed visualization to your dashboard today: the Sales Pipeline

Now, you can see, at-a-glance, where you stand with your pipeline. Keep it full, keep it loaded, but most importantly, keep it moving!

We’ve also added our Twitter and Blog feeds so you can keep up with Lead Zeppelin developments.