It is extremely important to get accurate leads to the right sales reps in Salesforce. This will enhance your sales team’s productivity and ensure maximum sales efficiency. Any large organization with a distributed sales team that does not communicate with other sales team members needs accurate and timely lead routing and Salesforce is the perfect tool for this purpose.
Managing Leads in Salesforce can be tricky due to duplication of entries and obsolete data records. The sales administrator must continuously monitor and improve the leads, even delete the entries if necessary, to keep the records accurate. Here, we discuss 5 ways to fix a broken lead process in Salesforce.
Improve Salesforce Lead Management Process by Recognizing Dead Leads
One reason for the inefficiency of Salesforce data is that dead leads are not separated and removed from the records. This can cause a lot of frustration and loss of motivation for sales team because they end up targeting the wrong leads.
Remember, leads are used to target customers who are potentially interested in your products. They may not want to buy your products right now, but they should have a genuine demand for your goods or service.
The sales administrator must differentiate when a lead is merely uninterested in your products for now and can be convinced to buy it later by the right sales agent, and when a lead is dead and simply will not buy from you.
Enhance Lead Management Salesforce by Cleaning before Routing
Lead routing is the central process in getting the best out of your sales team. It is the job of the sales administrator to route the leads effectively. If it becomes clear that a lead is dead, it should be removed from the database rather than getting reassigned to another sales agent.
The following steps could improve your lead routing accuracy by more than 60%.
- Clear out bad data entries that are invalid or misspelled. For example, the email address (jdoe@acme.con) and typos in city name (e.g., Massachusettes) must be removed.
- Resolve factual mistakes from data such as “Miami, Texas.”
- Complete records with missing fields. If the zip code is missing from a record, it can be easily searched online and filled in.
- Standardize data for all entries. For instance, the United States can be written as United States, United States of America, USA, US, U.S.A., and the U.S. All records must have a standard entry system.
Treat Leads as New Inquiries
Every time an existing lead is re-assigned to a new sales rep, it must be treated as a new customer inquiry. The administrator should carry out the same steps that they normally take for generating new customer leads. This will improve the effectiveness of your lead management system.
Match Leads to Accounts
Matching leads to accounts will improve your Salesforce lead management process. You can do that in the following ways.
- Set up leads to route directly to the account owner.
- Fill in or replace data from the lead with the help of account data.
- Set up leads to convert to contacts automatically and keep them attached.
- Identify and merge leads that are duplicates of a contact.
Automate Listing Process
If you regularly upload over a few hundred leads every week to your Salesforce database then you should automate the listing process to make things easier. This is a great way to ensure that your data is cleaned properly and entries are matched to the correct field before they enter your sales or marketing automation platform.
The following tasks should ideally be automated for the list-loading process:
- Data cleansing
- Accounts enrichment
- Segmentation of Records
- Data validation
- Matching leads-to-accounts
- De-duplication within the list and against the CRM databases
- Update and loading of data