Best Practices For Effective Salesforce Lead Management

Effective Salesforce Lead Management? Do you need a quick and accurate way to collect and prioritize sales leads? Of course, you do, we all do. In the past, writing them on a whiteboard, or passing around a spreadsheet worked, but there was a lot of information missing. Salesforce lead management consolidates a ton of information not only on the leads themselves, but key steps in moving the individual lead to a completed sale.

A Salesforce Consultant knows how to work leads. That’s their job. And they can be your guide moving forward. And Salesforce Leads are special, more important than any other sourced leads since they follow Salesforce’s Lead Management Process. Let's take a look at the content of Salesforce Lead Records. A typical lead goes through the stages in the Salesforce hierarchy.

• Lead Capture
• Separate sales-ready leads from the rest
• Assign leads to sales reps
• Converting leads sales opportunities
• Maintain future buyers
• Evaluate progress
• Adjust accordingly

The Salesforce Lead Management system clearly delineates the boundaries of each lead to eliminating confusion and duplication of effort.

Salesforce Lead Records consist of fields of information about a person or business entity that expressed interest in your company. The most important fields are Lead Owner; Lead Status; and Lead Source.

• A lead Owner Is a particular person that works with the lead.
• The Lead Status indicates the lead stage and progression.

The default Salesforce tracking stages:

• New
• Working
• Nurturing
• Unqualified
• Qualified

The Lead Source indicates the source of the lead:

• The default Salesforce source list includes:
• Advertisements
• Customer events
• Employee referrals
• Purchased lists
• Trade shows
• Webinars
• Websites
• Others

7 Salesforce Lead Management Best Practices

As we've been saying all along, Salesforce and its Effective Salesforce Lead Management is a powerful tool that will increase the number of leads captured, and almost more importantly, manage them. But on its own, Salesforce doesn’t guarantee stellar lead management results. Those results come from clear-cut procedures that the team follows. The procedures are not complicated, in fact, they're very intuitive.

1. Increase Lead Capture

1. More leads mean more sales opportunities, which in turn means more deals successfully closed. The Salesforce Database and its operating system are the key.
2. Automatic lead capturing. Salesforce has built-in functionality for auto lead capture, or the Salesforce AppExchange apps can be part of the system. Salesforce “Web-to-Lead” automatically captures visitor information from the website. Using Toucan, Salesforce can help you promote products through Twitter campaigns.
3. Lead importing. The Salesforce Data Import Wizard can ensure the mass import of leads from Excel, or email apps, like Outlook or Gmail.
4. Manual lead input can be used as well but requires more input time.

2. Eliminate duplicate leads

1. Data cleansing helps reduce the possibility that your list of contacts contains. Duplicate leads. This can happen in Salesforce for a variety of reasons:
   1. One lead responding to multiple marketing campaigns.
   2. The same lead had multiple queries on your website.
   3. A lead personally contacted may have also touched on your website.
   4. A 3rd party list may contain contacts you have already reached out to.

3. Follow lead qualification protocol

1. A new lead doesn't automatically demonstrate an interest in your service or product. It may be a soft potential customer that is light years away from a deal. This is where lead qualification comes in, and that is made with a process.
2. Convert leads showing even a casual interest.
3. Convert leads when you book a sales meeting
4. Convert leads after they have passed the Salesforce lead score threshold.
5. Convert leads only after a price has been quoted.

4. Prioritize and distribute leads

1. This prioritizing can follow any number of rules. You can group sales reps by geographic areas of responsibility. You can distribute evenly among teams. Teams can be determined by evenly distributing experience among the teams.

5. Keep leads moving toward conversion

1. The end game for any sales rep is to convert a lead into an opportunity for sale or disqualify if they are currently interested in your offer. Salesforce lead management assigns a follow-up task so that leads don’t languish for an extended period. The sales queue should contain fresh leads. What determines a fresh lead should be dependent on your experience and strategy.

6. Cultivate leads

1. If a lead is not ready to close, keep them close to you. Gently supply them with information, and stay in touch with emails and calls. Don't be overbearing or pushy, no one likes that approach, and the one thing you don't want is your eagerness to turn them off.
2. Salesforce's Pardot's drip campaigns allow managing multiple cultivation tasks.

    

7. Track lead management

1. The only way to know for sure if your lead management system is effective is to measure its success. That can be done with tracking. Salesforce has the tools to quickly and easily get a clear picture of how you're doing.
2. Dashboards to track results of lead generation using any of a number of metrics.
3. Lead history reports allow tracking using different lead criteria.

Take Advantage Of The Salesforce Strategy.

The key to being effective in any endeavor is making a plan, sticking with the plan, adjusting the plan to fit reality, and following through. Especially in sales, this method will garner superior results. Right out of the box, Salesforce has plans that will fit your objective and mold strategy to achieve it.

But by itself, Salesforce lacks one important component: a guide, an interpreter that because of their experience, can help you navigate the finer points of mastering this impressive sales tool. You have many guides to choose from, so why not start talking to them? Rely Services, a leading BPO with deep experience with Salesforce, and certified Salesforce Consultants would be a good place to start.