Salesforce.com® For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Prospecting Leads

In This Chapter

• Defining important lead terms

• Creating, importing, and sharing leads

• Arranging your leads

• Converting leads

• Keeping your leads database up to date

Often, we hear frustrated sales people say, "We could hit our numbers if we just had enough leads to fill our pipeline." Leads are the building blocks by which many companies drive their sales.

Loosely defined, a lead is a person or a company that might be interested in your services. Some organizations refer to them as suspects because that person might not even be aware of you. Others call them prospects because a lead has to be someone who has expressed interest in your service. Whatever your favorite terminology is, you can use leads to efficiently follow up on sales inquiries, aggressively attack new markets, and vastly improve your sales pipeline.

In this chapter, you can discover all the basic tricks you need to convert leads into revenue. You need to get your existing leads into Salesforce, organize them in a logical fashion, and update them when you follow up with them. Also, we discuss how to convert a lead into an actual opportunity that you can link to an account and a contact. And, finally, if you're a lead manager or administrator, we devote an entire section to how you can manage and maintain your lead database.

Introducing the Lead Record

A lead record consists of a number of fields that you use to capture information about a potential lead. A lead record has only two modes: an Edit mode, ...