Salesforce Lead Object Best Practices

Alongside Accounts, Opportunities, and Contacts, Leads are one of the Standard Salesforce Objects, having their unique related functionalities, behavior, and of course, considerations.

In this post, we will deep dive into a few ways to ensure you make the most out of your Salesforce Lead object with out-of-the-box functionality, as well as point-and-click configuration.

The Author

Andreea Doroftei

Andreea is a Salesforce Technical Instructor at Salesforce Ben. She is an 18x certified Salesforce Professional with a passion for User Experience and Automation.

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Comments:

Great little article, what always surprises me is that you find orgs that DON'T follow these basics. Had an org recently with 96 fields on the lead and 7 on the Opp. Or the marketing team who built a web form that simply "emailed" the head of sales even though they already had 3 other forms with Web 2 Lead functionality. it was easier apparently.

How do we cope with multiple leads for the same company? Sales person doesn't want to add the address and other fields repeatedly on each. How do you then convert all at the same time?

Hi Ben and all, we're having a challenge at my organization because we have account creation permissions turned off for our users in order to help with data cleanliness. But that also means our users can't convert leads because account creation permissions are required. Any best practices/workarounds anyone knows of?

Hi Katie, If you haven’t figured this out yet, I just ran into this with a client who is on Professional (so no access to Approvals) and wanted to approve all leads before conversion. Here is what I came up with: •Create a Lead Status called “Request Account Creation” •Create a checkbox on the lead “Approved for Account Creation” that is only editable by the profile of the approver •Verification rule that throws and error if lead status =qualified and that checkbox just created=false •Use Process Builder to send an email and create a task to/for the approver when a lead is saved with the status of “Request Account Creation” to review the lead •Approver then decides if Lead should be converted, if so checks the box, converts the lead, and notifies the user who requested the Lead conversion. If not, changes Lead status to something else and notifies user.

Hi Ben, I want to know how can we learn to use Salesforce email functionality to send emails and all the emails can be captured in email as a thread as well. Thanks, Ravindra

That's a great point, but Salesforce also has the Individual object which you may want to utilize as well. I believe the point of it was to handle compliance and issues associated with GDPR.

Hi, we have implemented unique leads and contacts in Salesforce but there is a requirement now from senior management that why can't we assign contacts as a new lead when a new business requirement coming in from an existing contact via Marketing campaings. I somehow agree to the business logic but afaird that by allowing this there will be lot of duplicates in the system. Can you suggest some better way where we can track new requirement from existing contacts and how can I emphasise on makings leads and contacts as unique

Hello Brinda, Amy, Thank you for reading the post! Each Salesforce implementation is different hence companies can choose how and when to use the Lead / Contact Objects. Considering the Lead is the start of the sales cycle, while the Contact would mark someone who already has a relationship going on and could potentially be involved in Opportunities, not wishing to create duplicate Lead Records means you would have to leverage other means to track progression. These could be the Campaign History on the Contact (for Marketing Campaigns, using First Associated Date), Opportunity Contact Roles, Record Types or even a custom Stage/Status field on the Contact (to offer a means for Sales to mark them accordingly in a similar way to what they are already accustomed with for Leads and Opportunities).

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Very well written article. It will be valuable to everyone who employess it, as well as yours truly :). Keep doing what you are doing - looking forward to more posts.