Shamrock CRM – Salesforce.com Consulting, Implementations and Web Development

Sales Leads – Automating Your Leads

The next installment from Salesforce.com’s marketing blogger team relates to automating your Lead Flow. Once you have identified what Leads really are and how they relate to your business, you need to incorporate them into your Salesforce environment and automate the distribution.

They go over 4 tools to do this:
Web-to-Lead forms
Web-to-Lead forms allow you to add an input form on your website for potential customers to fill out with their contact information, company information, product interest, etc. Once the customer fills in this data and submits the form, the data will automatically be inputted into your Salesforce.com as a Lead for you to sell to. To see an example of this, look at the bottom of Shamrock CRM. Web-to-Lead forms are very flexible.

Lead Assignment rules
If you have a lot of Leads being entered in the system and you have multiple sales people that these Leads should be assigned to, Lead Assignment rules might be an excellent option for you. Lead Assignment rules would allow you to say that “any Lead where State = Florida, Assign to Jim.” This removes a ton of manual work that you might possibly perform already.

Another option for this is Round Robin Lead Assignment or Lead Sprinklers or Lead Assignment based on a rating structure. These require some code, but are excellent.

Lead Auto-Response rules
Lead Auto-Response rules allow you to respond to the Leads automatically with pre-defined email templates based off of that Lead’s specific details. This allows you to quickly get information to these users, so they do not sit around waiting for a response. These are essentially workflows.

Lead Scoring
An example of Lead Scoring would be the “Hot/Cold” rating system in combination of potential revenue estimates in combination with other criteria. An example can be seen here with my Lead Activity History Report.

Salesforce.com Marketing – Best Practices in Lead Management pt 2