How Can Salesforce Make Lead Management Easy for Your Business.

The key to the success of any organization is a sales pipeline that is robust and effective. While managing leads is quite a complex task, sales and marketing managers need to get the most out of incoming leads and existing ones, and this is only possible with an effective lead management solution.

Relying on traditional systems such as spreadsheets and various documents for managing leads is a thing of the past. If you’re still holding on to them, you need to introspect your processes and understand that this may be one of the reasons for stunted business growth.

As a company grows, so does the number of leads; using conventional lead management methods will result in lost business opportunities. That is why you need to invest in a lead management tool that addresses your business requirements at scale.

In this blog, we’ll learn about modern lead management, its advantages, what to expect from a basic lead management tool, how to develop your lead management tool and the best practices for Salesforce lead management in detail.

What Are Modern Lead Management Solutions?

Most of the lead management solutions today are in-built within Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. End-to-end management tools like these help marketers understand customer relationships better, right from the time leads enter the sales funnels till the leads turn into dollar-giving customers. Thus, the tools provide clear and useful information with high efficacy. An optimal lead management solution helps you navigate every customer’s history faster making it easier to interact with your clients as and when required.

Here’re the features of a robust lead management tool.

• The ability to collect, organize, sort and analyze data at scale.
• A unified dashboard for internal communications regarding lead activity
• A capability to provide seamless automation support for tasks such as lead tracking, lead distribution, alerts, reminders and so on.
• A facility to create a record of all interactions leads have with sales reps across various channels such as live chat, phone calls, emails, online demos, social media, webinars and so on.

With this information at hand, companies can save a huge number of work hours and empower the reps to focus on other critical tasks that require their attention.

The Advantages of Using a Good Lead Management System

A powerful lead management system will enable you to:

1. Facilitate better lead nurturing and boost your conversion rates
2. Cut down on unnecessary marketing expenditure
3. Speed up your sales cycle as the system signals you to re-engage with prospective customers at the right moment in their buyer’s journey.

7 Steps to Manage Leads with High Efficacy Using Salesforce

1. Capture More Leads

When you have more leads, you have more potential to close successful deals. Salesforce has various options to help you capture more leads.

• Automatic Lead Capturing: You can automatically capture leads through either Salesforce’s in-built functionality or use a Salesforce AppExchange application. Salesforce’s web-to-lead feature lets you capture leads from your website. You can also install Toucan, a Salesforce tool that helps you promote your products through Twitter campaigns and collect information about your followers.
• Lead Import: Import your leads enmasse from your emails, spreadsheets, Gmail and Outlook with the Lead Import feature from Salesforce Data Import Wizard.
• Manual Lead Input: Manual lead input, as the name suggests, enables you to manually enter lead information into Salesforce. It works well for individual leads.

2. Check for Duplicate Lead Records

Lead duplication in your Salesforce database happens due to one of the following reasons.

• The same person might have responded to several of your marketing campaigns.
• The same lead might have interacted with your website either for downloading a white paper, sending a request for a proposal or requesting for watching one of your on-demand webinars.
• You may have bought a list of leads from third-party vendors that contain contacts you already have.
• A lead may have met one of your sales reps at an industry conference and also responded to one of your email campaigns.

So, conducting a lead record cleanse can save you time and prevent confusion. Ensure that you don’t create a duplicate lead when you create a new one. In case you find a lead being redundant, you can merge it either with the Salesforce data cleansing tool or use a data cleansing tool from AppExchange. Also, you can set validation rules limiting the conversion of leads that have incomplete data.

3. Follow Lead Qualification Requirements

You want to find out if the lead you’ve captured will convert and earn you revenue or not. To identify leads that convert, you need to check if they meet all your lead qualification criteria and determine at which point they will convert to prepare an appropriate sales pipeline. Some conversion options are:

• You can convert leads once they show some kind of inclination to your company.
• Convert leads only after the sales rep quotes a price.
• Work on converting leads after they decide on a date for a meeting and attend it.
• Convert leads once they qualify your lead score threshold, which depends on whether the data they’ve entered is complete.

Convert a potential lead into an opportunity when your sales reps can identify the deal size, business challenge, competitors, final decision-maker and the potential date of closure.

Bonus Point

Converting early lead opportunities may broaden your sales pipeline but may result in lower win rates and vice-versa. So, carefully decide on the number and quality of leads you would like to have in your sales pipeline accordingly.

4. Prioritize and Distribute Leads

There are two ways to work on your leads. Your sales team can work on leads through a first-come-first-serve approach or automate lead distribution and assign the lead to the right sales rep promptly.

5. Nudge Your Leads Toward Conversion

The end goal of every sales rep is to identify a potential lead that is bound to convert and disqualify the ones that won’t. Leverage Salesforce Lead Management to assign follow-up tasks. Ensure that you queue the latest leads for immediate follow-ups.

6. Nurture Your Leads

When leads are not quite ready to purchase your products or services, you need to nurture them, and this goes beyond just sending emails every month or following up with them every two weeks.

Sales reps can have meaningful and effective conversations by sending across tips, guides, industry research content and more to help leads resolve their everyday pain points that will position your organization as an industry expert and a trustworthy partner. Leverage Salesforce Pardot’s drip email campaigns that enable your team to nurture different leads and personalize your approach to each of them.

7. Track Your Salesforce Lead Management Effectiveness

Monitoring your marketing campaigns and improving the ones that will benefit you and bring more revenue should be your top priority if you want to maintain the effectiveness of your Salesforce lead management. Some Salesforce tools that you can leverage to enhance your lead management effectiveness are:

• Lead History Reports – The lead history reports tool enables you to trace various criteria such as annual revenue, industry, lead source and opportunity amounts
• Dashboards –Dashboards let you track your lead generation results against various metrics such as number of leads, converted leads and pipeline count meticulously.

What You Need to Expect From a Basic Lead Management System

A robust lead management system should be capable of performing the following.

• Avoid any kind of lead leakages from the source or the entire sales pipeline
• Delegate leads to the right sales rep based on the criteria of the lead
• Deliver leads that are deemed to be fit as qualified leads to increase the sales potential
• Generate timely reports to enforce accountability at every step of the management process
• Nudge users about a missed designated task, for instance, calling the prospect, following up and so on
• Manage leads carefully from the time they enter the sales pipeline until the closure of the deal
• Cut down the response time from the brand and furnish the information that prospects require faster.
• Foster meaningful and effective conversations between sales reps and prospects by presenting the right content at the right time

I’d like to conclude saying growing companies need a powerful lead management tool that helps them scale without any hassles. And Salesforce is indeed a powerful tool that helps organizations do that. At Albertein, our rich experience helping several companies in diverse industries make the best use of Salesforce to manage leads effectively coupled with a strong focus on comprehending your unique marketing needs helps us provide the right solution to meet the needs.