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5 Biggest Lead Management Blunders

by on June 2014

One of the nice things about consulting is that you get to help people. It’s very satisfying to spend a day checking out someone’s Salesforce.com implementation and give them a set of recommendations for how they can build/fix/improve their processes and use of technology to give them the data they need to make better marketing decisions.

I’ve been working on a couple of lead management projects that caused me to wonder — how did they get here? By here, I mean to this state where they’re bringing in a consultant to help them figure this out. Not that I’m complaining as I’m the one who gets to help, but how does an organization end up needing lead management consulting? Are there any lessons to be learned by the rest of us on how not to end up in that place?
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Filed Under: Lead Management, Marketing Automation, Salesforce.com

Defining Your Lead Management Strategy

by on February 2014

My husband recently started a new job as director of sales operations for a start-up company. The company has been working on refining its lead management process, and he’s been pulled in to help figure it out. And so have I — indirectly.

One of our favorite topics of after dinner discussion over the last week has been about lead management. And while this topic is top of mind for me, I thought I’d share some thoughts on this important process.

If you’re a marketer at a B2B company, you can’t afford to have a hastily put together lead management strategy. The return on your marketing investment depends on how well you set-up your demand gen machine.

First off, you need to reach out to Sales as mapping your lead management process should be a joint effort. Sales needs to buy in to the process and be committed to its success. The four areas to focus on are:
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Filed Under: Lead Management

Salesforce Tip of the Day: Mapping Custom Lead Fields

by on August 2013

One of the things that I’d like to do on the blog is to share tips and tricks on how to use Salesforce.com more effectively as a Marketing person. For those of you who use Salesforce, you know that it wasn’t well-designed for marketers. We’ve done a pretty good job of coming up with clever workarounds and building some functionality into the product to help us do what we need to do.

Our first Salesforce Tip of the Day comes from a question that I received twice this week — once from a former colleague who is now at a start-up company and another off of the Austin Salesforce user group board.

The question is this — how do you take a custom lead field and have the field and value appear in the contact once it’s been converted?

In Salesforce-speak, this is called Mapping Custom Lead Fields. You can search on this topic in Salesforce Help & Training, or you can follow the directions below:

  • Create custom fields with the same names in Leads and Contacts
  • Go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | Leads | Fields
  • On the bottom of the page in the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section, click on the button Map Lead Fields
  • Select the custom lead field on the left, and map it to the custom Contact field you created. It should appear in the drop down list on the right side of the page.

And, voila! You’ve mapped your custom lead field. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Filed Under: Lead Management, Salesforce.com

The Next Marketing Frontier: Real-Time Lead Nurturing

by on May 2012

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week about middle of the funnel marketing challenges. As technology marketers, we’ve learned the lessons about how to get found on the internet, convert web site visitors and analyze the results.

We’ve spent time and money on implementing marketing automation systems to help us score, prioritize and nurture the leads we generate. And, we’ve discovered that the fuel to feed this marketing engine is content. Free, compelling, content. And lots of it.

So, what’s the problem?
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Filed Under: Content Marketing, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Automation