Publish date:

• 9th October, 2023

Businesses in search of a robust sales pipeline and sealing deals with the Salesforce CRM tool realise the need to go beyond keeping an eye on sales effectiveness & building many pipeline dashboards. The process begins with building a smooth workflow that details how sales personnel ought to engage with prospects to convert them into sales deals. Salesforce Lead Management is used for this very purpose effectively by companies and a Salesforce partner.

With the help of Salesforce and a Salesforce partner, businesses can smoothly manage their prospect management process & pipeline including:

• Acquiring prospects

• Assigning scores to prospects to know who is likely to convert faster

• Assigning priority to each prospect and assigning them to sales deptt team members

• Converting “hot” prospects into a sales opportunity

• Engaging with prospects that are new or undecided

• Analysing prospect management progress.

Here are some tips on effective Salesforce prospect management process:

1. Acquire more prospects – With the help of Salesforce and a Salesforce partner, here are some ways to enhance the prospect list including Automatic lead capturing with Salesforce in-built functionality alternatively Salesforce AppExchange apps. Lead import with the Salesforce Data Import Wizard. Using it, users can mass import data on prospects from Excel docs or email apps, like Outlook or Gmail. Manual lead input is great for single prospects. Get help from a Salesforce partner.

2. Be alert for duplicate prospect records Avoid a mess/chaos in your prospect database. Have someone appointed to regularly clean the records. Errors, typos, duplicates, etc. need to be weeded out, confirms a Salesforce partner. Duplicate records for one prospect can occur because of many reasons. So, before creating a new prospect, don’t end up creating a duplicate state of a Salesforce partner. If by any chance you do locate multiple profiles belonging to the same individual, merge them with either Salesforce or partner information cleansing tools found in the AppExchange. Plus, validation rules that restrict the conversion of prospects with incomplete information can be used.

3. Be diligent with prospect qualification needs – Every company wants to know as soon as possible that a prospect is worth investing time & energy in or should be let go of, at least for the time being.  Hence before marking a prospect as an opportunity, it must pass muster a set of prospect qualifications criteria. These criteria include the name of the decision maker + revenue amount + closure time period + rivals and any issues/challenges.

4. Keep the conversion pot alive and boiling for qualified prospects – The objective of any salesperson is to get as many as prospects to become clients or else shift focus to those who will. To make it happen, it's ideal for Salesforce lead management to assign a follow-up task to enable prospects to become paying clients. If managed smartly and diligently, the pipeline will contain the ‘freshest’ prospects for nurturing much to the delight of all says a Salesforce partner.

5. Nurture the prospects – Meaningful engagement and conversations are essential to keep a prospect interested in the offerings of a business. It could be meeting for a cup of tea or sending tips and guides. Subtlety and sophistication are needed for this task. Good content never fails confirms a Salesforce partner.

Also Read: BEST PRACTICES FOR SALESFORCE INTEGRATION