Lead Zeppelin

We’ve added a category for Companies to the Lead Zeppelin CRM. Now, you can add information for your contact’s and lead’s companies. People can be associated to a Company and will be listed along the right sidebar.

What’s more, you can add notes, attach files and add tasks for a Company, just like you do for Leads and Contacts!

While we’re working on custom fields for your leads and contacts, we added the ability to add multiple ‘notes’ fields to your web-to-lead forms, as requested by Jason O. and others.

When submitted, the additional textarea field content will appear as a Message in the lead’s detail screen, as shown below.

Adding these extra fields is pretty straightforward.

1. Click on the Forms Tab
2. Select Notes under Other Fields in the Available fields box and click Add.
3. Give the field a name and click OK
4. Repeat as necessary

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.

Today we added a Files tab to your navigation bar. Any files that have been uploaded for a client or a lead, or files uploaded via one of your forms, can now be located easily by clicking over to the Files tab.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving… I’m on my way to make stuffing for our Zeppelin now.

All of our plans include SSL now, including the free one! Oh, and we’re *this* close to rolling out credit card payments.

As a follow up to last week’s post, we now are displaying lead owners (“assigned to”) on your lead list page. Now you can see at a glance who on your team is responsible for which leads!

Happy Halloween!

New features rolled out last Friday:

Exports

You can now export your leads and contacts by clicking the Export button on the main listing page. They will be exported as a CSV file for use in other applications.

Assigned Leads

A lead can now be assigned to another user in your account. You can do this by going in to Edit a lead and selecting a user under the Assign To dropdown menu. We’ll be adding other features soon to leverage this assignment, such as listing the owner on the main lead listing page, so everyone can quickly see who’s responsible for which leads.