Automate it!

Now that we have a process in place, how can we automate as much as possible inside the application? Here are 4 easy tools that can help.

Web-to-Lead
Are you generating leads on your website? Salesforce web-to-lead forms allow you to post all of your inbound web leads directly in to Salesforce. We’ll dive deeper in to web-to-lead in the web integration section but for those of you new to the concept check out Kraig’s previous post here to get you started: http://blogs.salesforce.com/marketing/2007/03/capturing_leads.html

Assignment Rules
Your lead gen machine is in full gear but where are all of the leads going? Assignment rules can help you get the right leads to the right people, and keep those Mickey Mouse leads far away from your sales teams. Located in the admin set up, these rules let you assign leads to users or queues based on any criteria you may be capturing on the lead or related objects. For example, all leads in the eastern US should go to one rep, and leads in the western US to another.

Auto-Response Rules
Your sales team is busy and might not be able to follow up on every lead in ample time, so let marketing handle the first point of communication. Auto-response rules can be based on any criteria that you are capturing or pre-populating on the lead record and can leverage text and html templates.

Lead Scoring
Pre-score your leads so only the most qualified are getting passed over to sales. You can create some basic lead scoring formulas using custom formula fields.

In this example, we’ll leverage the lead source field and provide a higher score for leads generated through our “contact us form” than through “advertising”. Simply add a custom field to leads called “lead score” and use the following formula: Case(LeadSource, “Contact Us Form”,2,”Advertising”,1,0). Now I can leverage assignment rules and send all of my 0 and 1 leads to a queue for marketing to cultivate and send my 2 leads on to the sales organization.

These are some out of the box ways you can start to optimize and automate your lead management process but don’t stop here – get creative! With all the developments to the platform in the past years, including custom formula fields, workflows, validation rules, roll up summary fields, etc. there are a lot of options for you to create a process inside Salesforce that is  aligned to your business process.

Salesforce includes a number of powerful features to help you manage and optimize your lead flow - Sales Leads Tools ensure that leads are optimally routed while automatically recording all touches with prospects and customers. The Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product, ensures that marketing and sales are always in tandem when it comes to growing your sales. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.