Best Practices for Lead Conversion in Salesforce

By: Kirsten Kippen

As with most things in Salesforce, lead conversion can be endlessly customized. While this is a fantastic attribute for businesses and organizations who have ironed out their processes, many of our clients starting out in Salesforce run into sticky spots trying to map out how and when to convert leads.

You can get a sense of the varying approaches and emotions around this topic from these excerpts from a recent conversation in the SMB Business group in the Success Community:

“Leads are far too often a pool of rogue records with little attention paid.”
“Leads do not work.”
“It’s different for every company.”

Clearly, this is a hot-button topic. We set out to compile some best practices and steps for you to approach your own lead conversion strategy.

Note: this post is primarily for B2B sales cycles for small-medium businesses. We have not seen leads used as frequently on the nonprofit side, but if you do use leads or are interested in this as a nonprofit let’s talk as we are interested to learn where you’re coming from.

First things, first, what is a lead?

A lead is a standard object in Salesforce that represents an individual at an early stage in the sales process. They’ve expressed an interest in what you have to offer, but require additional nurturing to verify and convert into a contact.

Leads are not as robust as other objects but they are useful for early-stage tracking. Salesforce’s sales process is designed around contacts, opportunities, and accounts, so as soon as you’re sure you want a relationship with them or there is a clear financial opportunity identified, you should convert to these objects.

Steps and best practices for lead conversion in Salesforce

1. Set up a system

Use the lead source field. One of the most powerful uses of leads is that they give you visibility into what marketing channels work...but only if you set up a picklist under lead source that has an option for each channel you want to track. We recommend 5-10 for starters. For us at Idealist Consulting we have Web, Events, Webinars, Dreamforce, Referral, and several others (don’t try to map out every last individual path, you can use campaigns for more specific efforts). Every new lead you get should be tagged to a lead source and you probably want to make this a required field.
Map out your business process. Tools like Gliffy (or just a pen and paper) can be helpful here: basically, you want a rough flow chart of your customer journey. Consider how you currently communicate and whether there is a handoff from one department to another. For this exercise, your goal is to identify when a good point to convert from lead to contact would be. Even if you’re still small and don’t have separate sales and marketing teams, it is important to define a key point here.
Use the lead status field. Equally important to lead sources are lead statuses: you need a picklist of lead statuses that mirrors your engagement process. Depending on your business process, you probably want some options like No contact, Email intro, Meeting request, Future, and Closed.
But don’t keep them in any one lead status too long. Leads are designed to be an initial stage only. Make sure your conversion point happens within a few months for your highest performing leads, and consider setting up a workflow to automatically close leads (or decrease the level of attention your team gives them) after several months.
Implement web-to-lead or another form tool to integrate your web leads with Salesforce. This means you might have to do it manually if your contact form currently connects only to Drupal or Wordpress or another back-end CMS.

2. Determine your conversion point. Here are some possible times to convert:

Immediately. This is not recommended, but one option is to convert every lead into a contact.
Once certain criteria are met. Many companies have 3-5 criteria or questions that must be answered before converting. Some examples: do they have a budget set? Do you know what industry/region they are in? Have they seen a demo? Are they “fresh” (new within past 30 days)? These are typically answered through lead qualification calls or forms.
Once a high lead score is reached. If you’re using a marketing automation solution like Pardot or HubSpot, you can use lead scoring to trigger a notice to your marketing team to convert a lead. For example, you could say that everyone with a lead score over 50 should be converted, and then you would assign point values to activities like viewing X number of pages on your website, attending an event, or opening an email.

*Note: there is a built-in “merge lead to existing account” feature but it doesn’t necessarily catch acronyms or slight variations, so when you convert, check manually to make sure the account doesn’t exist manually before creating a new one.

Pro tip: Create different account record types such as prospect, client, partner. Many businesses have different things they want to track (and different ways to communicate) with different contacts, and record types are a good way to organize this once a lead is qualified and converted.

3. Set a baseline

Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Set up a report to measure, at a minimum, the number of leads generated and the number of leads converted each month. You may also want to track the number of leads generated by different sources or other key data that shows progress. These can also be used for annual employee goals or incentives.
Create a service level agreement between Sales and Marketing: Once you have a sense of your average lead generation and qualification numbers, set an agreement of roughly how many leads marketing will contribute per month, and set up a regular meeting between sales and marketing directors to discuss how this is working, what lead sources are converting best, etc.

4. Track progress

Once you have a lead conversion system in place, don’t forget to monitor your reports to see trends. If you are getting less leads overall one month, but conversions are up, that means the sales pipeline is still flush but you may want to consider reaching out through new channels to keep the lead funnel active.

5. Don’t forget the customer experience

At the end of the day, a happy customer is a repeat customer so in the midst of all this process planning, make sure you’re thinking of how they want to be communicated with during both the lead and contact stages. Maybe a lead nurturing workflow makes sense for new leads where they get a series of drip emails, but don’t forget about regular communication with your contacts too, perhaps in a more targeted way.

Finally, even though it’s tempting to set this all up and forget about it, don’t fall victim to temptation! Your process for qualifying a lead may change over time, and it should. For example, if you start using a marketing automation solution, there will be a lot of new ways you can approach lead conversion. Or if you expand into a new business area, you may want to consider making a lower/higher criteria for conversion. Just make sure you go back to your business process map and identify who is responsible at each stage so it doesn’t get muddled.

For additional support, check out Sales and Marketing Best Practices from Salesforce.

If lead conversion sounds intimidating, don’t worry. We help customers with implementing web-to-lead and customizing contact/account/opportunity objects all day long and would be happy to chat with you. You can schedule a call with us, or fill out a form to see if you're ready to tackle full-on marketing automation.

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