Overview
Welcome to Lead Management in Merchant Central! Our comprehensive suite of lead tools is designed to help your sales teams efficiently track, nurture, and close deals in one centralized workspace.
Whether you are capturing new prospects, automating communications, collecting payments, or analyzing team performance, Merchant Central provides everything you need to optimize your sales pipeline.
Use this guide to explore our lead management features, understand how they can streamline your daily operations, and easily navigate to detailed setup and usage instructions.
Capturing & Importing Leads
The first step in any sales pipeline is getting your prospects into the system. Merchant Central offers flexible ways to capture and import lead data.
- Creating Leads: Add new prospects manually or via quick-add features, ensuring your sales reps can get new opportunities into the pipeline immediately to prevent lost prospects.
- Importing Leads: Bulk upload lead data using CSV files. This saves hours of manual data entry when migrating from another system or loading purchased prospect lists.
Automated Lead Capture via Web Forms
Automate your lead capture by bringing prospects directly from your website into your CRM.
- Web Forms Overview: Create customizable forms to embed on your website that automatically create or update leads in Merchant Central. This feature suite includes various configuration options to help you build a seamless, automated pipeline from your website directly to your sales floor.
Customization & Organization
Every business is unique. Tailor your lead records and organize your prospects to match your specific sales process.
- Lead Page Configuration: Customize the layout and tabs on the lead record. This keeps your workspace clutter-free by only showing the data most relevant to your users.
- Lead Status States: Define and map out the exact stages a prospect moves through before becoming a client, giving you an instant, high-level view of where every prospect sits in your sales funnel.
- Campaigns & Lead Sources: Track where your leads are coming from by configuring Campaigns and Lead Sources. Tracking this data empowers you to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts by showing exactly which channels generate the most valuable business.
Custom Properties & Workflow Automation
Capture the bespoke details vital to your business with highly customizable data fields.
- Custom Properties Overview: Build, manage, and arrange custom fields to track industry-specific data on your lead records. Because your data needs are unique, this expansive toolset allows you to define exactly what information your team needs to collect, track, and report on.
Daily Navigation & Management
Tools designed to help your sales representatives manage their day-to-day workload effectively.
- My Leads Navigation: Access a personalized dashboard where users can filter, view, and organize their assigned prospects. This helps reps prioritize their daily workflow and focus on the most pressing opportunities.
- Appointment Board: Use a visual calendar to schedule, manage, and track sales meetings and calls so that you can prevent double-booking and ensure reps never miss a crucial follow-up.
- Mass Lead Actions: Perform actions—like reassigning ownership or updating statuses—on multiple leads simultaneously, eliminating tedious, repetitive clicks when managing large portfolios.
Productivity & CRM Tools
Equip your team with powerful built-in utilities designed to speed up daily workflows and enhance data entry.
- The Dialer: Make and receive calls directly within the CRM, automatically logging call history and recordings to keep all communication centralized and save your reps from manually dialing numbers.
- Global Search Field: Instantly find specific leads, merchants, and contacts from anywhere in the platform, eliminating the need to click through multiple menus when you need information fast.
- Merchant Central Calendar: Keep track of all your upcoming appointments, tasks, and follow-ups in one unified daily, weekly, or monthly view so nothing slips through the cracks.
- Speech Recognition: Dictate your lead notes, emails, and updates using your voice instead of typing, allowing for faster data entry and much more detailed record-keeping.
Communication & Engagement
Engage with your prospects and keep internal records updated without ever leaving Merchant Central.
- Email & SMS Messaging: Communicate directly from the CRM using Gmail/Outlook Integration, Direct Email Sending, and Mass Email/SMS Outreach. Centralizing all prospect communication saves time and ensures every conversation is securely logged right on the lead record.
- Lead Notes: Log internal updates, call summaries, and tasks directly to the lead timeline to promote team collaboration and preserve historical context if an account changes hands.
- Lead Files: Upload and store important documents, proposals, and identity files on the lead record, creating a single source of truth so sales and underwriting teams don't have to hunt for documents across local drives.
Agreements & E-Signature
Provide a frictionless, modern closing experience for your future merchants.
- Agreements & E-Signature Overview: Generate PDFs and send legally binding contracts to prospects for digital signature. This comprehensive set of features accelerates the closing process by allowing you to build templates, map data fields, and track document statuses all in one place.
Billing & Financials
Seamlessly transition from selling to collecting revenue.
- Lead Invoices: Generate and send professional invoices directly to prospects, streamlining your billing workflow so you can request payment as soon as a deal is struck.
- Lead Payments: Securely process credit card or ACH payments directly from the lead record, allowing for instant revenue collection without needing to toggle into a separate payment gateway.
Analytics, Sharing & Audit
Monitor performance, review historical changes, and collaborate across networks.
- Reporting & Metrics: Gain actionable insights with Advanced Reports, track team conversion rates via Sales Metrics, and monitor outreach success with SMS Metrics. These tools replace guesswork with hard data, helping managers identify top performers and optimize the overall sales strategy.
- Viewing Lead History: Access a complete, unalterable audit log of every change made to a lead, ensuring full transparency, accountability, and security over your most valuable data.
- Lead Data Sharing: Safely push and sync lead records with other connected Merchant Central sites, a feature highly valuable for multi-tiered organizations, franchises, or partnerships that need to collaborate on shared prospects in real-time.