New to Salesforce and struggling to understand "logic"

[Ruskin29]

Hi there, I have recently joined an organisation responsible for Sales and Marketing Operations. I have limited experience of SF but over 8 years experience of SAP and Siebel. My company are embarked on a major project to re engineer their business processes due to what they perceive to be a lack of functionality within SF. Essentially they want the sales people to be able to view leads associated with a specific account or contact person. I'm used to CRM systems where leads are created from an account and then associated CP's are added so that on viewing an account you see all opportunities, activities and leads in one view. Currently we are creating contacts but not leads and the effectively managing leads within opportunities (using a pre opportunity sales stage). This is a messy solution and means that opportunity pipeline is being clogged with lead related objects and more importantly producing any meaningful results on campaign success, lead conversion, etc is impossible without a large amount of manual effort...

I appreciate that the SF logic is different in how it handles contacts, leads and accounts but there must be some way to achieve a similar result i.e associating leads to an account/contact. Unless I can find a way around this I wiull have serious problems with user adoption.

If anyone has experienced similar issues or can suggest possible alternatives/workrounds I'd really appreciate your feedback.

Thanks

[Stevemo]

Hi Ruskin,

The way that I explain the Lead>Account>Contact relationship when I'm introducing new users to SFDC is that I tell them in SFDC a Lead is "a raw, unqualified Prospect" (a person or company that we've never done business with before, and we're not even sure if they're worth going after).  If you look at a Lead in SFDC the information is little more than you might get off someone's business card, or their email signature (name, company, phone, email, address).  

Once they've become "qualified" the Lead is converted into an Account and a Contact.  All of the information related to the company is used to create the Account and all of the information about the person is used to create the Contact.  Once an account had been set up for a company there's really no need to create additional Leads for that company, and new people we meet are automatically added as Contacts within the existing Account.  

It might not be a perfect fit for your business model, but that's the way we have things set up and it's been working for us.