Table of Contents
Obtaining potential buyers (or in other words generating leads) is a highly important process for any business. The good-old-days of cold calling as a way to find prospects have passed, therefore the question of how to efficiently conquer and process a larger number of qualified leads that are ready to make a purchase is very relevant.
Because Salesforce is among the top CRMs that are currently available, on this page, we’ll share how this CRM can be helpful in getting more high-quality leads and better-organized workflow processes.
Leads & Their Types: Qualified or Not?
First things first, mentioning why lead use is handy, the major idea lies in the fact that you can divide your clients into existing customers, into those who you can actively put in circulation, and your potential ones that still need some nurturing. Such division is twice as relevant if your organization has different groups of specialists who’re responsible for sales and for lead generation. That said, in Salesforce, you can thus separate your Leads from Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities, and have each team focus on various “layers” of your prospects.
Without a doubt, it is then vital to understand that leads differ from each other. And the biggest mistake that can then be made is not distinguishing the leads that you receive. They should be sifted out by their readiness to do business with you. Although the scale and naming may differ, generally leads are split into five or more status categories, some of these are:
- New (someone whose contact details you have but whom you haven’t contacted yet);
- Processing (someone with whom you’re communicating with, discussing an offer);
- Fostering (or nurturing, for someone who isn’t interested in your offer at the moment but you continue to communicate with them across multiple channels so as to stir up their interest and purchases later on);
- Unqualified (someone who isn’t interested in your offer at all, usually no further communication follows with this kind of lead);
- Qualified (someone who is likely to buy from you, you pass this lead type to your Sales specialists as a “green light” to do their magic).
That said, one of the main aims that you should pursue with leads is to convert the maximum number of your prospects into qualified ones, moving them down the marketing funnel and sales pipelines. The more qualified “ready-for-action” leads that you route to your Sales specialists, the more sales you make and the bigger revenues you get.
How Can Salesforce Help in Lead Generation?
So where do you get leads from? Fair enough, you can still reach out to prospects the old-fashioned way, such as by making calls and through personal meet-ups. Yet the digital channels have proven themselves to be a lot more effective not only in return of investment. Taking into account the modern reality of today, socials are very mighty in terms of reaching out to the right people and targeting your audience better.
This is why it’s crucial to have a powerful online presence and to continuously put in effort into broadening it. Among the strong sides worth noting is that with thorough planning, tools, and proper linking to your CRM, a lot of your marketing, nurturing, and lead conversion efforts can be automated. This, in turn, removes a great load of unnecessary manual work as you build up your relationship with a client.
The same applies to qualify leads and further work with them in an organized and efficient manner, including analytics for understanding the effectiveness of your channels, on-point reporting, monitoring arising trends, and client needs. The mentioned above are some ways how you can generate more qualified leads with Salesforce.
Undoubtedly, you won’t go far if you don’t have a great developer or administrator to help you set up and customize all the Salesforce processes around your needs. When looking for such a specialist, make sure to pay attention to previous hands-on experience, especially if the person worked in a similar sphere as your business and understands its peculiarities, plus there are many Salesforce certification benefits, so this point matters too.
Specific Channels & Strategies for Generating Leads
Listing some channels and strategies (apart from advertising) with the help of which you may generate leads are:
1. Sign-up forms on your website & landing pages
Perhaps the most widespread way of collecting leads deals with putting up various forms on your website. Having them as an obligatory element on landing pages is among the common best practices. When connected to Salesforce, you can capture data on such leads as they’re auto-submitted as separate records in your client database.
2. Email-marketing
Another highly effective channel and strategy is email marketing. Drip campaigns, for instance, may automatically send mailers depending on the lined-out “scenarios”. These are perfect for welcoming your leads, nurturing them, and informing them about your products and services. What’s for Salesforce, it allows creating customizable email templates that can be both personalized and auto-sent on a schedule.
3. Making great content
Creating content that no one reads or needs (for example, just for SEO purposes) is not the way to go. By adding pages, posts, and blog articles containing information that’s relevant and important to potential buyers can undoubtedly assist in lead generation, particularly if you share it across multiple channels and track its performance.
4. Using social media business accounts
Sharing content on many of your channels including LinkedIn, Facebook, and others is one side of the deal. Make sure to have all of your contact details and basic ways to reach you readily available on every one of your accounts. This includes a link to your website, location, ways to communicate with you, etc. After all, there is a pretty big chance that your prospects will come in contact with you via social media, so do whatever it takes to make it easy. Again, linking your social media to your CRM for lead collection is worth doing.
5. Optimizing your website
Your website is your “voice”. Therefore, it is crucial to have an appealing, well-performing, and quick website that contains easy-to-find information that’s of interest to your prospects. Mentioning optimization, SEO is a point to not overlook, as your website and content on social media channels should be simple for search engines to allocate.
6. Don’t forget to follow-up
Personalization is key for not only making first impressions but also for building long-lasting relationships with your customers. Doing one-time sales won’t get you anywhere. For this reason, following up with your clients after some time is a great “move”. Not being humble and asking those customers who you’ve “won” to refer your company to friends and family is another way to generate more prospects. Salesforce can surely be of help here if you set up reminders, notifications, and auto follow-ups.
Note that when combined and used together these strategies become more impactful.
Salesforce Lead Records
Lead record creation and data fill in a CRM can be done in various ways too. Apart from the obvious manual creation or list importing, Salesforce grants the opportunity to automate the creation of lead records. The so-called web-to-lead integration of Salesforce with the website of the company or other used software is one more best practice solution for getting more leads via Salesforce.
As aforementioned, whenever a prospect leaves their contact details, for instance, on a landing page of the company website, the system adds a record for the lead in the database, filling out:
- their name,
- email address,
- phone number,
- location/address,
- comments,
- lead source (on which channel the client left their details),
- other custom details,
- assigns the lead a Status (such as “New”).
If configured additionally, Salesforce allows to auto-rate or score the prospect and their readiness to do business. For example, this technology can mark leads as “Cold” or “Hot” based on set criteria that can calculate and determine the interest level or mark how active they were (such as based on how many pages the person has visited). Topping that, Salesforce can automatically run a check for duplicate contacts so that you don’t have “twin” records for the same lead.
Furthermore, depending on the specific needs of the organization, it is possible to set up Lead Processes in Salesforce that’ll help to construct the standard lifecycle of the lead and to therefore have all team members on the same page.
This also in many respects deals with the automated lead assignment, established via set rules. All in all, appertaining to the indicated peculiarities of the lead, it can then be routed to the most suitable employees for further management or closure (ex. distribute the lead by region or to that sales rep who has expertise in a specific product). This way, there’s no need to shoot in the dark when it comes to matching perfect leads with their perfect sales specialists.
Final Say
Summing up, there’s a multitude of ways how to generate leads. The most important factors to keep in mind deal with splitting them by readiness so as to branch out your further work with your prospects. And if connecting your website and other lead gen channels with the Salesforce CRM, you can definitely benefit from having your entire lead processes be more organized and automated.
