Best Practices for Lead Sources and Salesforce

[Anonymous]

I was curious how others handle lead sources.

We have an instance that has been around for a while and practice was for marketing to make a unique lead source for every campaign which required creating a new lead source in Salesforce every single time.  Between multiple groups and multiple years, a very large amount of lead sources have been created and it just seems messy and not very scalable  to me.

I was curious how others have handled this. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Jason,
you might want to consider adding "Lead Source Details" custom field that would be specific to a campaign, then limit the number of values used as lead sources (webinar, tradeshow, website, referral etc).
So if the "Lead Source" is "Webinar", "Lead Source Details" is the name of the attended webinar.
If the "Lead Source" is "Website", the "Lead Source Details" is the name of the downloaded collateral. 
This way the lead source is normalized which makes it more scalable and easier to use in reports.
Cheers,
Elena.

[Anonymous]

This is a great question and something I hear a lot. 
When you're looking at lead sources, try to keep it to 5-7. Lead source is really looking to tell you how your channels are doing, not a particular campaign. 
You can use lead source detail as a way for another layer of deatil, but I also wouldn't advice going down to the actual campaign. 

The campaign object is what will give you an idea of how your campaigns are doing. You  may also want to include campaign type as away to report on how groups of campaigns are doing.