3 Ways to Use Salesforce.com Leads Management

Leads management in Salesforce.com has some powerful features included in your license fees that are often overlooked. We recently worked with two companies who had great self-implementations but were not taking full advantage of native (i.e. free!) leads management features; their stories inspired this post.

Collect Leads From Your Website Into Salesforce Your system can automatically capture important lead information from your website, send it to Salesforce and turn that information into a new lead record using Salesforce web-to-lead. This will save you from having to re-enter data and allow you to start dealing with the prospect’s inquiry immediately.

• Decide which lead fields to collect (E.G. First Name, Company, Email, etc)
• Edit the picklist Lead Source in the Lead Setup & add a new value (E.G. Lead Source = Contact Us)
• Ask your web developer for the URL of the “thank you page”
• Go to Your Name > Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead > Create Web-to-Lead Form
• Add the fields you want to include and paste your thank you page URL and click GENERATE
• Copy this text into a notepad.txt file (this strips out any potential html craziness)
• Include the value Lead Source = Contact Us in this text file
• Give the file/code to your web developer and tell him to hide the Lead Source field

Once the developer has this code it will take him/her about an hour to add this snippet of code to your website and the next time a prospect makes an inquiry it will be automatically created in Salesforce. Be sure to test it thoroughly – you don’t want to lose leads in error.

Automatically Assign Leads To Users With Assignment Rules Now that Salesforce is creating lead records automatically you want to be sure these are reaching the correct team member immediately; you can do this by setting up some simple lead assignment rules. Example: When a lead arrives from the Contact Us page send to Geraldine Gray

• Set your lead default owner under Your Name > Setup > Customize > Leads > Settings
• To create a new assignment rule go to Leads > Lead Assignment Rules
• Click NEW and name your rule (E.G.: Contact Us = Geraldine Gray) and save it
• Click on the rule name
• Click NEW under Rule Entries
• Set the Sort Order to “1”
• Enter your rule parameters of Lead Source EQUALS Contact Us
• Assign to user “Geraldine Gray”

Now when a lead is created from your website it will automatically be assigned to Geraldine.

Set Customer Expectations With An Auto-responder You may choose to have your prospect complete the contact us page and be sent to a thank you landing page or you can choose to create a customized email template which will take their inquiry and let them know what to expect next. This can be done using an auto-responder rule.

• Go to Your Name > Setup > Customize Leads > Auto-Response Rules
• Click NEW and name your rule “Contact Us” and check the button to “set this as the active Web-to-Lead Auto-Response rule”
• To create a new auto-response rule click on the rule name
• Click NEW under Rule Entries
• Set the Sort Order to “1”
• Enter your rule parameters of Lead Source EQUALS Contact Us
• Assign a user and email address (this is who the auto-responder will derive from)
• Select the email template you want to use (Salesforce has some samples set up you can clone)

Now when a prospect makes an inquiry from your website they will automatically receive a thank you email. We suggest that you go a little further and create a custom email template that suits your business response and includes your business letterhead so that the prospect receives a branded experience and, of course, be sure to test this out several times.

Final Thoughts Lead management is a powerful tool that can help you enhance your customer’s experience from their first point of contact with your company so it makes sense to ensure this is professional and provides a closed loop between your company and your future customer. If you need help please contact Endiem – polishing your lead process may seem intimidating at first but we’ll have you up and running in no time at all.

Further resources: Salesforce: Getting The Most From Your Leadsis an official cheat sheet giving an overview of leads. Salesforce: Sales Cloud Marketing & Leads demo RingLead Blog: Top Five Salesforce Web-to-Lead Implementation Tips by @michaelforce is a 30min recorded webinar that could help you take your self-implemented web-to-lead process to the next level.