Lead Zeppelin

This is BIG! We just rolled out the ability to add custom fields last night. There is still some tweaking to be done, but you can now add your fields for your leads and contacts!

You can access the field manager by going in to add or edit a lead or contact. Look for the link on the right sidebar. Below is a quick video showing how you can add a field. Give it a try!

We’ve been feeling a bit social here lately at Lead Zeppelin… so we added the ability for you to tag up your contacts and leads with links to their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

Try it out! We hope you like it…

When adding notes or attaching documents to leads, contacts or deals, you can now notify other team members. The selected people will receive an email containing the contents of your note along with a link back to the original post where they can add their own comments.

We hope you find this feature useful!

Yep, you can import your contacts now into Lead Zeppelin without having to subject them to TSA x-rays.

For best results, having your list in a Outlook CSV format works best. If you have a simple list that only contains a few columns of information, like name, email and phone number… you just need to make sure your column names sync with ours. Check out our template here.

Importing your contacts comes in super handy when you’re adding deals, so you can associate a deal to an existing contact. You haven’t seen deals yet? You’ve been missing out!

If you’ve been storing away your leads in an excel file, why not upload them into your Zeppelin so you can start adding tasks, notes and files and getting them closed? Back from a trade show? Upload them leads!

Last week we rolled out a much needed function to our Leads and Deals list screens. Filters! Yep, now you can select what lead or deals you’d like to see based on their status. And not by only one either, you can filter by multiple status.

Bonus: For some quick stats, a current count of how many records exist will be shown after each status as a type.

“Rocking! I really like it.”
- Cliff H.

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.