Best Practices for Leads & Contacts in Salesforce

[Anonymous]

I am curious to hear what others have found to be a best practice in terms of Leads vs. Contacts in Salesforce. The cons to using leads and having them converted into contacts seems to be that 1) reporting is much more difficult - two reports to pull - and 2) reps would need to look in two separate places for their MQLs - the leads and the contacts module.

I'm wondering if there has been a best method that you employ at your company, and what you have found to work (or not work). Our current process is to have contacts updated as they engage and continue to score & move through the model, even if they are not a lead record type. Is this a best practice? Or should they be created as a new lead and then merged upon the "convert to contact" action?

Thanks in advance!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jackie,

There is no unique response on this issue. Let's start with the basics : the linear lead -> contact + account + opportunity process that salesforce natively enforces is a little obsolete. It comes from times when lead generation were always preceding opportunity management and if leads were not converted, they were discarded.

If you add to this that :

• the SFDC Conversion utility is complex to use, and error prone
• Marketo (and other Marketing Automation tools, BTW) can only create leads, not contacts. So when a new person comes to you web site and fills out a form, he/she will turn into a lead in SFDC.

You have a not that compelling picture 🙂

You may want to consider 3 possibilities that can be mixed :

1. You only use contacts and accounts. This works for businesses targeting large enterprise, when you can map all the accounts in your sales territory. Imports have to be done in salesforce and data will have to be qualified before import. Typically, your marketing activities in this environment would be ABM. The processes are simple in this case and you mainly have to manage statuses at contact level. In case a lead appears in the system, created by marketing automation, you convert it as soon as you have enough info to identify the account and get rid of it.
2. You use leads. This works for smaller targets, when it's impossible to list all the potential targets and indeed most of business opportunities come from Marketing. This choice will require a more complex process as you will have to manage the lead ownership transition from marketing to sales, the recycling when lead are not mature, the role played by telemarketing in between, the identification of accounts for new leads even with partial information, ... But in some cases, you won't have a choice.
3. You use a mixed process in which you use leads, but leads are converted by marketing when qualification shows that their is a suspicion of an opportunity and then marketing assigns the opportunity to sales. In this version you remove the conversion task to sales, and all the problems and errors that come with it, but you agree that sales can dismiss the opportunity and you end up with lots of opportunities lots at the first stage.

Whatever the choice, always remember :

• To avoid duplicates at all cost (never create a lead if the contact already exists).
• The choice you make also has impacts on how you measure marketing contribution to business

Hope this helps,

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

Generally yes, it just depends.

As for Leads vs. Contacts it depends on how sales works the leads. I disagree that MQLs are a problem because:

1. Personal Lead View will show sales what they own, which should be MQL and up.

2. Existing Contacts should be flagged with a Task and an email alert, so you can go there. Contacts should have a matching Contact Status and Lifecycle Stage on them too.

But this also depends a lot on the approach taken with Sales and SFDC. I prefer that SDR/BDR/LDR qualify Leads and help Sales convert to Contacts. With the new LeanData and other ABM tools, this should become easier or even automatic. At this point, I would consider a Contact only system since I can automate this.

As for reporting, the two reports in SFDC only matter if you are looking at the lifecycle setup. Ideally you should use RCM/RCE to report on this aspect of the system.

Ultimately, I think your existing setup is fine and that's generally how people manage it.