Creating and working with Leads in SAP Cloud for Customer(C4C)

Lead creation and management is the first step of your sales and marketing process. In this step, you can capture any interest in your products and services, and qualify and nurture the interest to turn your potential customers into real clients/customers.

Leads can come from a wide range of sources like, Campaign, Phone Enquiry, Roadshow and etc.

You can manually create leads in the system one lead at a time and lot of Scoping and Configuration activity needs to be completed before working on Leads.

Creating and working with Leads:

Leads can be generated/created from different sources such as marketing campaigns, referrals, and social media. SAP Cloud for Customer offers you full flexibility to create, track, and follow up on your leads.

Leads can be created in the following ways:

Create leads manually from the quick create icon
Import leads from Microsoft Excel
Upload leads through SAP Cloud for Customer APIs
Scan a business card on your mobile devices
Copy an existing leads

Create Lead Manually from the quick create icon:

To Create Lead Manually, you can follow the below steps:

Login to your C4C system
Go to Sales Campaign
Click on Leads
Click on ‘+’ icon to create New Lead
While creating a new lead, first select whether this lead is created for an existing account or a new account. If you select NO under Use Existing Account, you’re presented with a free-text field to enter the Account Name. However, if you select YES for Use Existing Account, then you need to select one of the existing accounts, as shown in below.
Following are descriptions of some of the important fields in a lead transaction:
- Status: Statuses such as Open, Qualified, Accepted, and Declined are assigned to the leads for better processing and reporting. In addition to the standard lead statuses, custom entries can be added using business configuration.
- Qualification Level: To better classify the leads, you can assign qualification levels such as Hot, Cold, and Warm to the leads.
- Source: To help differentiate the quality and effectiveness of leads, you can assign a source to the leads such as Campaign, Road Show, Trade Fair, Telephone Inquiry, and so on.
- Category: Assigning categories further classifies leads based on your internal assignments such as Prospect for Products, Prospects for Service, and Prospects for Training.
- Campaign: If a lead has been created as part of a campaign, then you can assign the campaign ID to the lead for identification and reporting purposes.
Maintain all these details on the New Lead creation screen and click on Save. After maintaining the pertinent information in the lead, you have three options to save it:
- Save: Saves the lead and closes the New Lead screen.
- Save and New: Saves the lead, and the New Lead screen is presented to enter details for the next lead. If you’re planning to create more than one lead at a time, Save and New is a good option to enter all the leads one after another into the system.
- Save and Open: Saves and opens the lead so that you can maintain additional lead details as needed.
For an example create lead and click on Save and Open, it will display the details as shown below:From the above figure, SAP Sales Cloud offers a very inherent user interface (UI) for displaying leads. The lead information is presented in different tabs, including OVERVIEW, FEED, PRODUCTS, ACTIVITIES, CONVERSION, and ATTACHMENTS. These tabs can be configured and personalized based on the scope of the project. There are more UI tabs that you can configure SAP Sales Cloud to enable or hide as needed to support your business requirements. For now, let’s review the standard UI tabs available in a lead:
- OVERVIEW: Displays lead details such as Lead ID, Name, Account, Contact, Qualification, Status, Source, and Category.
- FEED: Provides details on any lead updates. It’s a great tool if a team is working on the lead.
- PRODUCTS: Enables you to assign products to the lead.
- ACTIVITIES: Lists all the activities created for the lead such as appointments, tasks, phone calls, and emails.
- Contacts: Enables you to add customer contacts for the lead.
- Sales and Marketing Team: Allows you to add internal team members from sales and marketing who are working on the lead.
- Involved Parties: Allows you to add all the external parties, such as customers and partners involved, who are collaborating on the lead.
- CONVERSION: Shows the leads that have been converted to opportunities.
- ATTACHMENTS: Enables you to attach documents and images to the lead.
- Changes: Shows the change log of what and who changed the lead.
- Surveys: We can attach surveys to qualified leads. For surveys, newer versions of the same survey can be created if needed. Activating a newer version of a survey will inactivate the previous version. When you attach the survey to the lead, only the newer active version will be attached. If you used the previous version of the survey in the lead, those surveys will remain unchanged.
- Tickets: Enables you to add service tickets to the lead.
- Sales Quotes: Shows the sales quotes created with reference to the lead.
- Sales Orders: Shows the sales orders created with reference to the lead.
- Approvals: Shows all the approval details and enables you to start a formal approval process for the lead.
- Document Flow: Shows all the preceding and subsequent documents linked to the lead such as the preceding lead, follow-up opportunity, or quotation.
- Workflow Changes: Shows the workflow changes if you’ve enabled workflow for the lead.
- Notes: Allows you to add free notes to the lead.

Import Leads from Microsoft Excel:

You can use Microsoft Excel template to import leads in a batch, you can follow the below steps to archive this:

From your profile menu at the top right, go to the Download section.
Download the Add-In for Microsoft Excel.
Install the add-in using the .exe file.
Go to Sales Leads, and click the More icon at the bottom right.
Click Import from Microsoft Excel.
Open the Microsoft Excel template locally and log in with SAP Cloud for Customer credentials.
You can either manually type in or copy and paste your leads information from another spreadsheet.
If you have downloaded the add-in, saving the spreadsheet will update your leads in the solution simultaneously.

Scan a business card on your mobile devices:

ABBYY and FINEREADER are trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd., which may be registered in some jurisdictions.

Go to Leads, and add a new lead.
Tap Actions, choose Scan, and the phone camera will be activated.
Center the business card that you would like to scan, and take the picture.
If the photo is clear, tap Use Photo. The information in the picture will be transferred to appropriate fields in the application.
Confirm or adjust the information as necessary, and save the lead by tapping Done. The information from the business card will appear as a contact under your lead.

For more details please refer the link: Use Business Card Scanner.

Copy an existing Lead:

You can create new lead from an existing lead, Please follow the below steps to create new lead from another lead:

Login to your C4C system
Go to Leads under Sales Campaign work center
Open lead
Click on Actions
Click on Copy
It will open New lead screen with auto-populated data from the existing lead.

Check for Lead Duplicates:

Lead duplicate check is a combination of account duplicate check and lead duplicate check.

As prerequisites, your administrator must enable and configure both business partner duplicate check and lead duplicate check.

Configure Lead Duplicate Check:

Administrators should scope the feature before you can configure it.

You can follow the below steps to configure the lead duplicate check:

Login to the C4C system
Go to Business Configuration work center
Go to Implementation Project
Select the Implementation Project and Click on Edit Project Scope
Navigate to Questions tab
Navigate to Sales -> Lead Management -> Leads
Scope the question “Do you want to enable duplicate check for lead?” as shown below
Again Navigate and Select the Implementation Project
Click on Open Activity List
Search for “Lead Duplicate Check”
Configure and assign Weighting to available lead fields.

Note: The higher the weightage for the field, the more importance is placed on the field when the solution finds duplicates.

Once you configure for the Duplicate Check for Leads, whenever you create new lead you can check the Duplicate by clicking on Check for Duplicates in the Lead screen as shown below: