Lecture 5 – Creating and
Managing Leads
Introduction
• Leads are the first step of the sales and marketing cycle
– they keep opportunities flowing into your sales funnel.
• Leads are prospects or people that may be interested in
your products or service.
• The goal is to move them through the sales cycle and
assess them as either unqualified or qualified for
workable opportunities.
• Understanding how leads work is beneficial as it
familiarizes you with how a leads starts off the sales cycle
and how to move from a lead to the next step in the sales
cycle.
Understanding leads
• Leads comprise anyone that is a potential customer.
• You can think of leads as the “catch-all” database from which you
qualify potential deals.
• The goal is to convert the lead into a cleaner data set of high-probability
sales.
• Converting leads into opportunities is the key to a successful business.
• Managing your leads effectively allows you to convert more leads into
opportunities, which ultimately results in more business.
• Leads can be captured in many different ways, such as through
conferences, websites, purchasing lists, and any other way you may
come into contact with potential customers.
• Let’s look at a business use case where a lead may need to be created,
then we’ll walk through the steps for creating a lead.
Business use case
• You are a sales representative for your company, XYZ
Widgets, and have been sent to a conference to talk
to potential customers.
• While at the conference, you have a great
conversation with Brenda Mcclure, the CFO of
Cardinal Inc.
• Brenda is interested in potentially purchasing 1,000
widgets for Cardinal and gives you her card.
• This is a hot lead!
• Let’s see how you work this lead in Salesforce.
Creating leads
• After this conversation, you take the business card
and decide to enter the information into Salesforce
right away.
• Usually, you would wait until after the conference
and enter all of the leads’ information together, but
this is a potentially big deal and you want to make
sure you get it into Salesforce ASAP.
• Your manager always says, “If a lead doesn’t exist in
Salesforce, it doesn’t exist!”
• Let’s see how the lead is created in Salesforce.
Understanding how lead conversion takes
place
• When you call Brenda, she seems very interested, which is a good sign.
• You decide to convert the lead.
• When a lead is converted, something very important happens.
• The lead disappears from the system (it disappears only on the
frontend; it is still available for reporting on the backend) and it turns
into three records.
• It becomes an account, an opportunity, and a contact.
• All the information about the company goes to the account, the
information about the person goes to the contact, and the information
about the actual sale goes to the opportunity.
• This is an important step in the sales process since this is the point
where you stop working with a lead and instead start working with an
opportunity.
Understanding how lead conversion takes
place
Summary
• In this lecture, we learned what a lead is and
how it is used to start the sales cycle.
• We understood what the Lead Status field is
used for and how the values drive the process.
• We also understood how to convert a lead
into an opportunity and that we can convert a
lead when we think there is further potential
for a sale.
