A sales cycle

A typical sales cycle starts from a campaign. An example of a campaign can be a conference or a seminar where marketing individuals explain the product offering of the company to their prospects. Salesforce provides a campaign object to store this data. A campaign may involve different processes, and the campaign management module of Salesforce is simple. A matured campaign management system will have features such as sending e-mails to campaign members in bulk, and tracking how many people really opened and viewed the e-mails, and how many of them responded to the e-mails. Some of these processes can be custom built in Salesforce, but out of the box, Salesforce has a campaign member object apart from the campaign where members are selected by marketing reps. Members can be leads or contacts of Salesforce. A campaign generates leads. Leads are the prospects that have shown interest in the products and offerings of the company.

The lead management module provides a lead object...