Effectively managing leads in Salesforce involves a systematic approach to organize, track, and nurture potential borrowers throughout the sales cycle. In How to manage leads in Salesforce Part I – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com), we began by capturing and entering lead information into Salesforce, ensuring accurate data. In this article we will discuss about Lead conversion and how to utilize lead scoring to prioritize prospects based on their engagement and potential.
Lead Conversion
Lead Conversion process convert leads into Opportunities, Accounts and Contacts. Loan officers can then work on the opportunities through the various stages until they are closed similar to status for leads defined by the team.
Lead Conversion for a business
Lead Conversion for an individual Consumer
Lead Scoring
- From the lead information we capture, certain factors are key indicators which can help us foresee whether a lead is good or not.
- Considering a residential mortgage borrower, the stability of income, Readiness to pay downpayment, if a coborrower is involved in the home buying process are all factors that can be used to prioritize leads.
- The default scoring system provided by Pardot score leads based on their online activities like clicks, landing page views, form submissions and so on.
- Einstein Lead scoring functionality which comes along with Sales Cloud Einstein License can also be used to set up Lead Scoring for the incoming leads. Click How to Set up Einstein lead scoring in Salesforce Sales Cloud – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com) to learn more.
- But if you want to use the out of the box features provided by Salesforce Sales cloud license to set up a proper lead scoring system, you can accomplish this by creating certain picklist and formula fields to track information used to prioritize leads.
Steps for Setting up Lead Scoring in Salesforce
- Create a picklist field for each factor
- Eg. Readiness to pay downpayment (for Conventional loans) picklist field with values 20%, between 10 % and 20%, between 5% and 10%.
- Create a field to track the score for each factor
- Eg. Readiness to pay downpayment (for Conventional loans) score equals 10, 5, 0 respectively for each values explained above.
- Create a formula field for the total score
- Give it an image
- Track the ‘Total score’ field in reports, dashboards and list views to efficiently prioritize leads
- A section named ‘Lead Scoring’ can be added to the record detail page. Add the picklist fields and formula fields we created in the previous steps to this section.
Check out our blogs Report on Scoring Mortgage leads – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com), Lead Scoring in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com).
Set up Paths
- A path is a visual representation of the business process in Salesforce. We have learned about Paths in another article. For the lead objects, The various stages of the path corresponds to the lead status values. For each stage of the path, we can add key fields relevant to that particular phase.
- For eg: For the ‘Working’ phase you can dd the lead scoring fields we just created since the lead score is a relevant factor which determines further processing of the lead.
- Similarly Total score field can be added to the ‘Qualified’ stage.
To know how to set up paths, click Optimize business Processes with Path in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com).
Track leads progress via Reports and Dashboards
We can leverage Salesforce reports and dashboards for real-time insights into lead performance and borrower trends.
Below listed are some key metrics that can be tracked for leads.
- Lead Conversion Rate:
- Measure the percentage of leads that successfully convert into opportunities or customers. This metric indicates the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
- Lead Source Effectiveness:
- Evaluate the performance of different lead sources (e.g., website, referrals, events) to identify which channels are most successful in generating high-quality leads.
- Time to Conversion:
- Track the average time it takes for a lead to progress through the sales pipeline and convert. This metric helps optimize sales processes and identify potential bottlenecks.
- Lead Velocity:
- Monitor the rate at which new leads are entering your pipeline. Increasing lead velocity suggests a healthy influx of potential customers.
- Conversion by Campaign:
- Analyze the impact of marketing campaigns on lead conversion. Identify which campaigns contribute most to lead generation and conversion rates.
- Lead Quality:
- Implement lead scoring and track the quality of leads based on predefined criteria. This helps prioritize high-value leads for more focused sales efforts.
- Lead Engagement:
- Measure how actively leads are engaging with your content and communications. This can include email opens, click-through rates, and website interactions.
- Lead Aging:
- Evaluate the time since a lead was created or last engaged. Timely follow-ups are crucial, and tracking lead aging ensures that leads are not neglected.
For learning the best practices in Salesforce Reports and Dashboards, click Reports and Dashboards Best Practice Guide (salesforce.com)
Take Five Consulting is a technology company, based in Virginia U.S., that specializes in the Mortgage Banking vertical especially LOS implementation and application development. Take Five Consulting creates and implement mortgage technology and software specifically for Mortgage Industry.
