As salespeople we know we cannot rely solely on leads from marketing to help us achieve quota. We’re in a competitive role, carry high quotas, and need to be proactive as well as resourceful in finding additional revenue opportunities. Hopefully, we have an existing Contact/Lead database that is actively nurtured by our marketing department that also represents significant new business and cross/up-sell opportunities. That being said, an organization’s Contact database may go underutilized or neglected due to the fact that Contacts do not have the same dynamic workflow capabilities as Leads. While Leads can easily be tracked and reported on, converted to Contacts or Opportunities, and sent to specific queues, Contacts lack the same capacity because they have no status values attached to them. Consequently, we are challenged by a lack visibility into our existing Contact database that makes it difficult to uncover and keep track of potentially valuable selling opportunities.
In my last post I advocated the use of Leads and Contacts in our Salesforce databases because it provides better visibility at the Account level for sales reps and affords greater database organization and quality. However, companies may choose to work exclusively in Leads because of the challenge in reporting across both Leads and Contacts. In order to most productively and efficiently prospect to our existing database, as salespeople we really require a way to report across Leads and Contacts so we can easily pull targeted lists from across our entire database and prevent valuable opportunities from falling through the cracks. Obviously the value of this agnostic reporting not only empowers sales to more efficiently track all selling opportunities, but also allows marketing the same benefit of reporting across Leads and Contacts at a very granular level.
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