Lead Management - Salesforce Best Practices

Lead Management

Find Duplicates

Utilize the “Find Duplicates” button to avoid creating Leads which already exist in Salesforce. Before working a new Lead, use the “Find Duplicates”  button, located in the Additional Information section of a Lead, to search all Leads, Contacts, Accounts, or Opportunities for duplicate information. By default
Salesforce will search every field you have populated in the Lead record. When you click on Search, Salesforce will show you ALL Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities that match any of criteria selected in the Lead. If a match is found you can use the Convert Lead button to covert the Lead with the appropriate Lead, Contact, Account or Opportunity. Following this process will prevent you from creating duplicate information as well as from working a lead that may already be in Salesforce!

Lead Source

The standard “Lead Source” picklist is normally used in conjunction with the standard “Campaign” lookup field when creating new leads either manually, from web-to-lead, or in bulk uploads. The “Lead Source”
would be the top category like Trade Show, Web, Mass Email, etc.

Then the “Campaign” lookup field can link the lead to the actual campaign when it is created. It is customary to hide the two  fields in the web-to-lead form with pre-populated information (like Lead
Source = Web& Campaign = Mass Email Mar2013) so that the information is then reportable. You would use a different form for each source and campaign combination. When creating leads manually or bulk
uploading, these fields would need to be manually specified. If you use the same web-to-lead form on multiple pages for different campaigns, then the above model will not work. You will need to use a dynamic lead source with a custom field to track the data by URL or some other means. This would need to be passed through to Salesforce by either a 3rd party provider or by code on your web page.

General Things to consider
* Be sure to have a well understood lead conversion process in place
* Converting leads that are not properly qualified can actually hurt you more than help  you You have  
   the option to create an opportunity when converting a lead
* There may be times when you need to convert a lead but are not ready to create an opportunity. Utilize
   this option instead of creating an opportunity that is not valid
* Maintain your leads - Stale leads should be purged or followed up with so your list does not get too
   unwieldy