Lead in Salesforce

Lead object is used to store information about a person interested in the product or service we are delivering. In business terms, leads are the people who are your potential customers. It contains some information about a company and the information of a person working in that company. Hence Lead in Salesforce can be considered as a business card.

• Leads are prospects who’ve expressed interest in our product but aren’t qualified to buy it, hence they can also be called as an unqualified prospect.

• Lead conversion means qualifying a lead for the sales process.

• Lead management is a process that allows us to measure and monitor lead conversion. It helps inside opportunities or telesales teams qualify leads before passing them on to sales.

• Sales reps get instant access to the latest prospects and ensure that leads are never dropped.

Important Fields:

Company:

Name of the company with which the lead is affiliated.

Title:

Position of lead within his/her own company.

Lead Status:

This field specifies the status on which the lead is. For example, Open, Contacted, Working, Closed-Converted, or Closes-Not Converted.

Lead Score:

 This field specifies the source from which the lead is captured. It can be anything like Web, Purchased List, and Partner Referrals etc.

Related Lists:

Campaign History

Campaign & Leads are related through a junction object i.e. Campaign Member.

Campaign History related list describes that in which campaign this particular lead has been added as a member and also it’s status for that campaign. When we initially create a lead record and add the campaign through a lookup dialog then also it is added to campaign history, not as a field.

Lead Process

Lead processes allows to create different process cycle a Sales representative follow for leads. We can set up different lead processes to control the steps our users follow for leads because there are different stages through which a lead gets in the process of qualifying and converting which varies from company to company & department to department.

In a Lead process, we define the picklist values of the Status field which will be available to the user using that lead process. By implementing different lead processes, we can have different lead life cycle for each kind of lead. Lead processes are included in record types which can be assigned to the user’s profile to have a different lead life cycle.

Setting up each process takes several steps:

• Step1:  Create the lead status needed in the lead process.
• Step2:  Name the lead process, and select what lead status are included in that particular process.
• Step3:  Create a record type for the sales process. Record types link the sales process to the page layout that goes with it.

Let us now learn Lead Assignment Rules, Web-to-lead & Auto Response Rule.