Planning Your Leads Implementation

Do you need to customize fields to meet your business needs?

Leads in Salesforce have default fields such as Lead Source and Lead Status but you can customize them to help you track your leads better. Also, you can create custom fields to meet your specific business needs.

Consider these suggestions for planning custom fields:

• Customize the Lead Source field. This field indicates the marketing channel used to get the lead. By default, the Lead Source field includes sources like Web, advertisement, and trade show. Your company may generate leads based on other sources, which you can add to the Lead Source field. For example:
  • Email
  • Events
  • Purchased lists of leads
  • Leads captured from your website
• Customize the Lead Status field. This field indicates the state of the lead in the pre-sales process of turning a lead into an opportunity. Some default values for the Lead Status field include Open, Contacted, and Qualified. These values may not match your pre-sales process, so you may want to add other values.
• Create custom fields. Salesforce provides standard lead fields, but you’ll likely want to track additional information specific to your business. Create a list of all the attributes you want to track. Then, prepare a list of all the custom fields you need to create for each attribute.
• Map custom fields. Salesforce automatically maps standard lead fields to standard account, contact, and opportunity fields when you convert a lead into an account, contact, and opportunity. Custom lead fields can be mapped to custom account, contact, or opportunity fields. Before converting a lead, create the appropriate custom account, contact, or opportunity fields. Then, set the appropriate mapping for the custom lead fields.

What information should be available on leads?

If you want to make some fields read only or required and hide other fields completely, customize your lead page layout.

Before customizing your lead page layout, think about how you plan to use it. Here are some things to consider:

• Fields that should be visible
• Fields that should be editable
• Fields that should be required
• Related lists that you want on the lead page layout
• Custom links that you want on the lead page layout

Do you want to create email templates for lead assignment rules or auto-response rules, or to send to prospects who are interested in your company?

To get started quickly, create text email templates using Salesforce merge fields. Merge fields are placeholders for variable text that you want replaced with data from your records.

Determine how many email templates you need. For example, you may need email templates for:

• Reps to use as introductions, company overviews, invitations to events, seminar invitations, or thank you notes
• Capturing leads online by sending email to people who submit forms on your website
• Sending your users a notification when they are assigned a new lead

Note You may want to create folders to organize your email templates and ensure that they are available to the appropriate users.

How do you want to route incoming leads?

When incoming leads are imported or generated through your website, Salesforce automatically assigns them to users or queues. You can define assignment rules to ensure the leads go to the right owner.

Consider the following when planning assignment rules:

• How leads will be assigned, for example, based on territory, product interest, or on a lead assignment hierarchy
• If leads will be assigned to users or queues, which allow members of the queue to take ownership of the leads
• The lead attributes that determine how a lead is routed, for example, by geography

Where are you planning to capture leads?

If you already have a product inquiry page on your website where customers can enter contact information, you can easily customize the HTML and redirect the information to Salesforce using web-to-lead. Or connect LinkedIn Lead Gen advertisements to Salesforce. When prospective customers fill out a form with their information, we convert the data directly to new leads in Salesforce.

Consider the following when planning your web-to-lead or LinkedIn ad implementation:

• Design a default email template that reflects your company brand and messaging to send to people who submit inquiries through your website or an ad.
• Set up auto-response rules that determine when to send custom lead-specific email templates.
• Consider custom lead fields that you want captured.

Who should have access to leads?

It may be important to your company to limit the visibility of leads. Select the sharing model that fits the level of visibility you want.

• Public Read/Write/Transfer: Users can view, edit, and transfer ownership of any record, regardless of owner
• Public Read/Write: Users can view and edit any record regardless of owner, but cannot change the record owner
• Public Read Only: Users can view any record but only edit ones they own
• Private: Only lead owners, their managers, and Salesforce admins have access to view and edit their leads

Do you have leads to import into Salesforce?

If you have leads that aren't yet in Salesforce, you can import them so that all your leads are in one place. Importing your lead data into Salesforce is easy, regardless of what application you use.

Before you import your data from another source:

• Determine if you need to create custom fields to accommodate imported data that isn’t tracked in standard fields.
• Decide if you want to use assignment rules, for example, to auto-assign leads when you import them.