I really love this blog post by our friends at SiriusDecisions because it not only highlights the importance of nurturing to your entire database, but also because it offers a framework and keys to success on how to effectively nurture to your Lead and Contact database. In true piggy-back fashion, I want to take this conversation one step farther and address one of the inherent difficulties in doing this nurturing effectively.
Obviously, you are nurturing Leads and Contacts across your entire database, but Salesforce unfortunately does not allow you to report across both Leads and Contacts. Despite the fact that we have these best practices to effectively nurture across our entire database, we still struggle to understand the success of these efforts because we can’t achieve holistic visibility across the entire database (Leads AND Contacts). This Lead and Contact divide is a fact of life based on the current Salesforce architecture and to truly nurture and sell to your entire database you have to figure out a way to bridge that gap.
Finding the capability to bridge the Lead and Contact divide in Salesforce not only allows you to report across your entire database of Leads AND Contacts to achieve holistic visibility, but also enables you to understand the success of these Nurturing efforts across all of your response data as a result your demand generation efforts. Furthermore, it allows sales people to report across all of the Leads and Contacts that they are currently engaged with to ensure that nothing ever slips through the cracks and goes forgotten. While this will certainly allow you to understand the success of your nurturing efforts, it also provides tremendous value in a variety of other facets.
At Full Circle Insights we use our own product to to this across our database and believe me it makes a huge difference when it comes to understanding the results of our Sales and Marketing campaigns and making sure we are driving revenue from every possible corner of our database. Shameless plug . . . you can use Full Circle Insights to do this too!
Learn more about best practices in designing and implementing your lead lifecycle in Salesforce. Measure your lead progression with automated funnel stage tracking. Check out the Best Practices for Designing a Lead Lifecycle in Salesforce whitepaper.
