In the latest release, “Actions” have been replaced with “Tasks.” Tasks are steps, activities, or other “to-do’s” that need to be completed to move the lead through the sales process.

Scheduled Tasks for each day appear on your dashboard as you log into Open Leads, and your entire list of tasks can be viewed from your Lead List. Each account now has two new Views included, one called “Active Tasks” and one called “Completed Tasks.” Clicking between these will show you your upcoming Tasks, whether scheduled or open-ended, and your completed tasks. You may modify these as you wish, or use them as guide to create other views for Active Tasks for a particular user, or period of time, etc., simply by recreating the filters used in these views, and then adding additional filters to display the data you want to see.

We have just added some additional AJAX updates to Open Leads, which have streamlined additional edits for the application.

Among these are the “Add Field” and “Add Type” functions. Now, instead of being taken to an additional page to create a new Field or Type, it is done on the same screen. Not only does this make the process of adding a Field or Type easier, it reduces the number of clicks and time that it takes.

Additional updates to the user interface are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Using forms has always been the easiest and most productive way to manually add a new lead to your Open Leads account. By entering a lead using a form, you are able to use only the pertinent fields for new lead entry, and are also able to trigger a Workflow upon entry. Workflows adds one or more Types to the leads, can assign a User and Actions, as well as trigger an Autoresponder Email.

But until now this required creating a form and then opening it in a new window in your browser or using the preview function. While effective, it was not the most efficient way of doing this. The latest update to Open Leads adds the function to add a lead from a form directly in the application. To use this function, first click on “Add Lead” from your lead list. When the dialogue opens, you have the option of adding manually (the same as before) or adding from a form. Choose the latter and then select the form you wish to use from the dropdown. At that point all of the fields from the form you chose will be displayed and you can add data and tab through the fields as needed. Once done and you click “Save,” your lead is entered, and any Workflows associated with it are triggered.

The key to this working well, of course, is to create a form (or series of forms) for your specific new lead needs, and any workflows you wish to be applied. Make sure that you reference them in the Apply Workflow section when you edit your form.