Sales Lead Management: the Key to New Business

Intelligent lead management requires consistent lead tracking and distribution across sales and marketing. That’s exactly what Salesforce CRM delivers: Both managers and reps can easily monitor inquiries from prospects and efficiently route qualified leads to the right salespeople at the right time. The result is optimal lead management: Sales reps always have quick access to the hottest leads, and nothing falls through the cracks.

• Online lead capture. Easily build forms that automatically transfer Web site leads right into Salesforce CRM and send a personally tailored response back to the prospect.
• Import wizards. Consolidate sales lead management by quickly importing leads from trade shows, seminars, direct mail, and other offline sources. Manual data entry and lead tracking become things of the past.
• Lead search and merge. Use this lead-management capability to ensure that reps can easily identify prior interactions with a prospect before following up. Easily merge duplicate leads with existing leads, contacts, and accounts.
• Automatic lead routing. This lead-management feature lets you set up lead queues and assignment rules to automatically send leads to the right sales organization or rep based on your organization’s business rules.
• Security controls. You can restrict reps to accessing leads exclusively in their own territories, with the ability to manually share specific contacts with other users. You can also securely manage lead allocation to your channel partners.

Lead Tracking to Keep Every Prospect Alive

• Lead history tracking. Salesforce CRM’s sophisticated lead tracking lets you monitor every change from lead creation to conversion. To ensure legal compliance and effective lead management, you can create a full audit trail of modifications to standard and custom lead fields over time.
• Lead qualification. As an essential part of efficient sales lead management, lead-qualification processes ensure that all sales reps use consistent methodology. You can easily customize Salesforce CRM to create distinct qualification processes and page displays for each business unit or product line.
• Lead conversion. All it takes is a single click to convert qualified leads to sales opportunities. You can also notify field sales reps when deals are assigned to them.
• Email prospecting and tracking. Salesforce CRM augments lead management with powerful lead-generation capabilities. Reps can quickly create and send personalized, high-impact, templated email messages to large numbers of prospects, and easily track responses.

From Lead Management to Guiding Opportunities Forward

When sales lead management functions like clockwork, a high proportion of prospects progress to bona fide opportunities—and the sales process moves into high gear. Reps need to redouble their efforts, and managers must keep tabs on activities to make sure every potential deal is handled correctly. A full array of Salesforce CRM opportunity management capabilities take you effortlessly from lead management into this next phase.

• Increase sales productivity and close more deals. When prospects start getting serious about purchasing, lead management becomes opportunity management. The transition is smooth and seamless with the salesforce.com solution. Salesforce CRM gives sales teams a single place to update and track milestones and record all interactions, speeding collaboration to move deals more quickly to the point of decision. With just clicks, non-technical sales admins can tailor the application to reflect your specific sales methodologies and processes. This approach makes it easy for managers to shepherd opportunities from the lead tracking phase into their sales pipelines, where they can monitor progress in real time.
• Opportunity tracking. As with sales lead management, Salesforce CRM lets you centrally track all opportunity-related data, including milestones, decision-makers, partners, customer communications, and all other information unique to your sales process.
• Sales methodologies. Standardize lead management and other workflows for all sales teams by customizing Salesforce CRM to support your individualized processes. You also have the option of extending your capabilities with solutions from our AppExchange partners.
• Product tracking. Just as lead tracking is vital to sales lead management, it’s crucial to record product-level information for each sales opportunity. Notate deal-related data, including quantity, standard price, quoted price, and product codes. Send automatic notifications when a product is added to an opportunity or when a discount threshold is violated. You can also set up revenue and quantity schedules for each product to mirror payment and delivery terms.

Augment Lead Management with Flexible Forecasting

• Forecast globally. Salesforce CRM lets you use sales pipeline data to make dependable projections of demand and revenue. With accurate forecasts in hand, sales managers can allocate resources to help close more deals, increase income streams, and align costs with revenue growth. Forecasting also provides critical visibility into upcoming product and service demands. You can then prioritize lead-management activities accordingly.
• Manage territories. You can organize the lead-management and lead tracking capabilities in Salesforce CRM by territory. Plus, you can easily define, administer, analyze, and change territories to reflect the structure of your organization, no matter how complex it is or how frequently it evolves.
• Automate workflow and approvals. Easily streamline and customize workflows inside Salesforce CRM to better manage your organization’s unique sales processes. This capability gives you greater control over routine lead management and lead tracking activities, eliminates redundant tasks, and enforces adherence to your approval processes.
• Manage accounts and contacts. Salesforce CRM integrates with your other enterprise systems and lets you share account and contact information across your entire company. The result is superior sales lead management. Everyone on your team gets a complete view of every prospect and customer—and has all the resources needed to build and maintain strong, long-lasting customer relationships.