Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 11:39AM 
- Star Trek TNG on Blu Ray?
- The Sopranos Seasons 1-2
Round Table Discussion with our wives focusing on the question, "Did Ritchie Aprile and Janice Soprano love each other?"
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Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 11:07AM 
Scott & Josh discuss Fire Walk with Me with their guests (and wives) Jennifer and Rachel.
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Friday, August 12, 2011 at 11:33AM 
Scott and Josh lay out their philosophy on why television is so important and where they want to take this show.
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Sunday, August 7, 2011 at 12:09PM 
Leads are the targeted prospects a company is trying to engage with in a marketplace dialogue. It is the function of Marketing to target prospects and provide them with the right information in the right format at the right time, to spark enough interest to get the prospect to engage the company in a dialogue about purchasing products and/or services.
Likewise, it is Inside Sales’ purpose to engage these prospects by following up on targeted marketing campaigns, or contacting prospects through personal referrals (warm) or unsolicited (cold) from research.
The Importance of the Lead Source Field
The Lead Source field in Salesforce.com is a pick list meant to record the primary entry point of the prospect. Where did they come from? Don’t over complicate this. Did it come from Marketing or Sales research? Was it an internal referral from an employee or a warm lead from an existing customer? Don’t get into specifics of which campaign brought the prospect into the funnel on this field—that is what the campaign member feature is meant to do.
Don’t over complicate the entry point because someday you will want to know how many of your targeted Marketing leads were converted from cold calls by the Inside Sales team and how many of those conversions lead to closed deals. And oh, by the way, which marketing campaigns did the prospect who actually purchased something respond to? Over complicate the Lead Source field and you will lock yourself out of a plethora of valuable information that you will need for future planning.
Lead Responsibility Matrix
I share this matrix with my clients as a general starting point and it meets their requirements 75% of the time. I like the five statuses and breaking them out by who owns what and what their actions should be in that zone.
| Lead Status | Primary / Secondary Ownership | Primary Action |
|---|---|---|
| Open – Not Contacted | Marketing / Inside Sales | Open Marketing / Cold Calling |
| Working - Contacted | Qualification Process / Targeted Marketing | Inside Sales / Marketing |
| Closed – Converted | Outside Sales | Converted Lead |
| Closed - Qualified Not Interested | Marketing | Targeted Follow Up Marketing |
| Closed – Not Qualified | Marketing | Archive / Open Marketing |
I encourage clients to engage in research to determine who is most likely going to purchase right now and then implement that business logic on the lead pool to maximize dollar and time spend for Marketing campaigns and Inside Sales effort. This sounds easier than it actually is because it requires a detailed analysis of why your existing customers bought from you which is like asking why it rained today as opposed to yesterday. There are clear answers but there are also endless variables that can bog you down and cripple you into the old “Analysis by Paralysis.”
If possible, the Lead Status field should be locked down and changed through custom coding, based on specific milestones. For example, when an email response comes in from the Lead or when a phone call happens or a meeting takes place, the Status field would be flipped to “Working - Contacted” directly after the activity was saved. This requires custom development but the end result of pure data quality is completely worth investing resources into making that happen.
Lead Conversion
Why would you want to put the burden of converting leads on your sales team? Wouldn’t it be easier to just import every prospect as a contact and have a status field that allows you to move them along the sales cycle? I’ve worked in an org that did this and it was a nightmare. There were several hundred thousand contacts in the system and many of them had not been moved because of irresponsible sales users who were too lazy and ignorant to care about database quality. The responsibility for cleanliness and accuracy of the data in your Salesforce org begins with the President of your company. If they don’t put a value on quality data, why should the field rep who only cares about their commission check? In my opinion, if you don’t accurately record why deals are closed won or lost, you shouldn’t get paid and the system should be built with automation to make this as easy as possible to automate much of this burden from the sales users
Lead conversion should happen when the targeted prospect has been contacted by Inside Sales (with the help of Marketing), engaged in conversation and has been determined to be qualified in terms of:
• Interest in purchasing
• Ability to purchase
The Inside Sales person should “sign off” on both of these qualifications during the conversion process. This signing off might take the form of a Lookup field where the qualifying user enters their name next to the statement, “Ability and Interest to Purchase Has Been Qualified by _____________.” This signing of the name is an important psychological step in the sales process and will help ensure that only quality leads are converted in your database. Not many people will sign their name next to something that is likely to fail. Failure to convert opportunities is to be expected, of course, but the sooner you can inject quality into your qualification process the better off your end results will be.
What Happens When Converting Leads?
When converting a lead, information from the Lead record is bifurcated into a Contact attached to an Account. Additionally, an opportunity should be created upon Lead conversion (or else what’s the purpose of converting them in the first place?).
Another great benefit of creating the opportunity from Lead conversion is that the contact will be entered as a Contact Role in the opportunity and all of their campaign history comes with them. This means that with the click of a button you have now tied your Marketing efforts into your sales results.
After Lead Conversion
Once the Lead is converted to a Contact attached to an open Opportunity as a Contact Role, then the Outside Sales Team takes over and shepherds the Opportunity to closure.
The Big Picture
When used correctly, the Lead object in salesforce should start the process of a complete view of how a prospect is engaged and qualified or disqualified, and how those qualified prospects are then converted into open opportunities, carrying with them all campaign history, activity history, and research notes, etc. If you don’t capture this information up front, as it’s happening, you will be at a loss to explain your failures and, even worse, your successes.
PHOTO: Prospects are Low? (IMG_6166) © by Ed Townend
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 8:32AM 
The ancient argument about Contact level versus Account comes from the earliest days of my experience with Salesforce, back when I was a lowly Business Analyst masquerading as a Salesforce Admin. The sales and marketing department didn’t utilize the Account level for anything and had moved away from using Leads as the entry point to qualification. Every prospect was imported as a Contact inside a shell account and an Account Type field was created to measure their movement along the sales cycle. The sales folk wanted every field in the world added to the Contact record in Salesforce and they wanted it for three reasons:
Now the first two can be fixed with education, the third with a kick in the ass from Executive leadership. Because here’s the thing about hunting (all sales energy exerted is an action of hunting), the best hunters scout and track their prey from higher ground. In Salesforce, there is no higher ground than the Account object. All activity for each Contact, Opportunity, Asset, Contract, Campaign and Case are visible from the Account object. And to not use the Account record as the starting point for all execution on a qualified prospect, is akin to a hunter refusing to scout his target from a hilltop, instead choosing to walk down to a ravine and start looking up.
Your users should first review the activity history and attributes of the Account record first before they go down into the Contact records on any qualified prospects (I say qualified because they shouldn’t have been converted over from a Lead if they had not yet been qualified in terms of the ability and interest to purchase your product/solution).
Any time you have an attribute that will apply to all contacts at the same time (i.e. the company owns a widget with a competitor of yours), it belongs at the Account level because it’s one point of update which can then filter down to all contacts. For example, let’s say you had a CEO and a CFO you were working and you assigned competitive ownership on the CFO’s Contact level. Without configuring workflow trickery or outright custom code, this information is now unavailable on the CFO’s contact page and when you go to pull a competitive prospect list, the CEO will be excluded from the list and you could miss out on an opportunity for contact.
Don’t work against Salesforce; this is laziness and lunacy and you must not let your users fall victim to it. It’s up to you, as an intelligent Salesforce Administrator and/or Executive Sales Leadership, to understand and prevent the terrible mistake of allowing the Contact record to become the primary focal point of your sales processes.
Enforcing effective process on resisting users is like improving your golf game—sometimes you have to change your swing to lower your handicap and it’s painful up front but the results speak for themselves.
PHOTO: Hunting © by edbrambley
