Best Practices for Leads & Contacts in Salesforce

Hi Jackie,

There is no unique response on this issue. Let's start with the basics : the linear lead -> contact + account + opportunity process that salesforce natively enforces is a little obsolete. It comes from times when lead generation were always preceding opportunity management and if leads were not converted, they were discarded.

If you add to this that :

• the SFDC Conversion utility is complex to use, and error prone
• Marketo (and other Marketing Automation tools, BTW) can only create leads, not contacts. So when a new person comes to you web site and fills out a form, he/she will turn into a lead in SFDC.

You have a not that compelling picture :-)

You may want to consider 3 possibilities that can be mixed :

1. You only use contacts and accounts. This works for businesses targeting large enterprise, when you can map all the accounts in your sales territory. Imports have to be done in salesforce and data will have to be qualified before import. Typically, your marketing activities in this environment would be ABM. The processes are simple in this case and you mainly have to manage statuses at contact level. In case a lead appears in the system, created by marketing automation, you convert it as soon as you have enough info to identify the account and get rid of it.
2. You use leads. This works for smaller targets, when it's impossible to list all the potential targets and indeed most of business opportunities come from Marketing. This choice will require a more complex process as you will have to manage the lead ownership transition from marketing to sales, the recycling when lead are not mature, the role played by telemarketing in between, the identification of accounts for new leads even with partial information, ... But in some cases, you won't have a choice.
3. You use a mixed process in which you use leads, but leads are converted by marketing when qualification shows that their is a suspicion of an opportunity and then marketing assigns the opportunity to sales. In this version you remove the conversion task to sales, and all the problems and errors that come with it, but you agree that sales can dismiss the opportunity and you end up with lots of opportunities lots at the first stage.

Whatever the choice, always remember :

• To avoid duplicates at all cost (never create a lead if the contact already exists).
• The choice you make also has impacts on how you measure marketing contribution to business

Hope this helps,

-Greg