Lead is any person or business interested in your product or service. Once a lead is generated, you can capture its data in your Salesforce CRM.
Stages of Lead life cycle in a business
Generation
The first stage is lead generation. A business can generate leads in many ways. Those ways can be recorded in Salesforce as campaigns. Multiple leads can be generated from one campaign. Also, one lead can be a part of multiple campaigns.

A sales executive can tag a lead with a campaign in two ways.

From the lead page
Select the lead by checking on the box near the lead name and click add to the campaign.

From the campaign page
On the campaign page, go to related lists. Click on campaign members. Then Click on Add leads button. All leads from a particular campaign appear as campaign members.

Conversation
The next stage is conversation with the lead. The sales executive contacts the lead for information exchange and tries to convert the lead. The sales executive can capture the conversation with the lead using the activity tab.

But, there is also an internal conversation between various sales executives. Salesforce allows this internal conversation with its chatter feature. Using the chatter feature, a sales executive can converse with other executives or managers within his company. The chatter feature consists of Post, Poll and Question.

A sales executive can use any of these features and tag another member of the organization. The tagged person receives notification and can reply to the chatter thread.

Note- Chatter allows you to tag only the internal members of the organization who have login access to the Salesforce CRM.
Conversion
Conversion is the last stage of the lead life cycle. If the lead is not converted, it is closed and marked not converted.

If the lead is converted to a customer, in salesforce the lead object is converted to account, contact and opportunity objects. Once a lead is converted, the lead life cycle completes, and an account, contact and opportunity lifecycle starts.

The lead information is then hidden in a lead object because the lead is no more a lead. He is a customer. The entire lead information gets divided into three parts- account, contact and opportunity.

Hope this article/video gave you an overview of the lead life cycle and lead conversion. In the next article/video, we will discuss account, contact and opportunity objects in salesforce.

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