Salesforce leads vs. contacts

Understanding your Salesforce sales funnel

Your Salesforce sales funnel is a visual tool designed to help you nurture leads as they become aware of your business.

Salesforce generally organizes your data into four main objects: leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities.

Understanding the difference between leads and contacts will help you master Salesforce Sales Cloud and set the right processes to act upon both records in your sales funnel.

If you are still deciding which platform is right for your team, you can review the guide on how to choose between Salesforce and HubSpot.

Ideally, your sales funnel should work toward converting every individual who becomes aware of your business into a sale.

The first part of that funnel consists of leads who enter at the awareness stage.

From here, you must qualify a lead to determine if they are valuable for marketing or sales. Once leads meet your internal criteria, they are converted into contacts and accounts.

Contacts represent individuals, while accounts represent businesses.

These records store information used by marketing, sales, and account management throughout the relationship.

When a lead is converted, you also have the option to create an opportunity.

Opportunities represent specific sales activities for a product or service.

The difference between Salesforce leads & contacts

Salesforce leads represent any individual or company entering your CRM that is not yet ready for a sales discussion.

A contact is an individual who has been qualified and converted from a lead to pursue a specific sales opportunity.

To understand how these conversions impact your reporting, see our article on lead source vs. lead conversion in HubSpot.

• Contacts can be associated with one or multiple accounts in Salesforce.
• Contacts and accounts can both be linked to opportunities.
• Leads cannot be directly associated with accounts or opportunities.
• To pursue a formal sales process, a lead must be converted to a contact.

It is important to treat leads and contacts differently.

While most leads should receive marketing content, only qualified leads should be nurtured by sales. Using lead scoring allows your team to segment these groups using tools like HubSpot or Salesforce.

This prevents you from wasting marketing spend on unqualified records.

For a deeper look at setting up these systems, consult the Salesforce implementation guide.

Lead acquisition and qualification

Acquiring leads is a marketing process that involves several strategies like advertising, organic marketing, and cold outreach.

Understanding acquisition is important because you can attribute revenue to the specific channels that perform best.

Once acquired, qualifying leads allow you to convert them into contacts and accounts. To refine your criteria, follow these lead scoring best practices.

Salesforce divides lead status into four default categories:

• Open: The lead is in the CRM but has not been contacted.
• Contacted: The lead was contacted but has not yet responded.
• Qualified: The lead was contacted and confirmed as a fit for the sales process.
• Unqualified: The lead was contacted but determined not to be a fit.

Strategies for lead qualification

To act on leads effectively, you must fine-tune your qualification framework.

There is a very small window to act on leads as they enter your funnel.

Setting up automations to engage leads instantly ensures quick action. For example, setting up drip campaigns for any lead set as a marketing-qualified lead allows you to stay consistent without manual effort.

You should also score leads for priority.

Both Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud provide templates for scoring, but you can create custom versions.

Salesforce Einstein also provides artificial intelligence to help build actionable recommendations.

Finally, be sure to qualify leads based on budget and business fit. This allows you to prioritize the opportunities that are most important to your bottom line.

Leads and contacts are the backbone of Salesforce, but if your funnel is clogged with bad data, you are leaving revenue on the table.

We help teams clean up their Salesforce and HubSpot setup to qualify faster and sell smarter.

‍Contact the experts at RevBlack to book a RevOps audit.