How to Know if You Should Use Salesforce Leads

To Lead, or not to Lead

One key decision that a business needs to make when they choose to use Salesforce is whether or not to use the Leads tab. The business process will drive this decision and then the technical setup will facilitate the functionality.

When to use Leads

Businesses that have a significant marketing effort that involves contacting new prospects are likely to use Salesforce Leads. In these cases, Leads can be used as a way to separate potential customers from existing customers. Imagine a business that buys a marketing list of fifty thousand prospects. You definitely don’t want to dump all of that data onto the same tabs that you use to find and manage existing customers. Here, Leads will store the many potential customers while Contacts and Accounts will be used to store existing customers.
Another factor in deciding when to use Leads is to look at how frequently the business has repeat customers versus brand new customers. If 10% of business is cross-sell/up-sell and repeat buyers while 90% are new customers, then you are going to want to use Leads to pursue and qualify all of the new prospects. You will also be able to get some interesting Lead conversion and buy-cycle reports. When not to use Leads Some businesses don’t need Leads because they don’t acquire new customers very often. For example, businesses that cater to a small group of high net worth individual and corporate investors (think wealth management, venture capital, etc.) […]

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