What Is Lead Management? How Does the CRM Platform Help?
Introduction
As a top CRM platform, Salesforce has all the tools for effective lead management. It allows sales reps to easily generate, track, capture, organize, and nurture potential customers until they are converted.
Often, sales reps are involved in redundant tasks that could be fully automated, like connecting the dots and manually tracking leads. By making the most of Salesforce capabilities, you can streamline and speed up the process of closing deals, reducing delays and bottlenecks.
In addition, Salesforce provides powerful analytics that helps sales teams improve their strategies by following their success rates and making informed decisions based on accurate data. Using best practices and tactics will allow your business to increase sales, multiply revenue, and drive business growth.
How to use Salesforce to power up your sales funnel?
First, make sure you are using the latest Lightning Experience version of Salesforce. It dramatically improves the user experience and productivity.
According to a study by Salesforce
- Users gained a 41% increase in productivity with the new Lightning Experience.
- Sales funnel guidance features improved conversion rates.
- Einstein Search enhances the search quicker, simpler, and more precise.
Salesforce lead profile page
The cornerstone of Salesforce lead management is the prospect’s profile. Leads in Salesforce are prospects that still need to be qualified. They’re top-of-funnel or cold leads. In the lead’s profile, you can save and monitor all the information about your prospects:
- Personal information and contact details as provided during lead capture.
- The sales path progress bar shows where a lead is in the sales pipeline (e.g., Open, Working – Contacted, Closed – Converted, and Closed – Not Converted).
- Campaign history shows the lead’s participation in marketing events.
- An activity log of interactions informs about emails, calls, or live meetings that were held with a potential customer.
- Any custom fields can be added to tailor the profile to your business needs.
Salesforce contacts and accounts
In Salesforce, a lead is transformed into a contract when a sales representative successfully qualifies it. A contact refers to someone who may be attached to accounts and opportunities.
Accounts are profiles that contain information about the businesses you engage with. For example, all leads and contacts connected to Meta will be linked to the Meta account in your Salesforce lead management setup.
Contact profiles provide the same capabilities as the lead profile, allowing you to store personal information and track lead management activities.
Salesforce opportunities
An opportunity represents a qualified lead with the potential to generate revenue, a chance for you to provide a product or service to a customer or business. Opportunities are deals in progress:
Opportunity management, an expansion of lead management, is a strategic process that involves monitoring, supporting, and controlling the sales process to effectively close deals and convert leads into loyal customers.
Let’s look at how the Salesforce lead management works:
1. Lead generation & capture
Let’s say you’re using SleekFlow, and a new prospect, XYZ has contacted your sales team via Instagram DMs. In this case, your team can communicate with the prospect directly in Salesforce via an omnichannel synchronized chat feature. Once a prospect’s details are captured, Salesforce automatically creates a lead profile for them, and your sales team can move on with lead qualification and routing.
Leads can also be imported from a spreadsheet by Salesforce integration with messaging and scheduling apps.
2. Lead qualification & routing
Your Sales person’s ultimate goal is to convert the lead into an opportunity or disqualify them as someone who is not interested in your product.
Lead management in Salesforce is powered by lead queues linked to lead assignment rules. The assignment rules determine how leads are sorted to a specific salesperson.
Using queues, your team can sort prospects based on various qualities, such as where they are in the sales conversion process, how hard they are to convert, or even organize leads by territory and business vertical.
If XYZ asks if you can customize your product to suit her requirements, this qualifies her as a hard-to-convert customer in the B2B sector, and her profile is placed in a queue for experienced sales reps.
Salesforce can help your sales team score leads based on your criteria. Once you’ve decided on the factors you’re going to score, you can set up Salesforce to keep track of the score for each factor and the total score.
In the example below, we grade XYZ by Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing, and then calculate the Total Score.
3. Tracking, monitoring, and nurturing leads
Salesforce provides advanced lead management tools that seamlessly track marketing and sales performance, offering instant visual reports. Your sales team can track prospects across various metrics, including:
- Number of emails sent
- Number of customer replies
- Email open rates
- Bounce rates
- Click-through rates.
Salesforce’s lead and opportunity dashboards provide a clear view of the vitality of your lead management process. You can customize reports and dashboards using Salesforce’s built-in features or integrate third-party solutions from AppExchange.
Managed by a senior salesperson and tracked across the funnel using powerful Salesforce capabilities, XYZ has successfully converted and become one of your brand’s featured customers.
Salesforce can be used to automate future interactions with customers, send personalized emails, schedule phone calls, and provide relevant content to XYZ, nurturing her into a loyal customer and your brand’s ambassador.
Conclusion:
While incorporating Salesforce lead management won’t grant you instant god-like status, it is a powerful tool that can significantly improve your sales process. Reach out to us for streamlined lead management to suit your specific needs.