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Key Takeaways
- If you want to get the most out of your Salesforce subscription, you can’t just let leads sit in the CRM—you have to actively manage them
- While Salesforce has a range of contact management features, its ability to handle enrichment, routing, qualification, and nurture are limited or expensive
- Filling the gaps in Salesforce lead management with other platforms is difficult without a common orchestration layer
Salesforce is the CRM of choice for most enterprise RevOps tech stacks. However, lead management in Salesforce requires more than the platform’s native capabilities. In this article, we’ll walk through how to get the most out of Salesforce, and recommend some tools to close its functionality gaps.
What is lead management in Salesforce?
Salesforce lead management is the process of servicing leads from their initial engagement until they convert into a closed-won deal within the Salesforce CRM.
For B2B, lead management involves several steps. These include enriching Salesforce records with third-party data, outbound and inbound lead qualification, lead-to-account matching, routing, scheduling, nurture, and pipelining.
As you’ll see throughout this article, Salesforce provides some, but not all, of this functionality. So while Salesforce is a solid CRM for enterprise customers, it can’t serve as an all-in-one lead management platform.
Why is Salesforce lead management important for sales teams?
If your leads just sit in your CRM gathering dust, they aren’t generating business value. This only happens through active lead management, whether in Salesforce or any other CRM.
We’re willing to bet that most salespeople (and even leaders) only use a fraction of the features available in Salesforce. In addition to contact records, the platform includes AI-powered lead scoring, advanced activity tracking, omnichannel lead monitoring, deal & pipeline management, sales enablement tools, and more.
(Note: Not all of the features mentioned above may be activated in your current Salesforce plan.)
By leveraging the suite of features contained within the platform, you can keep leads from slipping through the cracks and prioritize the most valuable prospects throughout the customer journey. When paired with lead enrichment, real-time qualification, and routing tools, you can deepen your knowledge of prospects and send them to the leads best positioned to close them.
Active Salesforce lead management enables you to take advantage of these features and get the most out of the platform. After all, Salesforce isn’t cheap. So you’ll want to maximize the return on your RevOps investment as much as possible.
What features does Salesforce lead management include?
The most prominent of Salesforce’s lead management tools include the following capabilities:
- Lead intelligence
- Leads list view (home page)
- Lead conversion
- Lead merge & dedupe
- Lead assignment
Let’s take a look at each of these in detail.
Lead intelligence
Image source: Keynode Solutions
Salesforce’s Lead Intelligence View enables you to quickly filter through your Salesforce leads and analyze the activities of the resulting records. You can also drill down into individual records to see their activity details, and even reach out to them directly from the Leads tab.
Here’s a brief list of the metrics you can track and use as filters from the Lead Intelligence View:
- No activity
- Idle (no activity in the last 30 days)
- No upcoming (no future activities schedule)
- Overdue
- Due Today
- Upcoming
- Not contacted
- Contact attempted
- Engaged
- Meeting scheduled
- Meeting declined
- Disqualified
Lead intelligence is available with the Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite, and Developer Editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Lead list view
Image source: Trailhead - Salesforce
Salesforce users can also manage leads from the Lead Views section. You can use filters to create multiple custom views for various use cases.
If you create a new queue—virtual containers for organizing records and tasks and assigning to users—Salesforce will automatically create a corresponding queue list view. Additionally, Salesforce also includes a Recent Leads view, which displays a brief list of the top leads matching specific engagement criteria (e.g. unread leads, recently viewed, recently created).
From the list view, you can select any of the links under Tools to manage your leads. Additionally, you can run a report based on any of the views.
Lead list view is available with the Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite, and Developer Editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Lead conversion
Once a Lead has been confirmed as a marketing- or sales-qualified lead, whether manually or through automated lead scoring, you can then convert it into a Contact or Account. This attaches all those activities to the Account or Opportunity with which that Lead is now associated.
It’s important to know that in Salesforce, you can’t reverse lead conversion. At that point, only users with View and Edit Converted Leads permissions enabled can search for them. In our view, this is a serious weakness in Salesforce’s capabilities, as it assumes a linear progression from lead → opportunity → customer. In reality, modern customer journeys include double-backs, fluctuating intent and interest, large and complex decision-making units, and more.
When converting a Lead, attached files or notes become attached to the contact, account, and opportunity records you associate with the converted Lead. If you use Sales Engagement, the Lead’s completed cadence tasks don’t appear on the Activity Timeline of the new contact, account, or opportunity.
Lead conversion tools are available with the Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite, and Developer Editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Lead, contact, and account merge & dedupe
Whether through the conversion process, multiple inbound channels, or lack of proper data management, Salesforce users often end up with duplicate records. When this happens, Salesforce has the features that can help you clean up your CRM.
Here are some things to expect when merging and deduping records in Salesforce:
- When leads are members of separate campaigns, the merged record maintains membership in both campaigns
- All sharing rules for both leads are applied to the merged lead
- While most items are retained in the merged record, only chatter feeds from the principal record are retained
- Hidden and Read-Only fields are only retained from the principal record
Keep in mind that if you use Salesforce Classic, you can’t merge a converted Lead with other converted Leads. This is only possible through the Lightning Experience option.
Lead merge & dedupe features are available with the Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite, and Developer Editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Lead assignment
A key aspect of the lead management process is assignment and routing. Salesforce enables lead assignment rules regardless of whether leads are created manually, imported, generated via web forms, or created via third-party integration.
Lead assignment rules are built with one rule for each purpose (e.g. one rule for imported leads and another for form-generated leads). Each rule consists of entries that tell Salesforce exactly how to handle them. This can include assigning the Lead to a specific queue, assigning them to a particular user, or triggering an action through an integrated partner platform.
Lead assignment is available with the Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite, and Developer Editions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.
5 tips for Salesforce lead management: best practices
Now that we’ve got a handle on the various functionality of Salesforce lead management, let’s look at some best practices.
1. Map out your lead sources
Salesforce has four options for creating new Leads in the platform:
- Manually create a new record
- Bulk contact import
- Web-to-lead form conversion (Salesforce native)
- Automated contact creation from integration partners (e.g. third-party lead capture tool)
Even without knowing anything about the Leads generated, just knowing the source tells us a lot about them:
- Manually created leads probably came from sales outbound prospecting
- Leads generated by webforms likely came through a marketing channel (although the account may have existed beforehand)
- Imported lead lists either come from third-party data companies, tech stack consolidation, an event, etc.
Although lead source doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, it’s certainly an important context clue. From there, you can start building personalized, tailored responses.
2. Automate lead enrichment
Salesforce currently doesn’t have built-in lead enrichment capabilities. This severely weakens the CRM’s ability to provide the context needed for qualification, routing, and personalized outreach.
Enriching data from a third-party source without an orchestration platform (like Default) is a complicated endeavor. However, it’s the only way to automatically enrich contact records:
- Make sure you have Salesforce Developer Edition
- Set up REST API authentication. You can use Salesforce CLI (Command Line Interface) to make the authentication process easier, although this approach may not be able to handle complex use cases.
- Manually set up the necessary series of REST requests. This is impossible without developer expertise, as the language for the requests has to be precise in order to function as intended.
Salesforce does have some pre-built integrations, but depending on your use case these may or may not fit your needs.
3. Build your lead scoring system
Salesforce only enables lead scoring through their Einstein AI, which is only available for additional cost through the higher-tier pricing plans. As such, you’ll likely need to use another platform to score leads once they come in.
Despite the complexities involved, lead scoring really isn’t optional as you start to scale up your inbound flows and outbound prospecting activities. Otherwise, you’ll have to manually qualify leads and manage their behavioral trigger data, which most revenue teams don’t realistically have the time or resources to do.
Integrating a lead scoring system with Salesforce involves REST API requests just like enrichment. However, there’s an added step: you need to add your enrichment data to your lead scoring system, score the lead, then import the lead with the enrichment data and the lead score to Salesforce. If the lead is already in Salesforce, these systems have to constantly send API requests back and forth, increasing the likelihood of an error.
4. Create automated post-conversion nurtures
Whether a lead is ready to buy the moment they convert or not, automated outreach can increase the likelihood of booking a meeting. For qualified leads, often this means simple follow-up reminders. For unqualified leads, this includes valuable and educational content to convince them to buy your product.
Salesforce doesn’t have this critical lead management functionality. Which means you’ll need to integrate with a third-party marketing and sales automation tool, then feed engagement data back into your lead scoring system and activity fields in Salesforce.
5. Invest in tech stack orchestration
As you can probably tell, the number of integrations necessary to use Salesforce for lead management is quite high. Bouncing data back and forth exposes you to risk of loss, errors, and dropped contacts.
To avoid unnecessary contact and revenue leakage, it’s important to have a common orchestration layer for your RevOps tech stack—including your CRM. Orchestration enables you to:
- Coordinate tasks among your various infrastructure components
- Manage data from a single location—including transformation, formatting, and integration
- Provide a one-stop authentication solution to maintain your RevOps tech stack’s security and privacy
- Improves overall performance and resolves dependencies among all components
- Enables more operational and automation possibilities as you scale
Other tools for managing leads in Salesforce
Despite being a power player in the enterprise CRM space, Salesforce falls short in providing several key features necessary for modern B2B lead management. As such, you’ll likely need to supplement Salesforce with another tool.
Here are some of the best inbound marketing, sales workflow, and marketing automation software for augmenting Salesforce’s capabilities.
1. Default
Default is an all-in-one RevOps software that performs all the functions necessary for lead management: capture, enrichment, lead-to-account matching, scoring & qualification, distribution & routing, scheduling, followup, and more. What’s more, our sales workflow platform integrates directly with the Salesforce CRM, updating records as needed in real time.
Instead of just one more Salesforce integration that requires extensive developer resources to implement, Default operates as a common orchestration layer for your whole tech stack.
Whether you’re just trying to augment Salesforce’s lead management capabilities with an all-in-one solution or looking to make your tech stack more efficient, Default can help.
2. Apollo.io & Clearbit
As mentioned above, Salesforce has no built-in lead enrichment capabilities. This is a problem. If your lead forms are conversion-optimized (i.e. five fields or fewer), you won’t capture enough data to accurately score, qualify, route, and service the lead.
Enter Apollo.io and Clearbit. Both platforms are Default data partners and key components of our lead enrichment software. Apollo.io has an extensive database of over 200M+ contacts, while Clearbit’s AI capabilities update their records faster than most competitors.
However, both platforms require API integrations to enrich your Salesforce CRM data. Skip the developer queue and use Default’s no-code, out-of-the-box enrichment tools.
3. Calendly
Salesforce Scheduler is a basic offering that puts meetings on your calendar and not much else. Its only value prop is that it natively integrates with the Salesforce CRM. Most sales teams (at least the ones we talk to) use Calendly or some other scheduling tool that provides added flexibility.
To learn more about the advantages of Calendly above Salesforce Scheduler, check out our comparison guide.
However, Calendly is a point solution that doesn’t handle enrichment, optimized conversion, routing, and other critical lead management functions. You should consider either an orchestration solution to more seamlessly integrate Calendly into your stack, or an all-in-one solution that handles all these functions natively.
4. Outreach
The more time salespeople spend on administrative tasks, the less time they spend building connections and rapport with prospects. Many organizations seek to solve this challenge by implementing AI SDRs to handle frontline engagements, but the results of this approach are mixed at best.
A better use of AI and automation is on the backend through smart automations based on qualification status, prospect attributes, intent signals, and engagement with your brand’s content.
Outreach fits seamlessly into most organizations’ lead management process flows with extensive, multichannel automations and workflows. By orchestrating Outreach and Salesforce, you can ensure you’re actually acting on your data—not just letting it sit in a database growing stale.
5. Salesloft
Salesforce CRM is great at recordkeeping, but it offers little in the way of managing your sales reps. Although sales team management is tangentially related to lead management, the more effective your reps work, the better they’ll handle leads—which, all other things being equal, should increase conversion and close rates.
Salesloft includes a number of sales enablement features that compliment Salesforce’s lead management capabilities, including:
- Conversation intelligence to surface insights from discovery and proposal calls
- Built-in coaching tools to increase individual and team sales performance
- Pipeline management tools to track KPIs and accelerate deals
- Long-term sales forecasting capabilities to enable more intentional strategic planning
Salesloft takes the data stored in your Salesforce CRM (ideally, enriched from third-party sources) and uses it to improve sales planning and performance. Especially for teams managing large enterprise SaaS deals, this can be critical.
Salesforce lead management FAQs
How do you organize leads in Salesforce?
Salesforce offers a number of tools to help organize leads. The Lead Intelligence View enables both high-level summaries of lead attributes and behaviors, as well as the ability to drill down and surface more granular insights. Additionally, you can use Salesforce’s List View to build custom lists of leads based on specific filters.
What is the role of a Lead in Salesforce?
In Salesforce, a Lead is a contact record that has no purchase history but has expressed interest in your product. This is contrasted with a Contact, Account, or Opportunity, which are all records that are or have been engaged in an active buying process.
How many types of Leads are there in Salesforce?
Salesforce includes four categories of Lead status. Open means the Lead hasn’t been contacted yet. Contacted means a salesperson has reached out to the Lead, regardless of whether they’ve received a response. Qualified means the Lead is a good fit and ready to buy, and Unqualified means they are either a poor fit, not ready to buy, or both.
Automating your Salesforce lead management
As we’ve laid out in detail here, automating your Salesforce lead management processes requires more tools than the CRM itself. Rather than build a patchwork of point solutions to build your tech stack, however, you’ll operate more efficiently with an all-in-one platform.
The best RevOps software not only handles all your core lead management functionality in a single platform, but can also orchestrate other tools and technologies as needed. Default is the only platform that does both.
Conclusion
Former pro Olympic athlete turned growth marketer! Previously worked at Chili Piper and co-founded my own company before joining Default two years ago.
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