About 5 mins
Learning Objectives
Manage and nurture leads, sales pipe and lead routing, summing it up.
- Challenge +100 points
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Discover more, manage leads.
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss ways to manage and nurture leads.
- Describe sales pipe and lead routing.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve managed to round up a substantial number of qualified and working leads. Things are looking up, and everyone has high hopes! But, what do you do with them?
Lead Management
Lead management is what happens after lead generation: It’s a bridge between marketing and sales. It’s a process that starts with identifying leads, qualifying them, and then with working them as sales opportunities.
In lead management, your job is to help people learn more about your product or service, about industry trends, and about successful customers they can relate to and be inspired by. Engaging and educating prospective customers is at the core of lead management and nurturing.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing refers to the specific actions that give your new relationship what it needs to prosper. Some leads want regular emails, some want quick responses on social media, and others want to call you up and have a conversation about what you offer.
Focus on the nurturing tactics your customers like best—developing an effective lead nurturing strategy pays off. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate more sales-ready leads at lower cost and boast more sales reps making quota than companies that struggle with nurturing.
Lead Management Software
Lead management software helps companies generate new leads and keep track of who they are, how to reach them, and how they were found in the first place.
This software captures information at the lead’s point of contact with your organization—such as a landing page visit, white paper download, or email open. Based on the lead’s action, they’re automatically scored and the software suggests a next action. Collecting data about how leads and customers are interacting with your brand online allows you to create one-to-one customer journeys and helps your salespeople focus on qualified sales leads while you send other leads on automated nurturing journeys.
All your hard work generating, qualifying, and nurturing leads pays off in the sales pipeline. When you fill your pipeline with quality leads, you help your sales team actively close deals and generate revenue. Surf’s up!
Scoring and Grading
As soon as leads enter the marketing funnel, you should start qualifying them to see which ones are worth additional time and effort. Lead scoring and grading technology can automatically calculate a lead’s value to your company (score) and likelihood of becoming an active customer (grade).
Lead scoring is based on a prospect’s activities, such as the number of pages viewed and forms completed. These activities indicate their level of interest. Lead grading is based on key factors pertaining to individual prospects, such as their location, industry, or company size.
Using lead scoring and grading together helps ensure that only high-quality leads are shared with your sales team—which optimizes their time by allowing them to reach out to the right lead at the right time.
Routing Leads
Once your sales pipeline is full of high-quality leads, you need to route them to your sales team. Lead routing is about assigning each lead to the sales rep best suited to guide them through a successful transaction. This can mean distributing leads by geographic territory, by deal size, or by products or services. This helps marketers streamline leads for sales, eliminating the need to comb through leads and guess which ones are right.
Of course, different sales organizations distribute leads in different ways. However you choose to share leads with sales teams, lead management software can help by creating fixed assignment rules based on lead qualification criteria and generating automated reports on pipeline status and sales team performance.
Everyone wants to do better business, and being able to meet customers’ expectations before they’re ready to buy a product or service can yield great rewards. To do so, you’ll want to master inbound marketing basics, understand the various types of lead classifications, and capably manage those leads.
Get started today by learning more about how to generate leads with marketing automation at the link in this unit’s resources. A transformative relationship with your customers is just a few clicks away!
- Salesforce: 3 Key Tips for Optimizing Your Landing Page for Lead Generation
- Trailhead: Lead Nurturing Campaigns
- Salesforce: Generate More Leads with Marketing Automation (Sign-Up Required)
We'd love to hear about your experience with Trailhead - you can now access the new feedback form anytime from the Salesforce Help site.
HOW TO: LEAD GENERATION
Lead routing in salesforce.
Assuming you have more than one sales rep in your company, when a lead comes in, you’re going to have to decide who gets it. This is known as lead routing.
Lead routing : The process of distributing incoming leads among sales reps. Also known as lead assignment, lead routing is usually automated.
A lead routing process could be as simple as making an alphabetical list of all of your sales reps and assigning each new lead to whomever’s next in line. More sophisticated systems depend on a variety of lead assignment rules, which are often based on territory (geography), industry, potential deal size, or other factors.
With Salesforce you can easily create automated, rules-based routing to assign leads. Salesforce lead assignment rules are customizable, combinable, and easy to create.
We’ve gathered up some great resources so you can learn more about lead routing in Salesforce.
Trailhead : Qualify and Route Leads to Your Reps Take an in-depth look at the importance of prioritizing incoming leads. Learn to qualify leads quickly, and see how your marketing team can effectively score leads using Salesforce lead routing.
Trailhead : Grow Your Business with Sales Cloud Learn how Sales Cloud automatically prioritizes and routes leads to the best possible rep using Salesforce lead assignment rules.
Trailhead : Convert and Assign Leads Go hands-on with a step-by-step guide to setting up criteria-based lead assignment rules in Salesforce. Automate your sales lead routing the easy way.
Trailhead : Sell as a Team Learn the principles behind team selling, and how to use Sales Cloud’s account teams feature with lead assignment.
Salesforce Documentation
Official Documentation : Leads How to track prospects apart from your contacts and opportunities with Salesforce lead records. After you’ve qualified your lead records, convert them to contacts and create accounts for them.
Official Documentation : Salesforce Lead Management Implementation Guide Make sure you have everything you need on-hand before you set up lead management
Official Documentation : Guidelines for Setting Up Web-to-Lead Get Salesforce ready to gather information from your company’s website and automatically generate up to 500 new leads a day.
Official Documentation : How Do I Create a Round-Robin Assignment for Leads or Cases to Users? Learn to assign leads (or cases) that are either manually created or created using web-to-lead (or web-to-case).
Official Documentation : Managing Assignment Rules Step-by-step instructions for creating assignment rules to automate your organization’s lead generation and support processes.
Trailblazer Community
Knowledge Article : Identify Leads Created by Web-to-Lead Quick tutorial lets you show that a lead has been created using web-to-lead.
Q&A : Criteria-Specific Lead Routing Learn to route leads using a round-robin method, for specific lead sources only.
Q&A : Round-Robin Assignment for Leads Get the details on Salesforce lead assignment rules, specifically how to implement round-robin or balanced load methods for assignment of leads.
Q&A : Lead Routing — 2-to-1 Assignment Explore strategies and third-party AppExchange solutions for routing leads among teams with different numbers of members.
Q&A : Lead Assignment Based on Zip Code Get step-by-step instructions and a video-based guide to Salesforce lead routing based on zip code.
More Awesome Resources
Slideshare : Lead Management 101: Qualifying, Scoring, and Routing Your Leads for Success Learn all about lead management basics, including lead business processes, techniques for web capture, lead routing, lead scoring, and conversion. Then hear how experts are using Salesforce to generate better leads.
Pardot Knowledge Base : Market to Your Customers with Pardot Explore multiple ways to assign prospects within Pardot and Salesforce, including manual assignment and using automation rules or completion actions to assign prospects to a user or group based on their activity or information.
Salesforce Stack Exchange : Lead Assignment Round-Robin Based on Lead Source Want to use round-robin lead assignment only for certain leads, like leads coming from Facebook? Follow these easy instructions for implementing round-robin lead assignment triggered by a lead source value.
“ Forty-six percent of sales leaders say deeper customer relationships are a key objective for sustaining success.” Salesforce, “State of Sales” | ***note hidden for later reuse -dw ****
What is Salesforce CRM? See how the #1 CRM can help you grow your business.
The lead generation collection, how to grow your business with lead generation, free small business tools to grow your company, lead generation in salesforce, web-to-lead in salesforce, customer journeys in salesforce, qualifying leads in salesforce, lead management in salesforce, lead nurturing in salesforce, the sales pipeline in salesforce, lead scoring and grading in salesforce.
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