Managing leads in Salesforce involves efficiently capturing, nurturing, and converting potential customers into opportunities. Salesforce provides a comprehensive Lead Management system that allows users to track and analyze leads throughout the sales cycle. This involves creating and customizing lead records, assigning leads to the right sales representatives, implementing lead scoring, and utilizing automation tools to streamline the lead conversion process. Additionally, Salesforce offers reporting and analytics features to evaluate lead performance and optimize strategies for better conversion rates. This article explains ‘How to manage leads in Salesforce Part I’. Effectively managing leads in Salesforce contributes to a more organized and streamlined sales process, ultimately improving the overall efficiency of your sales team.
- Lead Generation
Generate lead from various lead sources
- Referral partners
- Realtor partners
- Past Clients
- Website
- Paid lead sources
- Advertisements
- Webinars
- Campaigns.
2. How to enter leads into Salesforce org
- Manual entry of leads generated from phone call, enquiry via email, Referral leads etc.
- Data importing tools such as Data import wizard, Data loader etc.
- Webforms developed inhouse or forms created using various integrations like Pardot (Marketing cloud Account Engagement), Mailchimp, Marketo etc. With forms, visitors can be turned into prospects by directing them to fill out a form where, the visitors are prompted to fill out important information like the loan types they are interested in, purpose of loan like Purchase, Refinance.
Below shows a form generated using the Pardot Forms. To know How to generate forms in Pardot, click How to create Forms in Account Engagement – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com).
- Web-to-Lead standard functionality which allows you to capture information of prospects visiting your website and store it as a new lead in Salesforce.
3. How to optimize Lead management with Duplicate Management
- Matching Rules: Matching rules in Salesforce define the criteria for identifying duplicate records during data import or manual entry, allowing users to maintain data accuracy.
- Duplicate Rules: Duplicate rules enforce actions, such as alerting users or preventing the creation of duplicates, based on the matching criteria defined by matching rules.
For detailed info check out Duplicate Management in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com), Custom Matching rules and Duplicate rules in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com).
4. Lead distribution
We can manually change the ownership of leads to other salesforce users/queues.
- Leads which are generated by the web to lead form will be owned by the default lead owner in the Web to lead form.
- A more efficient way to assign leads is by using the Lead assignment rules and Omni-Channel routing of leads.
- Lead Assignment rules
- For setting up Lead Assignment rules, understand the criteria for each type of lead.
- For eg:- Geography- Leads of a particular state can be assigned to loan officers of the same state.
- Loan type-Leads can be distributed based on the loan types. FHA loans can be assigned to one loan officer, VA to another and so on.
- Loan Purpose- Purchase and Refinance loans can be assigned to different loan officers if required.
- If a lead does not match with any of the lead assignment rules set up, then the lead will be assigned to whoever created it or to the admin.
- When a lead is manually created, salesforce standard functionality will assign leads to whoever created it. Loan officers can manually check off the ‘Assign using active assignment rule’ to run the leads against the active lead assignment rules.
To learn more, click Lead Assignment rules in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com).
- Lead Queues through the Omni-Channel
- This is a robust lead routing system and it needs to know what to route and how to route it.
- Leads will be routed to the loan officer based on their availability and capacity to take on a new lead.
- To access Omnichannel, navigate to the ‘Lightning Sales Console app’ from the app launcher. To utilize a Lightning console app, users need the Lightning Console User permission, and their profile must be included in the Lightning console app configuration.
- The loan officer has to manually mark that they are available to take new leads. For doing so, click on the Omnichannel widget on the bottom left of the Sales Console productivity bar.
To learn more about Omni-Channel routing, click Route Work with Omni-Channel (salesforce.com).
We will cover the further processes of lead management in another article. Effectively managing leads in Salesforce contributes to a more organized and streamlined sales process, ultimately improving the overall efficiency of your sales team.
