Hello Tim; I don't claim to understand your business from the inside but here is my take as to how I see it working in Outlook;
1. Lead-generators get basic information on prospects and email this to financial advisors. You could create a form but this would be more trouble than its worth. (i.e., I attended a free lecture by a seasonal investment expert, Brooke Thakery. The only catch is I had to provide my name, phoine number and email to the wealth management firm sponsoring the event.
Maybe a sales manager is Cc'd in who can audit to make sure the sales process is being followed.
2. Investment advisor converts this lead into a Outlook task to make sales calls and follow up. I keep a separate Outlook task directory for sales prospecting. While there are IT systems that specialize it this, it is a very simple process. Decades ago, I used recipe cards in a recipe box asa 1-31 Jan-Dec tickler to do this. To continue my example, a financial advisor called me who was very knowledgeable on seasonal investing. We decided to meet.
As a prospect soldifies and more information becomes known about him/her, an Outlook contact can be created and such info. can be stored in the free-form text field. (This field holds RichText, HTML so I paste a mini-form here based on the Mackay-66 system.) I store these contacts in a separate directory called "Prospects".
3. The outcome of a sales call is either another task - a follow up call or email or an appointment, which goes in the Outlook calendar. A meeting room can be assigned to be a resource in Outlook, so it's a great system to do room bookings. I met with this advisor and the eventual outcome was he manages 90% of my investable assets.
4. From there the Outlook contact is dragged-and-dropped from my "Prospects" directory to "Clients". You are going to want to call every client at least four times a year to talk about their investment portfolio's performance. Thus, you want to set up re-occurring Outlook tasks to do this.