Best Practice - Lead Source for New Contacts Added to Existing Accounts?

You could create a "Support" tag to track those new contacts. Additionally, you can create another field "Last Lead Source" to track the latest campaign engagement.

"Existing Customer" or "Existing Account" is a lead source I've seen used. It's more of a semantic thing - you just have to get buy-in and make sure everyone knows what the value you end up using means.

You could infer the person's source by the questions they are asking when they call in (product issue = end user, billing question = existing customer, etc.), and ask them how they learned of your company if it isn't clear from the conversation. We utilize a case detail field with a single-sentence description of the call and you could do an affinity diagramming analysis on this field to identify patterns to label your new source. Of course, you can always ask your question to the people taking the calls to identify the largest buckets of sources of the calls.

Let us know what you finally end up doing.

Hi @Jennifer DiMaria​,

I would offer similar advice to the above, in that you likely should create another pick-list value for "Support Case/Call".

Do you track call counts in your instance?  If so you could use this to infer per Jason Webber​'s suggestion above.

You could also set lead source by user (support team members) to default to "Support Case/Call".

All able to be scripted on the SFDC side, which is where I'm guessing your support team is modifying data anyway?

agreed with Charlie Liang​, it's not actually a lead, so it shouldn't be attributed as a new lead. You will want to make sure people understand that this is a contact added to an existing account!

Hey Jennifer,

This has been the subject of a great deal of debate at a lot of companies I've worked with. The general conversation goes like this:

1. Marketing wants the deals coming from that lead to be attributed back to the Marketing source (ie. the original lead)
2. SDRs want the deals coming from that lead to be attributed to their prospecting efforts (eg. I found the guy that turned into the deal)
3. The business just wants the deal to close

Once you get passed that part of the conversation what you discover is that everyone has the shared goal of generating revenue for the business and that goal is enhanced by understanding that BOTH sources are important.

The way I prefer to solve this is to have the source for these leads to be listed as "Account Prospecting" or "Existing Lead Referral" - Or any other source name that makes it clear that there was already an account and this person's source will never be the original source that led to an outcome.

Where it gets interesting is how you actually leverage this fact later. What I then do is create a Contact Role in Salesforce called "Introducer" who, surprisingly enough was the person who introduced me to the contact the SDR really wanted to speak to. Then I add a validation rule to the SFDC opportunity that says that if it only has one Contact Role, and that Contact Role's source is "Existing Lead Referral", the SDR must add the introducer to the opportunity with that contact role.

After that, everyone is a winner, the SDR gets to clearly indicate that their prospecting effort drove the opportunity, and Marketing can attribute the opportunity to the introducer.

Marketing is happy because their demand gen efforts get credit for their results

SDRs are happy because their prospecting efforts get credit for their results

The business is happy because both teams are working together to generate results.

Hope this helps

-Guy