Converting a prospect

Converting is the seam between the two halves of Sales: it takes a company you have been prospecting and turns it into a customer with a deal against it.

What it asks

One decision: an existing customer, or a new one. Converting needs a customer either way — you cannot convert a prospect into nothing.

• Existing customer — search and pick. Use this when the company already trades with you under another name or another arm.
• New customer — created from the prospect as part of the same step.

What it does

Two things, in one action:

• The contacts are copied to the customer. Everyone you gathered while prospecting comes across; nobody retypes them.
• A deal is created in the first stage of the pipeline. It starts where every new deal starts, not at some stage inferred from how warm the prospect looked.

The deal it creates carries an Origin of Prospect, so months later you can still tell which deals came from prospecting and which were entered directly.

After converting

The company is now a customer and the work continues on the pipeline board. The prospecting record and its activity timeline stay where they are — converting does not erase the history of how the relationship started.

Example use cases

• Turn a company that replied into a customer and a first deal in one step.
• Attach a prospect to a customer you already trade with, instead of creating a duplicate.
• Keep the contacts you gathered while prospecting, without re-entering them.
• Tell, later, which of this quarter's deals came from outbound work.