You may be asking: "How do I track my prospects, leads, and opportunities?"
We developed "Opportunities" specifically for that purpose. It is like a specialized task. It tracks the opportunity through various stages. You can even add your own stages.
Typically, the stages advance as follows: Prospects/Leads --> Opportunities --> Quotes
Any given prospect or insured can have multiple opportunities (different lines of business) and each opportunity can have multiple quotes (a quote application and received quotes).
You can attach notes, files, emails, reminders, documents, etc. at the "Opportunity" stage.
(Added September 2018:)
In general, the commonly accepted CRM hierarchy (which we have adopted) is:
Lead --> Opportunity --> Quote
- A Lead (Prospect) is a commercial entity or a personal line (individual/family)
- Each Lead could have multiple Opportunities, loosely linked to Lines of Business
- For each opportunity, we would have a Quote Application. This hopefully results in multiple Received Quotes.
Example:
- Lead: "Jane and Mike Hudson"
- Opportunities: Personal Auto, Homeowners (all HO forms), Flood, Individual Health, Life, Personal Umbrella...
- Quotes: Application for Personal Auto. 3 received competitive quotes. Result: 1 quote bound into a policy = Opportunity is WON!
So, because there could be multiple "Quotes," the item to track for reporting would be the "Opportunity." We have conducted the research for this and this structure makes the most sense. This becomes more apparent when you have multiple producers. "Opportunity" is the items to track. Hence, we have endowed our "Opportunity" stage with the greatest amount of features (Notes, User-Defined Status, Attached Files, Emails, Due Dates, etc). "Opportunity" is an instance of a specialized "Task." We are concentrating our reporting efforts on "Opportunities."