What if Sales no longer interacted with the lead object?

[jvolkov]

What if Sales no longer interacted with the lead object?  What if they only interacted with accounts, contacts, and opportunities instead?

This is an idea we are considering implementing at our organization right now.  Having Sales convert and create leads is causing way too many data quality issues that can not easily be rid of through automated processees. 

For example, John is a contact at the lead company John's Corp. and is owned by salesperson Bill.  Another salesperson, Jennifer finds a another contact as John's Corp. named Barbara, Jennifer then creates a lead "Barbara at John's Corp".  There are now 2 leads for one company owned by 2 different sales users when in fact they both should be linked together under one company and owned by one sales user.  This is not an issue with Accounts since you can create and attach a new contact to an existing account.  Beyond this there are many other issues that arise from similar situations.

Has your organization come across this?  How did you approach it?  What new problems could arise from eliminating sales user interaction with the lead object?

[rpr2]

We use leads for only a few very specific processes (the major one being web-to-lead functionality).  For everything else, we use accounts and contacts.  On the account record we have a custom field that is used to separate prospect accounts from existing customers.  This works well for us.  Separating customers and prospects using record types could be another option, depending on your particular processes and needs.