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Lead Management

Overview

Salesforce.com defines a "Lead" as an unqualified individual/business that has expressed an interest in your service, product or organization.

Leads are typically used to capture information on businesses or donors even before they can be considered a prospect. The Lead record is then used to "qualify" a prospect. A qualified lead can be turned into an Organization, Contact, and optionally a Donation where it can be even further qualified and turned into an active donor and continue down the donation management process. Nonprofits commonly use leads to take in volunteers before elevating the lead to full Contact status.

The information pertaining Lead records often come from sources such as business cards, a business review list [i.e. Fortune 500], purchased lists, or research websites. However, Leads can also be contacts from a fundraiser luncheon or another networking event.

Lead Management Process

Lead Creation

• Initial Data Migration – Perform an initial data migration from current source systems that being used to manage information about leads.
• Manual – Users will have the ability to create leads manually from the Leads tab.
• Import - Users with appropriate access will have the ability to import leads through Salesforce’s Lead import wizard. This will enable users to import leads from standard lead lists maintained in Excel and other sources. Ownership of imported leads can be assigned on the records to be imported.
• Web-To-Lead – The "Web-to-Lead" feature in Salesforce allows an organization to automatically post leads from an external website directly into the Salesforce application.

Lead Conversion

Leads can manually be entered into Salesforce via the Leads tab. From there, once a lead has been qualified it can be "converted" by clicking on the "Convert" button. Alternatively, the nonprofit template includes customized functionality to help you rapidly convert multiple leads simultaneously and efficiently. See the Lead Conversion Tab for more information on this customized functionality.

Web-to-Lead

The web-to-lead functionality can be enabled for use in easily integrating your organization’s website to Salesforce. This can be especially helpful for nonprofits if they plan to use their website to capture volunteer requests.

Salesforce provides a mechanism so that anyone with System Admin privileges can generate an HTML lead capture form once the desired custom fields have been added to the Lead object. Your organization can then take the Salesforce generated web-to-lead form and embed it into your organization’s website instantly begin capturing leads (be it for volunteer requests or other needs).

For more information on web-to-lead, login to Salesforce and go to "Setup > Customize > Lead > Web-to-Lead".

Viewing Leads

Lead Views

My Open Leads

All Open Leads

Recently Viewed Leads

Today’s Leads

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