Respectfully, what Gartner (or anybody else) has to say about what a “Prospect” means basically nothing in an ERPNext context.
A better analog for the Prospect DocType is what most other CRMs would call an “Account,” wherein the record is used to keep track of a customer or potential customer, but doesn’t represent a single person.
One of the unfortunate failings of Frappe/ERPNext is that you can’t rename DocTypes, at least not without a lot of headaches. They really should have implemented some method to set an “alias” for DocTypes so people could change the nomenclature…
You don’t necessarily need to think of a Prospect in ERPNext as a stage in the sales process, or consider whether they’re qualified or not. You certainly can create a Prospect before you create an Opportunity, or create the Prospect immediately after creating the Lead(s).
One scenario where you might want to do this is when you have multiple Leads in the same company. You might have one Lead that represents the CFO, one that represents the office manager, and one that represents one of the purchasing clerks. In situations like that, it might be fruitful to create a Prospect and link all of those Leads to that one Prospect, then work from the Prospect record, especially if you are calling on multiple Leads in pursuit of the same sale.
The only reason I mentioned Gartner, is that I was compelled to do extensive research as to what a Prospect means since the Frappe documentation does not mention the concept at all. Nowhere is there any elucidation as to what a Prospect is.
I’ve uncovered that Salesforce uses the Prospect term very differently to how I understood Frappe to use it and the closest resemblance to how it is used in Frappe came from Gartner.
You can actually create a Prospect without any predecessor or link to any of the other CRM sales stages such as Lead or Opportunity. It is completely independent and acts very much as a Contact. Of course it has to be linked to a Lead or Opportunity at some stage but nothing prevents you from creating it upfront.
I do not think of a Prospect as a distinct stage in the sales cycle, but rather at what stage in the sales cycle does it become meaningful / useful. Hence I concluded that in most “non complex” sales cycles it is not necessary and only becomes useful in a B2B scenario where the Lead has progressed to an Opportunity and maybe even a Quotation was submitted. However the sale is not concluded for reasons pertaining to the complexity of the organisation’s purchasing process, introducing other role players. Things such as Vendor approval / creation and signing a Contract may delay the sales pipeline from progressing to a Customer. A Prospect is then used to relate all of these. In most B2C scenaria this is irrelevant and a Prospect is unnecessary.
Sorry about that. I misunderstood what you were trying to convey.
You’re right that ERPNext team hasn’t been great at explaining and documenting to end-users or developers what exactly their philosophy was as it pertains to the different DocTypes.
More generally, with regards to Prospects/Leads/Accounts/Opportunities, etc. I tend to abandon any preconceived notions as to what these terms “mean” when I start working with another organization. For example, to some organizations, the term “Prospect” means a qualified Lead. To others, a “Prospect” means an unqualified or cold “lead.”
To make it more confusing some organizations even have other record types to represent a different stage in the process. For example, I used to implement SuiteCRM, which has the record of “Targets” which are basically completely unqualified “leads” (typically purchased from a list or something).
With respect to prospects, it’s ultimately up to the users how they wish to handle that. I have one realtor client that works exclusively with residential buyers/sellers, which would represent a B2C scenario. Her team uses Prospects in ERPNext to encapsulate all of the client stakeholders into one record - the husband, the wife, the overbearing mother-in-law, etc.
I do B2B, so I use it basically the same way you do, with the exception that if I have multiple Leads for the same organization, I create a Prospect, even if I haven’t even called on any of the Leads yet.
When I first started working with ERPNext, the CRM module was quite frustrating. However, after using it for a while, I quickly started to prefer the way the data is structured compared to other CRMs.