Leads
Overview
Leads represent potential sales opportunities or prospects that have shown interest in your products or services but have not yet been qualified as business opportunities.
How Are Leads Used?
The true starting point for new business and commonly referred to as the lifeblood of business.
They allow users to create records based on introductions at trade shows, events, seminars, content downloads etc. and determine which people are actually interested buyers. From a management perspective, starting off as a lead reduces duplicate accounts and opportunities, as well as invalid accounts and opportunities.
What is the Benefit?
This is the place where you track the activity that takes someone from a stranger to a customer. There are a variety of tools like (Account Engagement/Pardot, Sales Enablement, etc) which can accelerate this activity.
In Salesforce, there are conversion tools to help users identify existing Account, Contact and Opportunity records. This reduces the possibility of duplicate data. As noted before it’s true purpose is to serve as a “first stop” for prospects to determine feasibility of business.
They can also be scored to ensure that your precious time is being spent with the most viable and interested prospects.
Who is Impacted?
Marketing
Marketing teams use this object to start a prospects relationship with your company. Marketing teams can analyze behavior, tune messaging and sourcing strategies, and set scoring strategies.
Segmentation and automatic nurturing over time are typically handled by the marketing team.
Sales
Sales teams use them as the foundation of their outreach efforts. Leads tell Sales who is interested in their company, which allows them to focus on the most promising opportunities.
Sales can personalize communication, follow- up based on automation, and answer questions at the right time to move leads forward in the sales funnel. A converted lead ends as an opportunity.
Developers/Admins
Developers and Admins together can work with leads to drive business process automation, customization to fit each companies needs and tailor the process to ensure successful conversion of leads into Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities.