Lead represents prospects that are interested in purchasing your product or someone who is interested in doing business with your organization. A campaign is one way to generate leads for your organization. Salesforce provides numerous ways to capture leads from different sources, for example, scan business cards and save the information in Salesforce as a lead, or through web-to-lead, and so on. You can easily access leads through any device, such as mobile, tablet, or workstation. If you want to increase inside sales productivity by assigning qualified leads to them, follow these best practices:
Follow these best practices to build a strong funnel of marketing qualified leads:
- Before you start managing a qualified lead, you have to define it. A qualified marketing lead is nothing but a person or an organization who has shown interest in buying your product or doing business with your organization and passed a set of lead qualifications criteria in order to progress further down the funnel. To better manage leads, you can use middleware systems such as Pardot or Eloqua. The following sample questions will help you to identify qualified leads:
- Does the person or company have enough money to afford your product or service?
- Can the person make a buying decision?
- Does the person or company have a specific timeframe to buy a product or service?
- Once you have qualified the lead, the next step is developing the sales process for your inside sales team to work on leads throughout the sales life cycle.
- The next step is to develop a plan to prioritize leads, then assign them to sales reps. It is crucial to assign the right lead at the right time to your sales team for better results.
- Nurturing is the key step to converting a cold call into a hot call. Remember that not all leads are ready to buy your product or service right away. For example, the prospect doesn't have money at the current time, but a future event will make it a lead after a few months. Lead nurturing is nothing but building a relationship and establishing a trust with the prospects over time through consistent messaging. It allows sales reps to send highly targeted messages to prospects, based on the information provided by them.
- Once the prospects are ready to buy a product or service, then pass it to the sales team and close the deal successfully.
Before creating a new lead, make sure that the user has appropriate permissions on their profile. Perform the following steps to create a new lead:
- Make sure that you have selected the Sales app.
- Click on the Lead tab and then click on the New button. Now create a new lead, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once you are ready to convert a lead, click on the Convert button. Lead conversion will create an account, contact, and optionally, an opportunity in Salesforce. Opportunities that are created by lead conversion default value for required field like opportunity Close Date is set to the last day of the current quarter and Stage will set to the first value of opportunity stage picklist. During lead conversion, the opportunity Amount field on opportunity remains blank. To convert a lead, click on the Convert button available on the lead detail page.