Lead management is one of the most valuable Salesforce skills that a team can learn. Good lead organization and tailored communications can promote greater alignment between sales and marketing teams, helping close deals and foster strong customer relationships. Improving your lead management skills can boost your conversion rates and enhance satisfaction scores. The following best practices can help your organization revitalize your lead management processes and reap the benefits.
Standardize Your Lead Management Process
If you have multiple team members on your sales team, they may have different approaches to the Salesforce platform. They may have different definitions of what qualifies as a lead, enter different information for different customers, and have different processes for handling leads. To ensure that your lead management process is streamlined, it is important to develop and implement standardized rules that all employees should follow.
First, identify whether your organization has a singular lead process or needs different leads for different sectors of the business. Identify the steps involved in each lead generation process from start to finish and strategize ways that your team can encourage conversion during each stage. Using this information, you can develop a stronger pipeline.
Implement Automation Into Your Pipelines
Manually handling lead generation process can be a challenge, especially if you have multiple channels involved and lots of customers. You can save significant time, labor, and costs by automating certain high-performing processes. For example, you can implement plugins that connect to your most popular channels, such as social media or blog sites, that collect engagement data and automatically create leads on your organization’s behalf.
You can also take advantage of Salesforce capabilities such as auto-response emails, assignment rules, and web-to-lead forms to streamline the lead management process. As a result, your team can avoid manual, repetitive data entry work and focus its time on developing innovative sales processes.
Check for Duplicates
Messy lead records can lead to serious headaches for organizations. You may have duplicate leads for several reasons; perhaps the lead has responded separately to multiple campaigns, or that user has conducted multiple activities on your website.
Regardless of the reason for the duplicate, it is important to check for a user’s data before entering a new lead. Salesforce has access to data cleaning tools that you can use to screen for duplicate lead profiles. Additionally, you can implement rules that help limit conversions for leads that have partial or incomplete profiles.
Track Your Lead Effectiveness
To ensure that your lead management processes are effective and that your organization is driving success and growth, it is important to have monitoring tools in place. Using Salesforce, you can track your lead management efforts and identify the most and least effective campaigns you are running. For example, you can use lead history reports to identify trends between various factors, such as lead sources and top industries. You can also use dashboards to track different campaigns with various metrics, such as the number of conversions versus the number of leads generated.
Contact HigherEchelon for Salesforce Lead Management Support
If your organization is just getting started on Salesforce, organizing leads and fostering conversions can be a complex and overwhelming process. In these situations, you need partner on your side – and the team at HigherEchelon can help. Our Salesforce implementation services can help you set up your Salesforce platform and execute customized solutions quickly. Contact us today to learn more about our services and discuss your Salesforce goals.