Converting Leads in the Salesforce Sales Cloud

I consider Lead conversion to be one of the single most important decisions a sales user makes in Salesforce. It’s like losing your virginity, there is no going back. It is a fair analogy to compare a Lead to a caterpillar, the conversion process to the cocoon and the resulting Contact/Account creation to the butterfly. Because many users don’t understand why they are converting a lead, their companies end up with some ugly ass butterflies that will never do anything more than flap their wings a few times then die.

Why Did You Just Convert That Lead?

You convert a Lead because someone on your sales team engaged that prospect and determined that they were qualified in terms of:

• Ability to purchase your product or service


• Desire to purchase your product or service

In my opinion, there is no other reason to convert a Lead in Salesforce unless it has been qualified to be capable of and interested in becoming your customer and being obtuse about it is going to result in dirty data that will waste marketing money and squander the resources of your sales professionals looking to engage serious prospects who were interested in the past but never became customers.

During Conversion Best Practices

1. Create an opportunity. (If there is no opportunity, why are you converting?)


2. Check for duplicate Accounts/Contacts already in the system. (Salesforce can help you with this but no automation or built in functionality can compensate for a user’s common sense. Check the Account picklist on the conversion screen and be diligent before you commit the record.)


3. Set a follow up task for yourself or a Sales Team user (Get to the next step already and Always Be Closing.)

After Conversion Best Practices

There are a few best practices that I recommend your Sales teams do once a Lead has been qualified and is then converted to a Contact inside of an Account, attached to an open Opportunity:

Work from the Opportunity Until it is Closed Won or Closed Lost

Finding and closing opportunities is the entire purpose of Sales and the Salesforce Sales Cloud is built to help you automate as much of the administration of doing just that as possible. Don’t work against it by allowing your users to pick where they are putting their data in the system. Build your sales success metrics around the qualification of prospects, their conversion to opportunities and the pipeline and forecast of those opportunities. Everything else is just noise and I urge you to stop listening to noise.

Bruce Lee once said, don’t mistake the finger pointing to the Moon for the Moon itself. I have seen many Sales Managers put way too much focus on how many tasks were set on a prospect. Unless you are doing a performance analysis on why certain users are more effective than others, who cares how many tasks it takes to get to the conversion? That is watching effort, not results. Start by watching results and once you have that nailed down, then start asking questions about the effectiveness of effort. Find the metrics that measure results and stick with them. In the beginning, the most important metrics are opportunities created and when the stages of those opportunities are moving.

Part of working from the Opportunity means launching all tasks from the Opportunity and then associating them with the appropriate Contact. You can also launch the task from the Contact and then associate them with the Opportunity the other way, but I have found users are more apt to properly associate tasks with all of the correct related records when they launch it from the opportunity. Doing this means that tasks associated with each opportunity stay compartmentalized within that opportunity but still roll up to the Account’s activity history and can be found in the Contact activity history as well. It’s the best of all three worlds. Make it easier for your users to find information wherever they happen to be looking for it.

Chatter, Chatter, Chatter from the Opportunity 

If I could hold the feet of Sales Management to the fire for one reason in Salesforce, it’s for not utilizing Chatter more effectively (if at all). Chatter is not IM and it is not a waste of time. Chatter is the longest lever ever given to a sales team that will allow them to move mountains virtually whether they are sitting next to each other in an office or are scattered across the world in different time zones on different days.

Chatter is the only instant communication functionality that is attached the records on which your users are working, that is instantly pushed to all users who have access to and follow the record in their Chatter feeds, and is recorded in the system, on each record, for posterity. Even your silly multi-million dollar collaboration tools can' t do that so wake up, recognize and bow down to the superiority of this tool.

Anyone internal that can influence the deal in a positive way (Management, Contracts, Marketing, Sales Support, Inside Sales, etc.) should be following the opportunity record on Chatter and be ready to respond in a moment’s notice to any question or task the Outside Sales rep posts to the Opportunity’s chatter feed. Your Users' response to Chatter posts could mean the difference between winning deals or losing them. Chatter is built to move business communication from hours and days into seconds, broadcasting and centralizing from ground zero of where the deal is happening. Use Chatter or become a victim to it when your competitors start moving faster to closing deals than you can.

Attach your proposals and keep track of every product the prospect gets quoted.

This is really a no-brainer. I can’t tell you how many sales deals I’ve seen fall apart because historical information is left to the mind of a scatterbrained sales person instead of logged into the system where it can be recalled by anyone with the click of a mouse. Don’t let this happen to you. Attach the proposal or log the numbers in as active products on the deal. Post proposals as Chatter files in the Opportunity feed if you want to. Just get them in there and make them accessible.

Make your Opportunity stages milestones and keep the list short and simple.

If you can’t understand the stage from the name, try again. Here are my suggestions:

Suggested Opportunity Stage Name	Meaning
Qualified	The entry stage. You shouldn’t create an opportunity unless the Account has been qualified in terms of the ability and interest to purchase. This is the honeymoon period of transition between Inside Sales and Outside Sales.
Needs Analysis	This is where the sales team is sending and revising proposals to the prospect. This is the primary of zone of conversation.
Negotiation / Review	This is the final stage of the opportunity, where the product or service has been clearly identified and any negotiation over the terms is taking place. This is the stage that Management / Contracts is likely going to assist the sales team in closing the deal.
Closed Won	The deal is won! Yay!
Closed Lost	The deal is lost. Boo!

Perform a Post Mortem

Why did you lose the deal? More importantly, why did you win the deal? There should be a mechanism built into every opportunity to quickly poll the Outside Sales team on why the deal went the way it did. This information should be the source of a consistent conversation between Sales and Marketing management and the Executive leadership of the company. Additionally, there should a regular Sales department all-in conference call / shared web screening where the entire team goes through the trends of losing and winning deals and feedback from the field is inserted where it can be used to further fuel this perpetual win/loss conversation.

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The way you approach Lead Management will directly impact your successful Lead Conversions, which in turn will directly impact your overall success with Opportunities. Whether you are a big or small company working with Salesforce, it makes sense to set your processes and data model up with quality in mind from the beginning. It doesn’t take a team of analysts, administrators, developers or administrative staff to make your Salesforce data work for you both now and in helping you prepare for the future. What it does take is for Executive leadership and Sales and Marketing management to step up and enforce best practices that do not tolerate user laziness or apathy when it comes to Salesforce.

I suggest learning to use this phrase: “If it isn’t in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist and you don’t get paid.” You’ll be amazed at how passionate your users become about getting data in Salesforce in a timely manner and making sure that it’s correct when their paychecks depend on it.

Attleson Farm: Monarch Caterpiller © by eliduke

Comments

[Chris]

Great article! I'm starting to put Salesforce to use in our sales team and was searching for this sort of information.

One question. If you are strict about only converting qualified leads into accounts. What do you do with leads that are partially qualified - they have the ability to purchase but not the intent right now. Create an account without an opportunity?, or leave them as a lead with a task to follow up again in the future?

[Joshua Minton]

Thanks for the comment Chris. That is one of the most important processes a company can define regarding its prospect qualification process. Here's what I would recommend--when a prospect is both financially capable of purchasing AND is interested in purchasing that is a definite opportunity and the lead should be converted. If however, the prospect is financially capable but may or may not be interested in purchasing, well, that's where sales professionals come in handy over order takers. The company must decide if it wants to convert Leads only the basis of financial ability to purchase versus that AND the interest. If you go the strict method, where the prospect must be both, then every Account should have either a Closed Won or Closed Lost opportunity attached (excluding partner accounts or non-sales accounts of course).

This means that Accounts with Close Lost opportunities are now your most valuable marketing data in Salesforce--because they've already been qualified on both criteria. On the other hand, if a Lead is judged to be financially capable of purchasing and the sales user marks their Lead Status as "Qualified" but does not convert them, then these Leads are your second most valuable marketing data in Salesforce because they've been qualified on one of the two criteria points.

If a company chooses to convert Leads that are qualified but not interested, they will have to contend with the definition difference from a marketing perspective--i.e. how to distinguish between qualified and interested Accounts where the deal went dead for some reason versus Accounts where there was no deal at all. Using the method I described above, there is no need for this headache as converted Account that aren't customers or partners are primary marketing targets and leads marked as "Qualified" are secondary targets.

I hope this helps--I know it seems arbitrary but it's important to nail this down out of the gate.