Lead allows you to enter and store information about potential customers. Information about the lead company, contacts and addresses can be stored. You can also assign representatives for the lead and create activities. The duplicate check can be used to detect if a newly entered lead is a duplicate of another lead or account in your database. If you find your lead to be a duplicate then you can merge information to correct lead or account. Merge of a lead record will delete the corresponding lead information from database.
Incoming leads should be qualified and nurtured so that they can be converted into new opportunities. The Lead qualification process is a set of actions the team makes in order to nurture the lead. It is a configurable process which will guide the marketing team and the sales representatives through the stages of the lead nurturing. When a new lead has been qualified, it can be converted into a prospect or customer. At the same time a new opportunity and, optionally, an activity is created for the new account. There is a setting in CRM/SRM Default Values page to control if a lead should be deleted when it is converted to an account.
If you want to qualify an enquiry or a new potential deal for a known prospect or customer, you can register a lead against the existing account and contact. When the deal has been qualified, it can be converted into a new opportunity.