INTRODUCTION INTO LEADS
To talk about sales in Salesforce and how to approach dealing with them, I believe we first have to understand the Salesforce definition of lead. They’ve created this object to allow you to “Track prospects apart from your contacts and opportunities with Salesforce lead records. After you’ve qualified your lead records, convert them to contacts and create accounts for them (if you don’t already have the accounts in Salesforce). And hopefully, create opportunities to booster your pipeline.” It is pretty vague, and it is not for no reason. Salesforce understands that even though everyone knows what a lead is, each company has its definition.
At Primescale, we define Salesforce Leads as people who may still need a purchase history but may be interested in your products or services. Contact information kept on your Lead records allows your salespeople to have a base for their future Accounts and Opportunities.
There are numerous benefits to managing leads via Salesforce. First and foremost, it keeps sales and marketing efforts in sync by seamlessly connecting the most critical data from both sources. It also helps sales teams understand their prospects better and adjust their strategies accordingly. This way, they can prioritize their actions towards promising, high-quality leads. Salesforce is designed to keep complex, multi-layered sales work efficient, providing a competitive edge for companies that invest in this CRM instead of managing their leads without it.
BASIC DEFINITIONS
Lead qualification/classification -
Lead qualification is the process done by the sales associate to evaluate whether your company can meet these clients' needs and expectations. It is usually your first step in the process of elimination. If, at the early stages, it is clear to both sides that there is no possible business to be done, you can now discard the most unlikely leads. At some point, specific leads can be converted into Contacts for discussing your offer, while those who don’t qualify will be moved to the “not interested” bucket. Those can then be further classified based on the likeliness of doing business with you in the future.
Lead generation -
There are multiple ways in which you can generate your leads. The most common ways include:
- People you meet at conferences, exhibitions, etc.
- People who visit your website and fill in the contact form
- People who have signed up for the newsletter
- LinkedIn posts reactions and LinkedIn site visitors
- People who have clicked on your adds
And the list can go on and on. You must know your Lead generation channels to evaluate the price per lead ratio.
Lead Nurturing - Lead nurturing is the maintenance of relationships with buyers at every phase of our lead lifecycle by reinforcing the brand image and showing professionalism and partnership through the whole sales process. What makes or breaks a successful nurturing program is the personal approach and engagement. Your marketing and sales teams have to go hand in hand in all actions they’re taking.
Most important do’s and dont’s:
- Do not duplicate communication. Make sure salespeople are clear on the marketing messages that are going out.
- Keep your data clean, do not allow duplicate Leads, and make sure you have only the most necessary fields and that those fields are updated with relevant information.
- Help your teams by introducing guidance for success so they know how to treat a Lead based on its current status.
SALESFORCE SOLUTIONS
Building relationships with your leads through a strategic lead-scoring system is crucial. Simply looking at things, there are two approaches you could take. The one that does not require any actions and is more based on your knowledge of your clients is a scoring system built based on the information available on your Lead. Say that if you have the email address for the lead, you assign 5 points, and the phone number, which is much harder to get in general, could be 15 points. Filling in the product your Lead is interested in brings this score even higher, let's say, by 20 points. However, you can also assign minus points for information that is not your liking or that is missing. So, for example, your lead has not signed up for the newsletter, so we give it -5 points, and they also are currently buying the identical product from your competitor, which could mean it’s less likely they will buy a more expensive substitute from you, give it -5. We score this lead at 30 points out of a possible 40. Despite this being a little oversimplified, I hope you get the idea.
The second solution is Einstein Lead Scoring (*Available with Sales Cloud Einstein, available for an extra cost in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions).
Einstein Lead Scoring uses data science and machine learning to score for you. It analyzes the leads you’ve already had and how they were being converted or “lost.” It uses the fields available on your lead to give you the most accurate prediction, indicating the likelihood of the Lead becoming an Account/Contact/Opportunity. If you have some fields that you feel should not be included in the scoring, you can select them in setup and ask Einstein not to consider those for scoring.
You can read more about Einstein Lead Scoring HERE
No matter what you select, the Lead Score helps your sales associates determine what leads they should focus most of their time and efforts on; therefore, this should be the first step in bringing your value for time spent on lead up to an acceptable level.
LEAD ASSIGNMENTS
Now that we have our Leads classified and scored, we need to ensure we get the suitable leads to the right people. Someone could be better at handling cold leads. Someone could be an expert at closing the hot ones. Going further down into the rabbit hole, leads are coming from different industries, and you have your banking experts, automotive, financial, HR, industrial, you name it. When you try to wrap your head around it, and it starts to spin, or your sales reps take too much time understanding which should belong to them, assignment leads come in with help.
You can have multiple entries in your assignment rule. You must assign an order to them, telling the system how to prioritize entries that may have overlapping logic. “When a match is found, Salesforce assigns the item and stops evaluating the rule entries for that item. If no match is found, the item is reassigned to either the default Web-to-Lead owner” - more HERE
The next step is setting up criteria. You can add up to 25 filter criteria based on e.g., language, industry, score, or any other classification you have available on your Leads. To put it into simpler terms, your admin can use almost any field you have on your Lead object.
CONCLUSION
The end goal of a Lead is to be converted into Account/Contact and Opportunity. You can leverage Salesforce to increase efficiency in how sales reps handle their leads, resulting in a better conversion rate and time saved. Add all that, and your profits will surely follow. If you need professional consulting, an experienced partner who will guide you on how to clean up your Lead data and streamline the process for your sales associates, look no further, Primescale will do it best.
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