Are you struggling to deal with leads vs contacts in Salesforce? Relax! A lot of businesses tend to mix them up. Unfortunately, this predicament turns out to waste a lot of time while at the same time causing a significant loss in sales. If your team is pursuing the wrong leads or missing critical opportunities, there is a high chance that your revenue is getting negatively impacted.
For instance, imagine that you have spent weeks nurturing an eager customer who seems all ready to buy your product, only to discover to your utter shock that the customer hasn't been made contact.
Similarly, your sales reps keep calling them without knowing that they have already interacted with them in the past. Such scenarios are bound to leave your staff and the customer irritable. As a result, poor data management not only slows down sales but also stifles growth.
A system helps businesses in tracking leads and ensures timely follow-up which leads to closing more deals. Therefore, knowing the difference between Salesforce contact vs lead makes your sales team much more agile and efficient. In this article, you will explore how Salesforce contacts and leads work, when leads should be converted, and how to better manage the sales pipeline.
In this section, you will learn the differences between Salesforce leads and contacts. You will understand how each of them functions within the sales cycle and why managing them correctly is crucial.
A lead in Salesforce is an individual who has expressed interest in your product/service but has not yet been assessed as a prospective customer. Leads might originate from a plethora of sources, including campaigns, referrals, or even direct inquiries. Most of the time, the information available about the prospect is rudimentary. Here’s a simple overview of leads:
A Salesforce contact is an individual that you have screened and linked to an account usually a company or organization. Contacts are people who intend to purchase from or engage in some form of communication with your business. Here’s a simple overview of Contacts:
Contacts are important in the business building process because they are a constant form of prospective customers or clients.
Leads and contacts are both important in the sales cycle, but within Salesforce, they have different functions. Here is a comparison that highlights the differences.
Understanding the difference between Salesforce Leads vs Contacts is crucial for effective Salesforce management. Here’s why:
Properly managing leads and contacts ensures that your team spends maximum time interacting with high-value prospects and customers.
Track contacts more accurately by rising qualified leads to contacts. This way, you can track conversions better.
You can pull reports based on leads and contacts individually, allowing better and more relevant business intelligence. Additionally, automated reports help you make informed decisions about targets, budgets, and sales strategies.
A lead should be converted when they show real interest and qualify as a customer. Some common signals a lead is ready to include:
Moving a lead to a contact changes the person from a prospective client to an actual relationship. This gives your team better control over tracking interactions and managing the sales funnel more seamlessly.
All records have a certain purpose in Salesforce, so you won’t have a hard time addressing when to use which one. Here’s when to use each:
Salesforce optimally aligns with your business operations. Follow these steps to ensure a smooth and efficient system:
Set up web-to-lead forms, lead assignment rules, and automation processes to capture leads and funnel them to the appropriate sales representatives. Set workflows for automatic contact creation through lead conversion.
Structure lead data depending on the area, industry, interest, or sale readiness. This allows your team to focus on the right opportunities and helps in personalized communication.
Accomplish activity management features of Salesforce and track every activity done with both contacts and leads. This ensures that any follow-up actions are not forgotten and creates a holistic interaction record.
Business data in Salesforce needs to be cleaned regularly to remove duplicates and obsolete leads, and edit important details. Moreover, clean data results in greater report accuracy and smoother operations.
Create lead conversion, customer engagement, and pipeline health metrics to track with custom reports and dashboards. With such insights available, taking action to enhance sales performance becomes simple.
Below are a few statistics that show the importance of managing Salesforce leads and contacts:
Knowing contacts as well as leads makes selling easier. For example, leads are potential customers who are interested but have not made the decision to purchase yet. Meanwhile, contacts are individuals who your business is already dealing with. As a result, converting leads at the right time enables your team to focus on buyers who are ready to purchase.
In addition, effective systems enable sales follow-up, effort duplication elimination and increase the number of sale closings. With this in mind, Salesforce tracking customers for interaction and building relationships is made easier.
For maximum output, the business units should develop and implement a basic workflow on how to work with leads and contacts. Ultimately, the right strategy helps save time, improve customer relationships, and boost sales performance.
Are you dealing with untidy sales data along with lost opportunities? Don't worry, this is a common challenge for many businesses. Overseeing leads and contacts in Salesforce can be challenging— but with the right approach, it's completely manageable!
PixelConsulting helps companies with complete CRM management, sales automation, and controlling conversions, moving them from leads to sales with Salesforce Sales Cloud integration. Imagine a business model where every lead is attended to, every opportunity is organized, and no contact is neglected. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?
Never let confusion slow your progress. Contact us today or book a free appointment with our Salesforce experts. Let’s transform the way your CRM works!
A Salesforce Lead is a person with a tentative opportunity, whereas a Salesforce Contact is someone who has already been vetted and is further along the customer engagement journey.
No. A contact is already engaged, while a lead is a starting point, which after qualifying, becomes a contact.
To convert a lead to a contact, click on the “Convert” button in the lead record. This will result in creating the contact, opportunity, and sometimes account.
Maintaining the distinction helps avoid clutter in your CRM. More specifically, leads require nurturing, while contacts are people who are ready to use sales or services.
Absolutely! The automation capabilities of Salesforce, such as workflows and process builders, can be used to automate the conversion of leads into contacts and opportunities, making the process more efficient.
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