Creating Leads
SolarNexus can act as your lead management database. A lead includes a customer. The customer is an individual or organization (business, non-profit, government) that is interested in purchasing products and services from your company. All projects start with the creation of a lead.
SolarNexus provides multiple means of creating leads in your company's account, including:
- Manual input
- Batch import
- Capture from your company website
- Automatically fed in from third party lead-gen companies
- Posted by other software applications you use (e.g. CRM)
Manually Inputting Leads
Leads can be input manually by clicking on the New Lead button at the upper right hand side of the Home or Sales screens.
Each new lead has one or more contacts associated with it. Each contact requires a first and last name as well as at least one means of contact (either a phone number, or an email address). The lead also contains optional fields for mailing and site address information.
On clicking Save, the user is taken to the Project Workspace on the Project tab. If not entered when the Lead was created, the site address would be entered in the Project tab (not under Customer, under Project Information).
TIP: Avoid creating duplicate lead records. Use the universal search box at the top right to search for either a contact's name or a site address prior to creating a new lead. You may find that the lead has already been entered by another user, or that the lead is actually a new project for an existing customer.
A typical workflow scenario for creating a lead is as follows:
An interested customer calls up your business. You greet the potential customer and gets his or her name.
Enter the customer's name into the universal search box at the top right and click Search or hit the Enter key.
If the relevant customer project is found, click on the project's name to open it. If the customer is found, but this is a new project, click on the Add Project icon in the customer record. (See below.)
If neither the customer nor the project is found, click on the New Lead link at the top right of the search results screen.
On clicking the New Lead link, SolarNexus will open the New Lead screen. Complete the fields in the New Leads screen (See below). Required fields are marked with as asterisk. The site address is not a required field for new leads. Every new lead requires either a phone number or an email address.
When you click Save, SolarNexus opens the Project Workspace, as well as an Aerial Map window of the site (this feature can be turned off in your Project Settings screen).
TIP: The user creating the project will be automatically assigned as the sales owner for the project. A user with Admin or Sales Management permissions can re-assign a project to another user.
Batch Importing Leads
SolarNexus provides a means to create a batch of leads in one operation by importing a properly formatted comma separated value (CSV) file. Use this feature to assist in migrating from your existing project operations to SolarNexus. You can quickly populate SolarNexus with existing data from spreadsheets or other applications rather than re-typing any of it.
Learn how to batch import new leads.
Capture Leads from Your Company Website
SolarNexus provides code you can embed in your company website to automatically capture leads entered by visitors to your website. Learn how to capture Leads from your company website.
Get Leads from Third Party Lead Gen Services
Many leading lead gen providers in the solar market are already integrated with SolarNexus. Learn how to get leads purchased from third party services automatically input into your SolarNexus account.
Push Leads from Other Software via Zapier or Custom Integration
SolarNexus' Zapier application allows SolarNexus to integrate with hundreds of other market leading applications via simple creation of configurable Zaps. (Contact your SolarNexus representative to learn more).
For integrating applications that don't have a Zapier application, the SolarNexus API (application programming interface), provides the option of programmatically creating leads from external software sources, such as a CRM system.
Next Steps: Qualification
Following the creation of a lead, the next key milestone is qualifying it. SolarNexus only allows qualified projects to continue through the process. Click here to learn about qualifying and archiving leads.