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Force.com Discussion Boards :
Salesforce User Discussions :
Best Practices Discussion :
Re: Leads with multiple 'Contacts'
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Re: Leads with multiple 'Contacts'
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Fifedog
Trusted Contributor
Posts: 379
Message 7 of 19
Viewed 11,579 times
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Just to add my two cents on this bit on two points: Reporting and touch points.
I've only been with this company for 6 months now, but have been on SFDC for over 2 years now. When I came on board they where already using leads in a typical fashion that I'm sure most start ups do. They had over 15 leads Sources different, redudent custom fields and so forth. From a high level, C-level, no real analysis could be determined with out intervention. The VP couldn't ask the simple question, how man leads did we get over the web. This was becasue 9 different lead sources where marked as web and cluttered up the charts.
After changing the methdology on how they wanted to report on inbound leads and start to capture ROI analysis I've put up 3 different dashboards all around Leads and Campaigns. Leads for the last 120 days, Campaigns for the current fiscal year, current fiscal quarter, and a rolling 365 day charts.
Below is the quote from our VP of marketing:
"Very nice, in 20 years of marketing I've never been able to show metrics ROI like this!! May 2005 bring more of this, especially with the partner portal."
What I had them change was making all touchpoints go into campaigns. From there when a prospect 'lead' touches any fortinet we know how many times, when they where, and what came out of it. Is there more data clean up and do dilagence... sure but isn't that going to be part of any process? However I think using leads and being able to report the way SFDC gives up is a huge success.
Anyway... my two cents... or a bit more.
Pete
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01-20-2005 09:57 AM
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Re: Leads with multiple 'Contacts'
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Gersh
Regular Contributor
Posts: 79
Message 8 of 19
Viewed 12,340 times
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successman wrote:
So this is a great discussion. What is a lead?
A best practice that I use is to define a lead as a unqualified prospect only. Trade shows, generic purchased lists, inbound calls etc. I generally stress to users that leads should be used to disqualify potential prospects so they stay out of accounts.
A common misconception is that accounts are only customers. This is not true. Accounts in my world are customers, qualified prospects, competitors, vendors, even your own company should be an account within salesforce to take advantage of mass email and other communication vehicles.
As soon as you have enough information to qualify a lead it should be converted immediately, the account "type" now being "prospect" One of the obvious advantages you have already seen is the ability to manage interactions with multiple contacts and/or opportunities.
You may figure out a way to create custom lead fields for contact 2, contact 3 etc. DO NOT DO IT. You will compound your problems when you convert the lead because that information will now need to be turned into individual contacts.
It sounds to me like your list contains what I would call "qualified prospects" and therefore I would save yourself a tremendous amount of troubla and simply import as a single account with multiple contacts. When you import set the account type to prospect or even pre-qualified prospect.
Yes, this is a good discussion.
The challenge is that you can't create a web-to-contact field in SFDC. All incoming responses to your web forms MUST be tagged as leads, qualified or not, known or not.
I think this is a problem with how SFDC is initially configured. It impacts not only analysis of touch points in determining campaign effectiveness, but it makes it **bleep** hard to get a decent report.
I think when Salesforce finally fixes this, it'll be Martha Stewart ("a good thing").
- Steve
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01-20-2005 03:49 PM
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