Beyond Default Settings: Best Practices for Managing Leads within Salesforce.com when you have a Complex Sale

Promote Initial Call's VP of Sales, Amy Keuper's, idea for a session covering the topic of Leads and the Complex Sale at the next Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco this November: http://dreamforce.ideas.salesforce.com/people/amykeuper/articles

Trying to track sales and qualification efforts without a protocol for immediately converting Leads can drive your organization into a workflow which does not fit your sales process if you have a long sales cycle.

We at Initial Call, Inc. provide contracted inside sales management. We maintain that, in the case of a Complex Sale (multiple Buyers, protracted education phase, expensive and/or complicated offering), the Leads tab should ideally function as an in-box—not a work platform.

Managing sales from within the Leads tab creates several specific challenges:

1. Leads are related to and tracked as individual people—not to the company they work for. You won’t have a master view of the target account unless you create an Account.
2. The “Company” field within a Lead record is freely keyed—not standardized. This causes multiple incorrect iterations of account names.
3. “New” Leads may not be new. Your sales team could “cold-call” someone you already have a relationship with.
4. Working in Leads causes duplication of effort. Two of your representatives can easily be, simultaneously but unknowingly, assigned different Leads at the same company.
5. Working in Leads can create conflict of ownership. Assigning Leads by territory or some other objective field is not error-proof due to factors such as HDQ/branch office location differences, parent/child relationships, etc.
6. Good salespeople are often not detail-oriented. Orders to “Find Duplicates” may not be followed.
7. Duplicate Leads skew reports about how many actual unique sales leads exist. An individual may appear in a database multiple times and be counted as a Lead many times over.

Leave with a plan to use Leads in a way that works for the Complex Sale.

Click here to promote our idea! http://dreamforce.ideas.salesforce.com/people/amykeuper/articles