Collection of vtiger Best Practices and experiences

Comments

• 3 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
• petertausd

  March 2009 Vote Up0Vote Down

  when looking for past discussions i found <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=1590&start=20&sid=04f215fced3074ade223fd81a53898ec">http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php? ... 81a53898ec</a><!-- m -->

  seems like everyone (including myself) is confused about that lead/contact/potential/etc thingy[...]
  
  i think there are 3 different semantic types involved here : person, organization, and transaction. each one of the leads, contacts, accounts, potentials concepts are of one of these 3 types.
  
  - a lead : vtiger apparently defines a lead as a person, since there are mandatory first and last name fields. the person belongs to an organization that is obviously not yet a business partner.
  
  - a contact is a person as well. arguably, the difference between a lead and a contact is the degree of acquaintance we have with this person. a contact is a generic concept, it can be construed as an independent entity in a customer (or other partner) role, or as a member of an existing partner organization (account).
  
  - an account is an organization that is considered to be a business partner. however, vtiger does not necessarily define an account as a 'customer' organization, since an account can have the types 'prospect', 'competitor', 'investor', 'reseller' etc, as well as 'customer'. this is tricky! so what is an 'account' ? again vtiger seems to define the concept generically as an organization that we have a business relationship with.
  
  - a 'potential', in vtiger, is a possible transaction! not a person (like leads and contacts), not an organization (like accounts), its a different semantic type altogether. when we convert a lead, we change the lead person into a contact person, and in parallel we also create an organization (a new account that has name of the lead's company name) as well as a transaction (the potential). if you examine the demo data installed with vtiger, you will see that potentials look like 'vtiger - 1000 units' or 'x-ceed inc 99 - 1000 units'. clearly, we are not talking about the same kind of entity as an account or a contact. it seems to me most posts in this thread have been mixing all of them in a uphazard fashion. '1000 units' shows we are talking about a potential sale to this specific account (organization) or contact (person).

  
  with a long ongoing discussion about the definition of lead, account, potential, prospect, contact ...
  
  it would be very nice, if some expert could explain vtiger's underlying definitions!
• zenonmb

  September 2009 Vote Up0Vote Down

  i am evaluating the product and facing the same issue trying to understand what is a lead , what is a potential, an oportunity ,etc...
  the product seems complete, installation was easy, but the user manual is bad. it does not explain those key and basic concepts.
  may be that is vtiger business....
  cheers,
  
  zenon