Lead 3. A few best practices for using Contacts in Salesforce are: Isn’t it time to get professional Salesforce training for your sales team so that you get the results you want? Lead Conversion: this feature allows you to convert Leads to Accounts Contacts, and Opportunities – this is a key conversion point that is important for any company to measure; Tip #2: Leads are not easy to group into one company. It is the default option after you have converted a Lead into a Contact and Account.Many salespeople struggle with re-classifying a Lead that is not connected to an Opportunity. But we typically recommend moving the “conversion” point to earlier in the sales process whenever a high-quality lead is identified. At a minimum, an Opportunity needs to have the following (our rules – not Salesforce.com’s, and perhaps not yours): A projected Close date; a projected amount of revenue; Competitors being considered for the project; the final decision maker; the business challenge being solved.We always tell our clients to think of a Lead as akin to a business card. Eventually, if they’re a good fit for your business, you want to achieve a “conversion,” which we’ll discuss momentarily.“Conversion” is often a vague term that gets used among marketers and salespeople. And guess what – many of them won’t go anywhere. While every firm will have their own set of rules to determine what constitutes a Lead and an Opportunity, this post will attempt to provide some general rules around when to treat something as a Lead and when to convert it into an Opportunity.Salesforce.com assumes that when you convert a Lead it is because you have uncovered some type of revenue opportunity. When you convert a Lead in Salesforce.com it automatically becomes both an Account and a Contact at the same time. However, it is important to keep in mind that each organization's sales methodology is unique. At some point, the Lead can no longer be considered a Lead and it should be classified as either qualified, or not qualified. Leverage the Web-to-lead form (if applicable).Add a custom alternate Account name for companies that have recently changed names or have common names or initials.Wherever possible, try to enforce entry of the email address. We’ll show your best sellers how they can become more productive with Salesforce. And Salesforce.com does that just about as well as anything out there. It is the sales person’s responsibility to reach out to the Lead and quickly ascertain the correct status. Then, we recommend using the lead process in Salesforce to manage every net knew conversion that enters the database.How businesses classify their leads often depends on several factors, including their customers’ buying cycle, their industry, and what they sell.What all this means is that leads in the system are always “inbound.” They are quickly qualified and converted, so ambiguity in your lead count is always very low. The standard Title field is text, and not that reliable for searching.In a broad sense, Accounts are companies or entities that can be either physical or logical. How Salesforce Manages Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities By Mark Christie, Salesforce Training To get the most out of your Salesforce implementation, it helps to understand how to properly categorize someone’s name and company within your sales funnel. New processes and technologies have given sales teams the ability to access highly structured data like they never could before. If they can’t, then it’s Sales 101 – Go back and qualify some more.To find out more on how to ensure your Salesforce CRM implementation sets you up for success, April 14, 2016 This is particularly true when managing a large number of Leads, and where a quick response to the Lead is necessary.If you are inside some pre-determined number of days, and the Opportunity is not yet closed, create exception reporting or email alerts triggered by the Close Date.Be consistent in structuring your Accounts, especially if you decide to use Parent Accounts.Contacts are the people associated with Accounts that you market to, sell to, support, etc.

It is the job of the CRM (Salesforce.com, or any other) to take these rules, and provide and simple and effective tool to automate it and make the data easily accessible to everyone. Salesforce user is Karen - sales agent She will sell insurance to Sarah, who is John's client. You may also include a custom Status Date field that (depending on your Salesforce Edition) might have a workflow rule with field update that changes the date when the status changes.Consider adding a Job Type pick-list field to quickly identify key positions like CEO, Salesperson, etc. There is a tab in Salesforce for Leads and there is a tab that you see for Accounts and Contacts.