so guys i appreciate everyone that gave me a hand here with technical difficulties apparently i don't have the start broadcasting button i don't know if it's chrome issue whatever it is but technology let's get started because i only have 15 minutes now and i have to get through all of this content guys i'm going to fly through this please use the q a i'll try to hit every single note that i can but um my name is eric for those who don't know i am going to skip through all of this but i use my hashtag salesforce responsibly please do feel free to follow there's a lot of cool content there but today's agenda with the time that we have i am going to go here and once and for all talk about what is a lead because the definition although simple can be very wrong several times i want to talk about who should use leads in your organization i'm going to talk about well who should not use these in your organization and if your company should even use leads to begin with the takeaways i'll summarize that at the end i will just continue to go right through this by the way there is 83 percent a 3 chance i made up this statistic but for the most part i want to do a little bit of talking and get back to the agenda so coming back to it really quick what is a salesforce lead so most people if you look online will actually say that uh and i took off the screen sharing most people online will actually say that a lead is where you put your prospects in and by definition that can be insanely misleading guys so i actually worked with a company once that had their sales people using leads and they were complaining about leads being cumbersome so one of the challenges when we came in and um you know through our consulting we started working with them and trying to understand what was going wrong and i saw that people sales people were opening leads to make their phone calls and as soon as they're on the call they switch immediately to the notebook and start taking all of their notes down and it was even crazy because in this one example one guy was about to get the sale and he started taking credit card information down and all these things down on these notebooks and it just blew my mind away when we started um when we started going um you know into like realizing that here's a company that all sales people have notebooks in their desks and this is how they've learned to manage it but if you look at it you know that person that purchased was a prospect so by definition something was right but the reality of it is that for that prospect to work you'd have to convert the lead create the opportunity go to the opportunity add the opportunity products then come back to the opportunity add the payment methods and it was just chaotic so you can see that even though it fits the definition of leads is where you put your prospects it doesn't work that way and there's one key word that if you guys get away with uh that you guys take away from this meeting is that leads is where you put your unknown prospects and if you think about it from that perspective everything suddenly starts to dramatically take a shift for the difference because if you're looking at it from a perspective of leases where you have your unknown prospects then the purpose of these is simply to understand one simple question is this someone that i or my company wants to do business with and that's one of the big things that you have to keep in mind as we're going through this is leads is there just for qualifying purposes not if they're interested in doing business with you but if you are interested in doing business with them if you can answer that question however you do it internally in your company then the lead is qualified and should be converted regardless of whether there's an opportunity the lead is already the leads object served its purpose so the the big pieces if even if you look if you have any questions go to a standard salesforce org out of the box the last lead status is what qualified even salesforce wants you to use sale uh leads to the point that you get to qualified and that's it once you know you want to do business with it it's a qualified lead it gets converted into a prospect account i'm going to share my screen again and this is probably going to be the image that we're going to be stuck on for the remainder of this session so um [Music] so essentially we're talking a little bit about here and we're talking about leads being your unknown information right there where you have those unknowns a great example is a trade show list right you go into a trade show and you have your badge scanners and people scan a hundred two hundred a thousand five thousand scans and you get that excel spreadsheet of names now i've been to trade shows in a past life i've done quite a few of them myself and i know that those trade show lists of people who scan are filled with people who are just unknowns because when you load it in you have to segment the people who are real prospects from the people who just scanned their badges for separate pens for some free gifts people uh maybe some someone was looking for an internship at your company and they scanned their badge so there's a lot of information there that would probably not be qualified people because you don't know if you want to do business with them or not so again leads becomes that perfect object for you to be able to work that list and define and qualify those individuals because that way when you know you want to do business with them you can convert them immediately and that becomes a matter of a prospect account so if you look at the bottom here i say where in um in sales force and leads is where you have that unknown information once that converts you're talking about accounts where type equals prospect and that's where the nurturing begins you may not have a full um you may not have a full knowledge of whether they're interested in you or not but you know you want to do business with them whether it's tomorrow or a year from now you want to do business with them and those are prospect accounts now from a uh question of you know introducing a couple of terms here we have marketing qualified lead the mqls and sales qualified lead um i'll go very briefly again in the essence of time but um andrea says i can go over i got a few extra minutes guys feel free to stick around ask questions but i will continue to go through this but in a timeline right we're looking at it here we have leads we have marketing qualified leads which again is you saying i know i want to do business with this individual and a sales qualified lead is the individual saying i want to consider doing business with you so when that person shows interest to you then is that's when you have an opportunity when that person says i'm interested tell me more and you have active conversations going on that's when you are genuinely now in an opportunity and that's when you have a sales qualified lead and then obviously hopefully you get to close the deal and you get to open some champagne bottles and that becomes a customer account but that's those are some of the big pieces which comes to the second question i want to talk about today is who should be using opportunities and if you're looking at the image instead of paying attention to me you may already have answered that question that leads should not be used by sales so the people who should be really using leads in salesforce are marketing and inside sales teams there should be no there's only one possible scenario where a sales person needs to go into leads where if for whatever reason someone who is a lead just calls in out of their own free will and gets connected straight to a sales person then that person could go into leads to pull that or certain sales force pull that lead and convert it into an account themselves but no sales person should ever be creating leads or anything like that because again that's the job of people who leads is for people who are going to qualify and decide whether it meets the minimum criteria for it to be in a sales person's radar so um that if you go by that definition once you know you want to convert your lead into a prospect account you know you want to do business with them you'll never run into the question of crap we converted this lead and now we want to bring it back because it wasn't you know there was no opportunity or no deal that's one of the big things that i always hear about because people start struggling with crap i've converted but i can't unconvert leads well the reality of it is that you shouldn't have to because once you know you want to do business with them regardless of whether they're interested or not you never have to worry about that point ever again because that unless you change your business entirely that question or that fact is not going to change so again some of the things to consider so the question you know we're talking about also from a user adoption perspective if you take away an extra tab that a sales user has to use you eliminate the thought process of them of oh do i have to work in leads or do i have to work in contacts how does this work you're eliminating an extra top for them to work on which simplifies the sales person's job so they can be focused on outreaches and trying to get the deals so again it simplifies a lot of the process by thinking that leads is where you put your unknown prospects so the the final question uh that i want to tackle in here is and feel free to put your questions in i'm happy to address them but the final question that i want to tackle in is uh should your organization use um actually before i do that before talking about that i want to talk about part out in a second so we're going to talk about you know we are in power dreaming so we want to talk paradigm and how does this all tie together to pardon well in part a prospect as a prospect is a prospect regardless if it's leads or contacts so one of the things that you have to keep in mind and we're talking about these marketing qualified leads these three big stages between lead mql and sql when you're considering these pardot actually is fairly well aligned with this because if you look at it you have what's called product grade and par dot score now in the marketing qualified lead the or in part the part of grade is you being able to classify whether you want to do business with them you're saying hey let's assign grades based on the criteria for these uh prospects that we have so you see that it's very well aligned on that sense the pardot score however is an indicator of the sales qualified lead because it starts telling you you know hey here's the here are the interactions right he may not have done the final move which is reach out to us or tell us i'm interested tell me more but hey he opened this email he clicked on this link he went to our website he downloaded this pdf so you're getting the the pardot score answers the question are they interested in us and how interested are they in us the pardot grade answers a question are we interested in them and all of that ties together and i do have a very simple trick for those that are looking to implement mql that i will explain shortly and we'll try to get this covered in this um in this video and yes i see people freaking out with sales should not be using leads that is correct i stand by the statement that sales sales should not be using leads do stand by that all day um anywho so you know that's how it all kind of ties together in part out and we only have 25 minutes so i will continue but the final question is should you be using leads in your organization now i do ask two questions to companies usually to filter to filter that out and and answer that which is um first do you have one person that is dedicated to sales or uh i'm not dedicated to inside sales or dedicated to marketing right so if you have a user that has to be doing half and half half sales half marketing then it might not make sense because it's just an extra tab it's extra complexity sometimes if you're small enough of an organization i would say keep it simple given this is part dreaming i'm assuming most people here are using pardots so chances are there is a person dedicated to marketing or inside sales so in that case you may meet the criteria but the second piece the second question that i ask companies to see whether it makes sense for them to use leads or not is um like are you dealing with pre-qualified data so we go back to the trade show example and we talk about you know these this massive excel file of that could include everything between prospects and and students seeking internships and and people want to free pens so you're going through that list and you want to qualify it throw it in salesforce and qualify there but some companies say look it's easier for me to just take them out you know we write notes in the on the excel we can filter them out before we load them in salesforce if you're filtering them out then it doesn't make sense to load it in leads because you've done the job of leads the downside of that i understand that it's faster but the downside is that you cannot have that funnel view of we went to this trade show we scanned 4 000 badges 200 were good uh you know we generated 20 opportunities we closed five you you lose that top piece of the funnel right by now being able to report on it if you do it outside of salesforce but if you are doing that pre-qualification then it doesn't make sense to import it into leads just import it straight as prospect accounts same thing with dealerships dealerships have a list if anyone here has is leasing a car right now there is a list with your name on it that says when your lease is going to be up and that is as pre-qualified as it gets because you have a contract that's probably about to end in 90 days you've already purchased from that manufacturer before the dealers are aware of that so you've at least probably qualified for the credit to be able to lease a car and you're going to have the need of getting a new car i mean it's like the perfect like uh combination and lists like that would just go straight into prospect accounts right if they leased it from a different dealer and it's your first time trying to convert this to your dealer this person to your dealer so just some examples of who should use it but with the little time i have left i i'm gonna go through the questions i'm just going to talk about the simple trick that i have i have relied heavily on linkedin company data to be able to run marketing qualified leads so i have yet to find a better source uh paid or unpaid uh you know there's a discover orgs there's all of these guys out there if you haven't yet implemented marketing qualified leads or if it just became too confusing and you guys were lost on all these items on like how to score how to categorize i have used linkedin data with a great amount of success because almost every company has a linkedin company page this is b2b at this point uh for everyone that's that's listening but you you can tap into your industries you can tap into your cities your states the number of employees and you can also use account source to be able to score your leads right uh in salesforce you can also transfer this data all of the account source employees linkedin industry city state you can transfer this information over to pardot right you can map those fields and help that on your part upgrade so you can all bring that together this particular screenshot wasn't appar.org but you can capture that information and it's normalized because everyone's going to have to enter the same drop down fields so it's great for reporting and accurate scoring and it's very very simple to put those fields together and get started so um jenna you're asking a question why would sales not use leads when they're prospecting themselves at times i i mentioned a second ago it's a level of complexity if you want to try to teach sales to say hey when you're prospecting say when you're prospecting use leads when you're um when you're you know selling convert them and use opportunities that's just an extra step of complexity in my experience in implementations it's easier to avoid leads on that side and for people that are using part up then there are functionalities that you can talk to your account executive actually here are the takeaways that you can talk to your product support to whoops to enable sync directly to contacts if you choose to skip leads all together but a couple of takeaways because i do want to uh dedicate some time to questions because i see a lot of them coming in remember guys leads is in salesforce is supposed to be a bucket of unknowns right it's where you put data in to qualify it um leads is best suited for marketing and inside sales sales should not be using leads um consider leads if you have at least one person dedicated to marketing or inside sales and then if you're skipping leads again contact the partner support and then again if you're gonna try to implement mql like marketing qualified leads and you're not using today then uh i highly suggest linkedin as a source so with that said guys i appreciate you guys sticking through with the technical difficulties i am going to try to look at some questions here so so many [Music] all right so let's see a couple of questions we're good now we're good it isn't your fault um so is a prospect before someone converts to a lead or after uh converted to lead so christina that's actually a great question i will bring it back to the um i'll bring it back to the slide so a prospect is uh is there in part when someone is a lead and afterwards so uh the idea is that once you convert there's still a prospect in pardot um from a business process standpoint you know it's whether it's a qualified prospect or not if it's a qualified prospect then it should be already into a prospect account where account where types equals prospect just curious how do you all other attendees okay jamie you ask the question okay theresa what if you want to track lead source but aren't using leads fantastic question there is a field called account source and that is tied to lead source in salesforce so teresa look for account source the field is there and you can map that over very easily over to pardot as well um so a couple of comments how do you best report on leads associated with content camp with product campaigns when the contact already exists in salesforce no leads will be created if contact exists already and hence you miss out on the reporting effectiveness on the campaigns william i'm not sure i fully follow your question right off the bat uh if you want to connect that first feel free to reach out to me i'm happy to dedicate some time just in the essence of time or if william if you want to put in some more details then i'll keep answering the questions and and we can come back to this um jenna why would sales not use leads when they're prospecting themselves at times we answer that a little bit um if anyone has any more questions again it is my recommendation that keeping it simple is the better strategy if sales is prospecting hopefully they're prospecting to people that are worth their time hopefully they're doing the qualification of researching that person on linkedin or whatever the information is to know if it's worth their time and if they're doing that then i make the argument that it is a qualified prospect because they're in the company that they want to pursue whatever the case may be there's no need to put in leads because it's not unknown you're already working that and you're saving them from having to decide whether to put things on leads or on uh accounts and contacts so those are my two cents for that i hadn't mentioned earlier um so tyler uh the linkedin data stuff is great where we want to start getting data i do want to put an unmanaged package together i don't have it the dropdowns are actually fairly straightforward if you go to a linkedin company page you could actually get those fairly easily but entering the data we've seen several customers use things like linkedin sales navigator or virtual assistants to try to pull in that information uh where they'll just put a simple process where a virtual assistant will go through all of the accounts in salesforce and just search them in um linkedin and be able to bring that information back so that there's a lot that can be done there uh kristin this actually goes with your point so and to extend on that so kristen thanks for the question one of the things if we're going to go on the virtual assistants we've used g-connector for salesforce which is a free tool which is an extremely awesome tool where you can put reports in salesforce and export them to google sheets and then we work with our customers so the virtual assistants don't need to go into salesforce they can start qualifying these accounts directly from google sheets and you drop your account id in the in one of the columns and they fill out you know protect those columns so they don't edit those and then they just fill out the remaining columns and once they're all done they you can just load that information with the data loader or just like mass updated with the data loader since you have that um that data there um a couple of different comments so lauren eubanks how do you suggest automapping inbound leads to contacts accounts if the lead works at an existing account um so that's that's a great question lauren i'm going with the assumption given this is power dreaming that you're doing this from a pardot form so i would contact your support and have them enable the ability to automatically create contacts if you're skipping leads if you're choosing to keep the leads object because you have information it's pre-qualified then you can choose you can ask for that support to enable to create a contact instead of a lead so you don't have to worry about that conversion if it's a if it's a toss-up if it's a mix-up you could come up with some triggers in salesforce to auto-convert convert leads there's a couple but that that is a whole different kind of forms that i'm not sure we can open here but um if you're interested please do follow up with me i'm happy to talk about that because there are certainly solutions for that so thank you lauren for the question uh sam you recommend salesforce before pardot i agree completely agree with that angela to follow up on michael's question where which one was my question uh i'm like flying through these uh but let me see here uh a lead will not be created if the prospect is an existing contact in salesforce angela okay yes that was an answer more than a question i thought that was the second question uh yes i agree with angela pender there uh can we revisit this presentation after it's finished one focus on the ground shaking revelations that is a question for the part dreaming guys but i'm happy to talk about this or do a youtube live session if there's any questions um barack you made a comment there uh craig i appreciate the comments i appreciate everyone's comments actually thank you so much thank you for sticking with us with this crazy uh slowdown and there's a q a here um rana um i'm there we go wait i lost it oh uh can we use part up prospects for nurtures and qualifying versus leads in salesforce the answer is yes you can certainly do that so the idea would be that again once the fields are mapped you can just work the updates right you update everything directly in paradigm if you choose to do so the idea is that um you just need to understand that if uh you cannot convert a lead from parta so someone needs to do that conversion um if you're managing product and if you're managing the um if you're managing on and you're managing the salesforce leads object you're gonna have to uh to do that uh again there could be some code or some things that you can do that um but guys i really appreciate everyone's comments i mean i'm not sure how we're doing on time i'm not sure if you're still here but guys i will stop sharing my screen um i really appreciate the opportunity i appreciate everyone from sticking around and listening in again feel free to check out the youtube session or the youtube channel that i have i also have another one if any formula one fans are here where i'm using einstein analytics to predict race outcomes um so you know but again i appreciate it i hope this was insightful and i'll stick around for anyone that uh anyone that has any questions or final final comments and we can upload on from there but um final piece actually uh i guess the pool's still there but it's kind of interesting you know half of the people that responded are uh you know using leads but they say that there is some conversations to it which matches what i've seen in my 10 years of salesforce consulting so uh i can totally totally understand and i appreciate the secondary team for putting card dreaming together and helping me out with this issue i'm not sure what happened here i still don't see a start broadcast or end broadcast so i'm not able to end this uh i'm just here as almost as much of a passenger as you guys so um but absolutely oh my youtube channel is called uh salesforce stories or uh salesforce responsibly um let me i will post the link on the chat for anyone that's interested um that way you guys can see uh came out with the with my profile picture in there but you guys can check that out there's a couple of videos i talked a little bit more about the leads um as well there's a lot of best practice chats on different topics uh we haven't done one on parda yet but uh we'll probably have to pull one of the speakers here for from par during me and try to get a couple of best pros best practice conversations with regards to uh pardot as well so um then another question came in uh two questions what is your advice when to sync a lead to salesforce brandy so um yeah that's that's a good question um show us your contact info be like oh here's why you know like um i posted it below you can search my name eric um but i'll talk i'll talk that one later but brandi um you asked about what the what is my advice on when to sync leads to salesforce so i think that that is up for a little bit of a discussion there could be a probably a session on that alone to be quite uh honest because it depends on different company situations i would say that you can always sync a part up prospect um to to a salesforce lead if you're using the lee's object uh because again a leads a bucket of unknowns right we stay we always stick with that principle so if you want to be able to run salesforce's reporting engine which you know is much more robust than pardot's reporting engine you should sync that information over so you have access to be able to run those reports and try to do better reports for cross-referencing against other salesforce data that you may have and then if you have other add-ons besides part out to your salesforce org if you're talking about einstein analytics or a couple of other things it's certainly much more useful so i think my general answer for that is the sooner the better but there are definitely a couple of things to have to be aware of that may make more sense to hold that back especially when it comes to conversations about volume of leads if you're talking about the hundreds of thousands whatever the situation would be then then you know sometimes if you deal with a lot of spam leads that comes is coming somehow it may be better to be selective of when that stuff sinks so you get an idea of at least some process to correct that or filter that out so just a couple of um just a couple of points or a couple of thoughts with regards to that and then chris uh you know again uh i don't i can pull in my linkedin profile for anyone that's interested but i will post that in let me see here all right i am being told that we have to stop this broadcast now so it was fantastic for for as long as it lasted um thank you everyone thank you emma and i hope you guys enjoyed part dreaming check out the other sessions you