HOW TO: LEAD GENERATION

Qualifying Leads in Salesforce

All leads are not the same. Determining a lead’s level of interest in, and fit for, what you’re selling helps you decide whether or not to pursue that lead, and where to prioritize it relative to other leads. The process of deciding if a lead is a “good” lead or not is called lead qualification.

Lead qualification: The process of determining how likely a lead is to ultimately turn into a paying customer. Qualified leads are leads that have been determined to have a good chance at converting into customers.

A number of factors go into this process, and one company’s lead qualification can look very different from another company’s, depending on the size of the organization, how marketing and sales work together, and so on. When a company has separate marketing and sales organizations, marketing will often qualify leads first before passing them on to sales. In turn, the sales team may then conduct its own review in order to best direct resources to the most promising leads.

This is sometimes called the sales lead qualification process, as it results in sales qualified leads.

Salesforce offers powerful tools for managing, qualifying, and routing leads. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, our B2B marketing automation solution, can also handle grading and scoring of leads before passing leads into your Salesforce CRM instance. Salesforce lead qualification helps take the guesswork out of the process, letting your teams focus on qualified leads.

Check out these resources to learn more about how to qualify leads in Salesforce.

Trailhead

Trailhead: Sales Cloud Einstein: Target the Best Leads
Learn how Salesforce’s artificial intelligence can analyze your history of lead conversions to help you target the best leads going forward.

Trailhead: Opportunity Management: Qualify and Route Leads to Your Reps
Understand the importance of prioritizing and qualifying leads quickly and effectively. Separate low-potential leads from high-priority, sales qualified leads.

Trailhead: Salesforce User Tour: Work with Leads and Opportunities
Go hands-on with the leads and opportunities workspaces, Salesforce’s easy-to-use interfaces for turning leads into conversions.

Blog: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Lead Scoring and Grading
See how to use scoring and grading in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce’s marketing automation tool, to identify the best leads for your sales team.

Salesforce Documentation

Official Documentation: Lead Qualification with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
Get an overview of qualifying your leads with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement scoring and grading tools.

Official Documentation: Lead Qualification Tips
One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is the ability to qualify leads. Getting a lead qualification system in place, however, can be a little confusing. Here are some tips to help get you started.

Trailblazer Community

Trailblazer Community: Lead Qualification with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
Get an overview of how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement scoring and grading tools work together to help you determine when a lead is a sales qualified lead.

Trailblazer Community: Using Lead Process in Salesforce
Step-by-step guide for setting up Lead Process to help your sales agents qualify leads. Understand the ins and outs of Salesforce lead qualification.

More Awesome Resources

Salesforce Developers Forum: The Five Stages of Leads
Learn how the five stages of leads are defined in Salesforce CRM.

Salesforce Blog: The Perfect Sales Qualified Lead
Get to know the top traits of the perfect sales qualified lead so your marketing and sales teams can work together to grow the business. Perfect your own sales lead qualification process.

Best Practices: The Basic Science Behind Lead Scoring
Understand how lead scoring helps sales and marketing departments identify the most valuable prospects to your company, and how to properly set up and maintain a lead scoring system.

Video: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Lead Generation B2B Marketing Automation Demo
Quick video overview of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation system. Get everything you need to drive demand and fill your pipeline with high-quality leads.

 

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Qualifying Leads in Salesforce