How to qualify leads in Salesforce

If there is an inquiry from a lead, which won’t convert into the opportunity why actually bother to record this inquiry into Salesforce at all?

We recommend recording every interaction with the company.  For example, how to define the effectiveness of your marketing campaign? Where these leads were generated from? If you have many inquiries for the product which you don’t produce or offer, most probably there was a mistake made in a marketing campaign that led to such misreading. 

Or you see that you keep receiving inquiries for the product which you don’t offer but it’s related to your business activity. You realize there’s a demand you’re able to fulfill and it could give you a new business opportunity.

Pros and cons for using Sales Cloud from salesperson perspective in terms of leads

There’re companies that work in a stable market that is not changing much. They have a few newly generated prospects and working with leads for them is a waste of time.  They don’t need to create leads because that would mean making extra useless steps in their customer journey. Instead they could create the opportunity with already existing Salesforce customers. 

Working with the leads are mostly applicable to the companies which are rapidly developing on the changing markets that might have some online activities like marketing campaigns on generating the leads. 

Leads statuses available in Salesforce

Every lead coming to your company must be qualified. It’s totally up to you which statuses you would like to implement. But there are some already created by default in Salesforce. 

The first one is Open. It means that you’ve generated the lead but you haven’t been in touch with the customer yet. 

Another one is called Contacted. As it comes out from the name it means that the lead was contacted and some additional data was also specified. 

The third one is called Qualified. At this stage the lead already turns into your prospect and you need to proceed with the offer. 

In most cases and in most companies qualifying the leads is the marketing task. When marketing qualified the lead it means they’ve created the opportunity. Then it’s been passed to the salesperson, and from this stage it’s his job already to be in touch with this prospect. 

There’s another out-of-box status which is called Unqualified. This is the status when marketing says - this is not our prospect. We can’t satisfy his requirements. 

We, as fansfactory, always recommend adding one more status, called Potential.  It applies effectively when the customer is asking for some specific product, which you don't offer yet, but you either plan to do it or you consider adding it to your portfolio in the near future. 

This is the standard Salesforce object which helps to monitor activities related to it, like recording received or sent emails, phone calls, online or personal meetings. What's very important here is after making such conversion all these activities are automatically transferred to newly created records. It means that if you convert this lead into an intercontact account, and possibly also into opportunity, then all activities which you have performed with this lead are now associated to this newly created record. So you don't lose them.