The primary purpose of Salesforce Sales Cloud is to organize fast and smart sales. To do this job, Sales Cloud offers users a simple lead management process that starts with lead generation and, in a perfect scenario, ends up with closed deals.
In this article, we will have a close look at the standard lead management process in Salesforce Sales Cloud. And in addition to looking at inbuilt tools and solutions, we will also describe some custom configurations and adjustments of Salesforce solutions at each step of lead management.
In our previous article about the lead management process in Sales Cloud, we discussed what leads are in Salesforce and how flows of inbound and outbound leads come to Sales Cloud; and also added an example from the healthcare domain: Salesforce customization in compliance with HIPAA requirements.
Lead management in Salesforce, example 1. Capturing leads in Salesforce Sales Cloud. API integration with WordPress
Standard tools for lead capturing are:
Web-to-Lead — a standard Salesforce feature that integrates your site with the Salesforce platform and generates new lead records.
Lead import — connection of the most popular business apps (e.d., Outlook) to import leads from there.
Manual lead input.
Cases that might need custom implementations:
Businesses need to capture leads via existing word press forms.
Possible solutions:
Custom integration via API. On the Salesforce side — create connected App + Apex classes for handling input requests. On the WordPress side — send requests to the appropriate Salesforce endpoint.
Use some integrators. For instance — Zapier, WPForms, Brilliant Web-to-Lead, etc.
Lead management in Salesforce, example 2. Deduplication & merging Leads in Salesforce Sales Cloud
The leads businesses are capturing must be unique. And for this purpose, it’s worth implementing deduplication rules for merging duplicate leads.
Standard tools:
Deduplication rules — define what happens when a user views a record with duplicates or starts creating a duplicate record. Salesforce provides standard duplicate rules for business and personal accounts, contacts, and leads. Organizations can also create their own duplicate rules.
Custom implementation:
Prevent duplication Leads in Apex. This needs to be done if an organization has some complex and specific logic for deduplication.
Lead management in Salesforce, example 3. Qualification Leads by scoring/ grading in Salesforce Sales Cloud
Now you have unique Leads in CRM. The next step is qualifying (scoring + grading) newly created Leads. For this purpose, you can use internal Salesforce tools or external tools.
Salesforce’s tools:
Einstein Lead Scoring — AI-based approach, which is simple, faster, and more efficient than the rules-based lead scoring approaches. Einstein analyzes the closed deals and determines which new leads have the similarity with a successful conversion.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) — this solution has a built-in system for tracking and automatically scoring existing leads. It allows tracking website activity and determining interest in certain products or sections. An interesting fact about Marketing Cloud: Marketing Cloud doesn’t offer native functionality out-of-the-box lead scoring. But you can have implemented lead scoring inside Marketing Cloud by following tools: SalesWings; Marketing Cloud Connect and Process Builder; Marketing Cloud Journey Builder; Marketing Cloud Personalization Builder and Predictive Intelligence; Google Analytics 360.
You can integrate with Salesforce a dozen of different marketing tools with the Lead qualification feature. Some examples of external tools are the following:
ActiveCampaign;
Keap;
LeadSquared;
GetResponse.
Lead management in Salesforce, example 4. Qualification Leads by calls
Now we have qualified Leads by some metrics and AI analysis. But often, we need to finalize the Lead qualification by speaking with them tet-a-tet. For this purpose, we need to implement a calling service inside Salesforce. We also have a lot of Salesforce internal and external solutions.
Salesforce solution:
Service Cloud Voice — an intelligent telephony solution integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud. Service Cloud Voice makes it easier to answer and make calls, track customer information, and resolve their issues.
External solutions, which can be integrated with Salesforce:
Dialpad
CallRail
Freshdesk
Zendesk Suite
Zoho Desk
Lead management in Salesforce, example 5. Nurturing leads in Salesforce Sales Cloud
If a person is currently not ready to purchase your products or services, you still should keep working with such lead — nurturing them — to emphasize the value you can deliver for this particular customer. For this purpose, Salesforce users have a great variety of possible solutions and can build nurturing processes inside Salesforce. It might be:
Flows — the most powerful automation tool provided by Salesforce for automating everything from sending emails and custom notifications to using triggers that create, update, or delete records in Salesforce.
Apex Email Service — automated processes that use Apex classes to process inbound email.
Email Templates builder — a tool for creating email templates, which allows quickly sending emails that include field data from Salesforce records.
Also, you can use some external tools to build an effective way to work with leads. Some examples of such tools are the following:
Mailchimp
Hubspot Marketing
Zoho Social
Example 6. Converting Leads
And it’s the final goal of lead management — converting Lead into the Account/ Contact/ Opportunity. First of all, you need to understand that the Lead is ready for conversion. For this task, you can do the following:
Determine the conversion criteria. For instance, some fields with proper values. These values display that your Lead passes the whole lead conversion flow. For instance, you can use Lead status field, which changes according to the flow’s step.
Use a Lead scoring system. For instance, if the score is higher than 80, Lead is ready for conversion.
Then you can convert your Lead. You have two options on how to convert Lead:
Manually. Use the standard process (Lead -> Convert, and then you can choose in which object you need to convert Lead, and then map between the objects).
Automatically. To convert Lead automatically, we need:
1) Create an Apex class and test class
2) Create a Record-triggered flow, which invokes an Apex action from a step.
Looks overwhelming? No worries!
Sales Cloud has numerous built-in features and tools to manage leads successfully and convert them into sales. Salesforce managed to automate the maximum in the lead management process and make each stage highly customized to various businesses' needs. In this article, we offered your attention to only a tiny bit of the many possible Lead Management flows, so if you didn't find a solution for your case — we are always here to provide you with that.
Contact us if you want to configure Sales Cloud to support your unique business processes. Sparkybit is ready to become your consulting and implementation partner. We will help you reach your business goals by improving lead management processes.