The end goal of every establishment is to grow and expand while maintaining steady productivity and healthy business-customer relations.
Getting there is just a matter of converting leads into potential opportunities.
Salesforce offers all the tools you require to plan your business’s growth while ensuring a healthy lead conversion rate to retain happy consumers.
In this article, we tackle general queries about leads and lead conversion in Salesforce and what you, as a business, can take away from employing efficient lead conversion tactics.
Let’s begin!
What are leads in Salesforce?
Leads represent meaningful consumer interactions that have the potential to undergo the sales process and ultimately create a new sale for your company.
Systematic handling of leads ensures proper management and thus further generation and successful conversion.
Why should you use leads in Salesforce?
The concept behind using leads in any business is effective segregation of prospective opportunities and existing ones. When you know which leads to prioritize, you can give them ample attention, successfully converting them into sales.
As for the existing leads, you can employ long-term lead conversion tactics to ensure a healthy interaction and business-customer relationship.
In Salesforce, you can maintain lists of potential and existing opportunities as separate entities. When you are done qualifying a lead, the next step would be its conversion, either into an account, a contact, or an opportunity.
The significance of leads comes through in large organizations housing separate teams in charge of lead generation and sales. While the lead generation team focuses on converting potential leads, the sales team then picks up on the case and tries closing the deal as soon as possible.
The primary purpose of leads in Salesforce is to track potential leads, create reports, and curate marketing campaigns targeting their successful closure.
How do you obtain a lead?
A lead is anyone who cares enough to sign up for your product or service to avail of it at the end of the sales process.
Leads can come in passively through word-of-mouth publicity by loyal and existing customers, business conferences, your website, and more.
Once a lead gets obtained, it gets transferred to the Lead record for further consideration.
How do you add a lead?
Adding a lead is a straightforward procedure.
Just click on Lead > New, and fill in essential details like Name, Title, E-mail, etc., and ‘Save’.
Leads can either get added manually or automatically, through Lead Assignment processes, depending on which format better suits your business operations.
Understanding Lead Record
The section Lead Records is like a workspace where all your leads reside. So, you can gradually work on qualifying them and progressing the sales process.
You can track the marketing progress of your leads through campaign history and schedule future actions by detailing events and tasks.
You can check out the latest news regarding the industry to which your lead belongs. Also, connect to Twitter to keep track of trending lead facts.
You can review and update information on your lead as required.
If there are any queries or concerns regarding your lead to which you need solutions in real-time, connect with co-workers and discuss matters while keeping track of all activities.
No matter the status of your lead, you can always update, review, and save the status as needed.
How do you convert a lead?
When you work on a lead, there are three possibilities to go further: Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities.
All information available on your lead gets quantified by Salesforce to create an Account and Contact for the lead.
The steps to manually convert a lead are as follows:
- Open the Lead Record of the existing lead you want to convert and select ‘Convert’.
- Under the Account section, create a new account with the specific Company name. If there is an existing account for the lead, you can choose to go with that.
- Under the Contact section, do the same. Create a new contact or choose from an existing contact if needed.
- Under the Opportunity section, choose an appropriately descriptive name for the same to make it easier for team members to understand the context at a glance when viewing from multiple opportunities.
- Ensure that the label for Record Owner is correct after making the changes as well as the Converted Status.
Note: Once you convert a lead, Salesforce automatically assigns all activities of the pre-converted lead to the Account, Contact, and Opportunity sections of the newly converted lead.
Converted leads have a viewing restriction set on them that can get modified by the admin when given the ‘View and Edit Converted Leads’ permission. While the lead does not appear in searches, it does show up in lead records.
Additionally, none of the existing information gets overwritten in the process of adding new campaign members or updating existing records. Lead conversion for businesses varies depending on the settings you may or may not have enabled.
After all the updates get made, you can now begin working on the sales process.
Making the most for your business with Lead Conversion in Salesforces.
Although everything about Salesforce Lead Conversion is open knowledge in the industry, implementing the strategy takes more than just standard research.
Oftentimes, businesses end up creating more losses than profit for themselves when implementing a Lead Conversion strategy.
It is just as crucial to follow up on every lead sale as it is to convert a lead. Also, not all strategies are applicable in every situation.
Ensure there is as limited friction between the Sales and Marketing teams as possible to streamline lead conversion solutions.