Negosentro.com | How to Deploy Salesforce to Generate More Sales Leads | There are very few things that are more important than generating leads for sales for a business. Traditionally, it has proved to be very costly and represents a major financial investment by the organization. The advent of the Internet has made it possible for many businesses to lower the cost of lead generation due to many factors; prime among them is the reduction of time and cost of physically meeting potential customers. If you have implemented Salesforce in your business, then you can use it to capture the leads automatically when visitors log on to your website and fill up the online forms to sign up for various services, including newsletters and emails. If you want to build custom documents etc you can check Salesforce document generation. These leads can be also automatically routed to the relevant sales representatives for following up and getting sales.
Because there is a constant change in customer behavior, the opportunities for lead generation also change accordingly. Social networking platforms represent the latest opportunity for grabbing sales leads. Organizations thus need to periodically revisit their strategies for generating sales and adapt themselves to take advantage of the dynamic trends in consumer behavior as well as technology. Some tips on generating more sales leads, effectively processing them, and refining your efforts:
Simplify Process of Capturing Leads from Conferences and Tradeshows
As you will know if your business regularly participates in seminars and tradeshows, you are bound to end up with a big pile of business cards left behind by people that have visited your stall and expressed interest in your products or services. Usually, the cards are given to someone in the office to painfully type out each field and capture the details in a spreadsheet or directly into the application so that the sales reps can take suitable action in following up. However, not only is this process really time-consuming but is prone to typing errors that can potentially lead to time wastage or embarrassment by getting names, job titles, or phone numbers wrong. There are a number of applications that can automatically transcribe the contents of business cards into error-free leads saving everyone involved precious effort and improving your response time. You can also use version control system extensions like Salesforce Git and Salesforce Git Hub.
Use Direct Web to Lead Functionality
You can capture the information of visitors to your website directly in Salesforce so that sales leads can be created without any other intervention. This also tends to deliver more refined results as these leads are of people who are genuinely interested in your products. However, you need to know very clearly the information that you will capture in your web form during the initial contact. Getting this right is also vital to the process of defining your internal processes. If the visitor is specific about his interest, then the lead can be assigned to a product expert.
It is also important to limit the extent of information that you want from visitors initially as forms that are too detailed and long tend to put off visitors making them walk away without completing it. Depending upon where they are located, you can use a number of different forms to capture information in short bursts that Salesforce can automatically collate and combine.
Be Present Where Your Prospects Are
It is really important that your website has a presence in places on the Internet that are frequented by your target audience; otherwise, both the quantity and quality of your sales leads are bound to be lower than expected. Use the many tools at your disposal; it is not necessary that all of them have to be paid versions; there are a number of excellent options that are available for free too.
Check Out the Salesforce AppExchange
There are a number of Salesforce apps that can enhance your sales enablement and ones that can increase the effectiveness of your SEM. A free version of the SEO for Salesforce app available on the AppExchange can automatically connect the data gathered through Google Analytics. This information can be analyzed to track its origins by a number of parameters like the search engine, keyword, and even campaign so that you can keep tabs on your website performance. You can also take the help of apps on the AppExchange that will help you to promote your products on social media, such as Twitter, and then capture the leads automatically. With Salesforce Analytics, you can now evaluate the efficacy of each of the channels you are campaigning on and decide on the quantum of investment that will be required to sustain or improve the performance.
[Featured Photo via www.mobiquityinc.com]
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via Roger Aronson
Roger Aronson is a database admin and Salesforce user in an IT firm. He has worked on the platform for over four years and has recently started a blog on how to enhance your productivity and get the most out of Salesforce by using custom dashboards and tools like SalesforceGit and SalesforceGitHub.
