Salesforce.com Lead management should facilitate an easy process for your sales team to collaborate and close a sale. Your roadmap process should have decision points for your Salesforce.com system to follow as new leads are engaged with your sales process. Here are three key lead management tips shared from our own Salesforce.com consulting:
Tip 1: Auto-Assignment Rules
Your sales team should be divided based on a sensible alignment for driving the most revenue opportunity. Geography, industry, seniority, or any other criteria which helps to identify teams or individuals for matching to a new inbound lead should be captured in a clear mapping.
Once the team has been divided, decide whether a queue should be used in lieu of individual assignments. We like to set the auto-assignment rules based on the criteria to a queue that is logically distributing to your respective team members.
The priority of the rules needs to be created with logic available in the Salesforce.com customization area. Be sure that if a custom field is used that your picklist values match precisely to the criteria for assignments.
Notifications for your respective team members based on new lead generation forms as well as task assignment for follow-up can be set up for quick response based on your sales process.
Tip 2: Nurture With Marketing Automation
Upon getting a new inbound marketing lead with a sales form, it usually is not best to immediately call. Your sales lead may be seeking to learn more. Integrating a marketing automation system with your Salesforce.com system helps to position your brand and build trust before the sales process starts. It is what is known as the buying process. The buyer’s interaction with pre-designed marketing content relevant to their inquiry and problem can be tracked within your Lead and Contact records.
This information helps you see Salesforce.com Activity records that are digital. These become just as valuable, if not more, than the high touch calls your salesperson may enter into the Salesforce.com system. The integrated marketing and sales data equip your sales team to engage when the timing is right and your Lead is truly an Opportunity.
Tip 3: Definitive Lead Conversion
There will be few sales compared to Leads. Your leads are extremely valuable, however. They must be handled differently than those that are ready to engage in your sales process. They are still buying. To help them buy, keep those that are Leads as a Lead record in Salesforce.com. As a sales team, be concrete about when to Convert a Lead to an Opportunity.
In our Salesforce.com consulting, we identify a Lead conversion as the point when the sales process is engaged. Before this, your Lead is being marketed to either by a salesperson or your marketing team. All activities and data related to the Lead is recorded in your Salesforce.com system.
Once the Lead converts, your sales team moves the Opportunity record through the various sales stages. This should also be part of the roadmap requirements to ensure common meaning for sales stages.
Clear Rules And Leadership
Salesforce.com success relies on leadership. With great leadership, your system reflects the rules of your engagement with the customer and helps your team execute with clarity. Be sure that the rules are debated and clarified early on. Don’t be afraid to launch without perfect clarity. In the course of working with Salesforce.com, your lead management will continually refine, and the system can be modified accordingly. This will come from your weekly team meetings to review the Lead management processes.
How is your lead management process working today? What could work better? Feel free to comment below.
Hi
My lead assignment is working fine! However, I am not able to find out how I can prevent auto assigning of leads to those users who are not present in office.
In other words, if sales user is absent I do not want auto assignment rule keep on assigning leads to the absent user. Any thoughts ?
Might consider assigning users to groups. It’s not that agile or flexible, but you could create a script to exclude the auto-assignment based on groups. I have not seen a built-in exclusion filter based on absentee users. There would have to be a bypass based on some kind of script in Salesforce.com