A lead is someone who becomes aware of your company or someone who you decide to pursue for a sale, even if they don’t know about your company yet. Typically, this includes everyone in one big group, but you could also break this down further to only look at qualified leads, which are leads that meet certain qualifications to becoming customers. For example, if you’re selling pet products, a qualified lead is someone who has a pet, versus someone who simply likes the cute animal pictures on your blog, but will never buy anything from you.

The most successful lead generation/lead management programs have dedicated phone resources whose sole job in life is to take raw inquiries and qualify them before they are sent to sales. More consistent and better quality follow-up on leads means better conversion of leads into opportunities. 

Qualifying leads occurs at the top of the funnel. By putting the right leads at the top of your funnel, you are setting yourself up to pursuing only those that have the best chance of closing. Of course, managing a swift funnel also requires a rigorous understanding of your customer’s decision-making process. This means that you’ve got to get inside your prospects’ head to understand their underlying needs and interests in the sale. You could start your sales process by defining the ideal prospect, allowing you to segment your leads, which essentially means that you are splitting the list of names into smaller lists.

Tags (or Labels) in Odoo's CRM app can be applied to leads and prospects in order to do such a segmentation. Create a Google Document (template) including the key characteristics of your ideal customer profile and share it with your sales team by making it available through the Leads / Opportunity form. Segment each lead by applying the corresponding Sales Tags. Make sure to assign the correct priority to your leads by determining a lead's compliance with what you expect from a potential customer. 

This will help you determine which accounts to add to the top of your funnel. The result is that you’ll be pursuing only those opportunities that have the best chance of closing. Isn’t that time well spent?

To help your sales ask the right questions, you can create a list of questions in the form of a Google Document Template. This can be a form, a document or a spreadsheet.

From Odoo's General Settings, link your Google Account by ticking the Attach Google documents to any record and clicking the Apply button. Now Generate your Google Authorization Code for you company's Google Account and paste it in Odoo. Then Configure your templates. Create a new template that you attach to your leads / opportunities. You can also add a specific filter, to show the linked Google Document only for the filtered leads / opportunities.

To qualify your new leads or opportunities, you can open the Sales Questionnaire. Odoo will create a new document based on your template, in which you can register the prospect's answers to your questions.

And faster lead response times lead to better conversion rates. A five-minute lead response means you’re four times more likely to qualify that lead than a 10 minute response, and a staggering 21 times more likely to convert than after 30-minute wait. 

Of course, Odoo allows you to automate such steps in your sales cycle. With Automated Rules you can tell the system for instance to automatically send a reply when a lead enters.

To access the CRM rules, use the Settings > Technical > Automated Actions > Automated Actions menu.

Suppose you want to have Odoo to send an automatic reply when a lead enters your system. Create a new automated action, i.e. Send auto-reply when lead arrives for the related document model Lead/Opportunity. Run it On Creation. You can add a filter with Type is lead, to avoid that the reply is also send for new opportunities. On the Actions tab, create a server action with the Action To Do set to Send Email. Create a mail template, or select an existing one. Save the automated action.

Inspired by http://blog.marketo.com/2011/03/here-are-my-secret-methods-for-turning-marketing-leads-into-qualified-sales-leads.html