Associating lead referrals to the respective contacts

Associating lead referrals to the respective contacts

In today's technological world, despite all the advertising a firm undertakes to attract potential clients, the number of customers a company obtains from referrals is enormous. So when happy customers refer leads to you, it's definitely a reason to celebrate. At the same time, when such word-of-mouth referrals occur, you may want to keep a good track of it.

Knowing who referred whom would give you a better context of the background behind a said lead. For example, a client may refer you to their sister concern or a different branch in their organization. Knowing details of the one who made the referral will help you make good offers and take informed decisions in a manner that will make both the referrer and the referred happy. Therefore keeping a track of referrals will therefore go a long way in helping you with customer retention, which is, after all, one of the most important aspects of maximizing revenue.

In Zoho CRM, you can establish referral association using what we call a lookup field, whose principal function is to establish a link between two separate modules. Let's look at how to create a lookup field.

For example, here, while you add a lead, you see a lookup field called "Referred by", from which you can pick the customer that referred your business to this lead.


To add a lookup field,
1. Go to Set Up > Customization > Modules and Fields > Choose the module you want to add the lookup field, in this case Leads.
2. Click on the layout of the module chosen. You will land on the Layout editor, click and drag the lookup field from the 'New Fields' section.
                                                         
3. Now, enter the required Field Properties.
Field Label : The title of the field is displayed using this.
Lookup Module : You can choose the module to which you want to add a reference from this menu.
Related List Title : This is the option's title, which will appear in the related list on the detail page's left side.
                                  
4. Click Done, and save the layout.

Execution :
The look up field that we added in the layout will be displayed over the modules (Here, leads module) page.

The corresponding lookup reference is also found on the detail page of the module (Contact detail page).


Creating leads from contact :
The leads that a specific contact has referred to can be found on the contact module detail page. This occurred as a result of the contact module being added as a lookup module for the leads module. We can create leads from the contact's detail page. To generate a lead from a contact, follow these steps:
  1. Go to Contacts module > Select the contact who has referred a lead
  2. Click on the reference link in the Related list on the left tab (Referred leads). The reference tab displays all previously referred leads, or it is blank if none have been linked.
  3. There are three options in the reference tab:
  1. Assign - Here we can refer to already existing lead.
  2. New - You can immediately add new leads here: If a lead is generated from this page, the lookup field is assigned to the contact from which the lead was generated.
  3. Edit - This edits the rows that are needed to be displayed.