Leads
Overview
Leads represent potential sales opportunities or prospects that have shown interest in your products or services but have not yet been qualified as business opportunities.
How Are Leads Used?
The true starting point for new business and commonly referred to as the lifeblood of business.
They allow users to create records based on introductions at trade shows, events, seminars, content downloads etc. and determine which people are actually interested buyers.
From a management perspective, starting off as a lead reduces duplicate accounts and opportunities, as well as invalid accounts and opportunities.
What is the Benefit?
This is the place where you track the activity that takes someone from a stranger to a customer. There are a variety of tools like (Account Engagement/Pardot, Sales Enablement, etc) which can accelerate this activity.
In Salesforce, there are conversion tools to help users identify existing Account, Contact and Opportunity records. This reduces the possibility of duplicate data. As noted before it’s true purpose is to serve as a “first stop” for prospects to determine feasibility of business.
They can also be scored to ensure that your precious time is being spent with the most viable and interested prospects.
What is Lead Conversion?
Conversion Process
Salesforce provides Out of the box (OOTB) a process to convert lead records into Accounts, Person Accounts, Contacts and/or Opportunities (new or existing records across the board).
For each object listed above you have the option at conversion time to either select an existing record or allow salesforce to create a new record. The UI is fairly robust and allows you to see minimal details about potential matches during the conversion process, ensuring that you are selecting the correct existing record(s) if that is the path the user chooses.
Matching Rules (which are also defined in Salesforce setup) aid in the lead conversion process helping define which potential matches show up during the conversion process. When converting a lead to a NEW record, lead mappings (standard and custom) will execute, pre-filling information on the new records.
For existing records, the information is not overridden, but if fields are blank they will be populated. Any automation on the lead/target object(s) will fire once conversion completes. Once a lead is converted, unless permissions are added, are not visible to users through the front end UI. They will still show up in reports and dashboards.
Conversion Mapping Process
All standard fields that exist on Lead are (by default) mapped to their counterparts on the records selected/created during the conversion process. As noted above, if fields are already populated on the existing records chosen, the fields will not be overridden.
Standard lead fields can only map to Standard Fields on corresponding Account/Person Account/Contact/Opportunity records.
Conversely, you can not map custom fields on lead to standard fields on the selected objects during conversion. Custom mappings can be created and viewed from Setup in the Lead Object field list.
Multiple tabs are present for each of the objects you have the ability to map to and are dropdowns in nature.
Who is Impacted?
Marketing
Marketing teams use this object to start a prospects relationship with your company. Marketing teams can analyze behavior, tune messaging and sourcing strategies, and set scoring strategies.
Segmentation and automatic nurturing over time are typically handled by the marketing team.
Sales
Sales teams use them as the foundation of their outreach efforts. Leads tell Sales who is interested in their company, which allows them to focus on the most promising opportunities.
Sales can personalize communication, follow- up based on automation, and answer questions at the right time to move leads forward in the sales funnel. A converted lead ends as an opportunity.
Developers/Admins
Developers and Admins together can work with leads to drive business process automation, customization to fit each companies needs and tailor the process to ensure successful conversion of leads into Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities.