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Leads - Plugixa CRM

A lead is somebody you have not qualified yet. It exists so that your contact list is not full of people who never became customers.

The leads list, showing name, company, status, source, score and owner

Why a lead is not a contact

The company on a lead is plain text, not a link to an account. That is the point: an enquiry from “Northwind Traders” should not create a company record until somebody has decided Northwind is real.

Everything else looks like a contact - name, title, email, phone, address - plus a few fields a contact does not need.

Field Why
Company Typed, not linked. It becomes an account only on conversion
Status Where it is in qualification
Source Where it came from
Score How promising it looks
Opportunity amount What it might be worth, before there is a deal
Industry, Website Useful before the company exists as a record

Statuses

Status Means
New Just arrived, nobody has looked
Assigned Somebody owns it
In process Being worked
Converted Became a customer. Set by conversion, not by hand
Recycled Not now, but maybe later
Dead No

Recycled and dead are both worth using. A lead list where everything is either new or converted tells you nothing about what is not working.

A lead page, showing its fields, its score and its activity

Where leads come from

Conversion

Convert turns one lead into three records at once: an account, a contact and an opportunity. Nothing is retyped, and the lead keeps a link to all three.

This is the one moment unqualified data is promoted into the records the business relies on, so it behaves more carefully than ordinary saving:

It checks everything before it writes anything. And if a later write fails anyway, it removes what it already created. A conversion that made an account and a contact and then failed on the opportunity would otherwise leave you with an unconverted lead sitting beside two orphans nobody asked for - and you, seeing an error, would press the button again and get a second set.

It refuses rather than retries. A lead that has already been converted cannot be converted again. Without that, a double-clicked button silently duplicates a customer.

It deliberately does not wrap itself in a database transaction. MySQL has no nested transactions, so committing here would also commit whatever transaction the surrounding code had open - another plugin’s, a migration’s - and silently make their half-finished work permanent. A plugin does not own the connection and must not assume it does.

You do not have to create all three

Conversion lets you skip the opportunity when there is no deal yet, or attach the contact to an existing account rather than creating another one. That second option is the one to remember: it is how you avoid a second “Northwind Traders”.

Troubleshooting

Symptom Usual cause
Convert is greyed out The lead is already converted. It cannot be converted twice, deliberately.
Conversion made a second company It created one because none was chosen. Pick the existing account next time.
Conversion failed and left nothing behind Correct. It removes what it made rather than leaving orphans.
A converted lead still shows in the list It should. Filter by status to hide them.
Leads are all “new” Nobody is setting status. It is how you tell a stalled list from an empty one.
The company is text, not a link Until conversion, yes. That is what a lead is.
Score is empty It is a field you set or an import fills, not something computed for you.

What to do next

Quick Links

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