(Updated on July 2021)
[To enhance the user experience of Customers, Salesforce is a one-stop solution. The software plays a prominent role in managing leads. This includes capturing them, scoring them, assigning them to appropriate personnel, converting them, and nurturing them. Finally, Salesforce also tracks those leads once matured.]
The measure of success of a business largely depends on its customers. Good customer experience leads to the formation of a lasting bond between the company and the client, ensuring customer retention and a wide customer base. In order to do so, companies must efficiently identify possible leads and ensure their smooth progression through the pipeline. This calls for an effective means of identifying, handling, and nurturing leads.
Salesforce provides its users with an effective means of managing leads and monitoring their progress throughout the pipeline, complete with a dedicated leads module. With the advent of the Sales cloud, lead management has been made easier than ever, and businesses can measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategy on the sales pipeline.
So what exactly does the Salesforce lead management process entail? And how does Salesforce help its users set up an effective lead management system? Let’s find out!
Lead Management Process
Any new or prospective client is treated by a business as a lead. Salesforce Lead Management allows businesses to update their lead records in great detail, with important fields such as lead owner, lead status, and lead source, which help users keep track of their status.
A lead owner is an employee in charge of handling the lead. The lead owner could be manually assigned by a manager, or via a method of assigning queued leads to certain sales reps. The lead status depicts the tracking stages through which the progress of the lead could be determined and future plans could be made on how to proceed with the lead. The status could range from new, working, nurturing, unqualified to qualified. Adding to this, the lead source depicts the origin of a lead, so that employees can keep track of the source for future possibilities.
The Salesforce lead management process aims to convert new leads into qualified ones, and then finally convert them from prospective to actual clients. A well-organized lead management process allows businesses to efficiently convert leads, boost sales, and increase revenue. Should the clients experience a seamless and well-organized business transaction, they are also increasingly likely to return with future leads. Therefore it is crucial for businesses to create a thorough and systematic lead management process.
Capture Leads
The aim of the organization should be to capture as many leads as possible. Greater the number of leads, the greater chances there are of achieving a closed deal. Users can capture leads with the Salesforce web-to-lead feature which automatically captures visitor information from their visit to the website. Other apps on the AppExchange can also help achieve the same goal. Leads from email applications like Gmail and Outlook can be imported via the Salesforce Data Import Wizard, which helps save employees’ time and labor that would otherwise be spent in manual import. That being said, manual import itself is a popular way to capture leads too.
Score Leads
Lead scoring determines if a lead is worth passing on from the marketing department of a business enterprise to the sales team. Lead scoring in Salesforce can be done by giving each inbound lead an automatic score that may depict how interested the lead is in availing the services of the business. Users can set up the scoring mechanism by assigning varying degrees of importance to customer actions, such as viewing the pricing page or requesting a demo. Once the leads are scored, users can pay immediate attention to high scoring leads and assign the most experienced employee to handle it.
Assigning Leads to Appropriate Personnel
Distribution of leads depends on the method that an organization finds to be most efficient. Should users wish to implement a first-come-first-serve method, having lead queues can benefit the process of assigning leads since the queues can be classified according to the nature of the lead or the location of the personnel. Apart from that, an automatic lead distribution process can also be set up where administrators can create rules of assignment of leads to certain sales reps or specific queues, depending on the nature of the lead. This is especially useful when a company is dealing with a very large number of inbound leads.
Lead Conversion
The most crucial aspect in the Lead Management process is the conversion of said leads to an opportunity. Businesses need to decide which leads are likely to avail their services and which ones are likely to decline an offer, so as to deal with only the relevant leads and prevent time and labor of the employees from being wasted. It is good practice to keep only the freshest leads in the queue and eliminate any leads beyond a certain length of time. This time period could vary from company to company depending on their specific requirements.
Nurturing Leads
Nurturing is essential for leads that are not fully committed to availing the services of a business. In this case, these leads need to be communicated with on a personal level, with an exchange of helpful and meaningful resources such as product guidelines, industry research, and tips that help the leads in their day-to-day issues and therefore solidify their relationship with the organization in question. The trust that is established between the lead and the employees is essential to converting the leads into opportunities. To assist its users with the lead nurturing process, Salesforce Pardot offers drip campaigns that allow users to engage with the leads via specifically tailored means, to suit their needs.
Tracking Mature Leads
Once leads are nurtured and incorporated as opportunities, it is imperative to determine which methods have been the most effective in lead management. This can be done by monitoring marketing campaigns. Some ways to track the success of lead management in Salesforce are lead history reports, which depict connections between lead criteria and the resulting opportunity amounts, or through dashboards which employ several different metrics to track the results of the lead generation.
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The Bottom Line!
With effective lead management in Salesforce, users can aim to convert a maximum number of leads to opportunities, thereby driving revenue as well as expanding the customer base. Useful features present in the Salesforce platform help make the process easier. Users can further transform the lead management process by incorporating third-party applications that help capture and keep track of leads. Rolustech’s team of certified experts is available to help you with the Salesforce Integration of your choice and transform your Salesforce experience!
Rolustech is a Certified Salesforce Partner and Consultant. We have helped numerous firms with Salesforce customization and integration. Get in touch for a FREE Business Analysis and hop on to Salesforce.
