6. Lead Conversion
Now for the lead conversion. So we’ve got our leads in salesforce, and we’re going through the process of qualifying those leads to see which ones can go into the main sales process. So we could come across a lead and say, “Yep, this is a potential sale,” and then we could go across and convert that lead. And that conversion process basically means that it’s going to look at the lead, kind of take the fields off that lead, and create an account, contacts, and opportunity from that information.
And then, based on some other bits of logic, you can ask, “Well, actually, I don’t want that opportunity to be created; I only want the account and contact to be created.” Or maybe you want to create a task alongside the whole process to kind of kickoff a salesperson working on that sales prospect. So let’s go in and take a look at the lead conversion process. Okay, so here I am on my lead record here, and you can see here there’s a button called Convert. So if we click Convert, we then get the option to convert the lead, create some task information, give some descriptions, and set a reminder at the end as well. But the first bit is the main bit of the conversion process. So it’s first stating who will be the record owner. We’re going to then say, “Do we want to send an email to the owner to say, “Hey, this opportunity has been created,” and then we can decide if the account should be created?” Now, this is based on the name on the lead, which is the company field. So it pulled through that, and it’s done a search in Salesforce and found that there are no other accounts with this net stronghold, UK Limited name.
And if you can see, yes, that’s the only one on the list. But if I go to a different lead, for example, this James Tom James Lead, and click Convert, you can see the company name is Gene Point. And I know there’s an account called Gene Point. There it is. So if I dive into that TomRecord and convert this now, it’s gone. Oh, it’s devolved to none. because there are two options. You’ve now got to create a new account called Gene Point or attach it to the existing Gene Point record that already exists. So I’m going to actually convert this lead instead. So I’m going to convert this one, attach it to the existing GenePoint account, and give it a name. This name could be based on lead information, but I’m just going with “1000 series sales.” Now, you’ve got the option not to create an opportunity on the conversion for that.
So you can just convert it as closed immediately and not create an opportunity, but you’ve got an option to add in different conversion statuses in there as well, to say, “Hey, yeah, it was an opportunity.” We’ve determined this is just spam or something like this. so you can close it immediately. Then you had a subject for a task. But if you do want to create a task, you can pick from the quick subjects, set a due date, and set a status. Now, obviously, it hasn’t started, but if you’re a salesperson, it may be that you’ve already completed this task of giving them a call, and you just want to create an opportunity off the back of the call because you’ve qualified the lead. As a result, you can immediately create a completed task. off there and to say, “Talk to the customer,” and they were busy, so we’ll call back later in the week, which actually doesn’t make sense with my date, so I’m actually going to leave. That has not started. And then you can set a reminder for yourself, and then click the convert button. Now, when you click the convert button, there are two different things that happen.
One is that the initial lead essentially vanishes from Salesforce, so you can’t search for it anymore, and then it’ll either create that account or contact, or go ahead and create that opportunity if you’ve given that option, as well as that task, if you want to create a task as well. But also, there’s field mapping that’s going on behind the scenes. So based on the data on that lead, there may be certain fields that you want to put into the opportunity record, the account record, or the contact record. So there’s a bit of field mapping that goes on behind the scenes. So I’m just going to convert this initially. So I’m going to hit convert. And there we are. I’ve converted this lead, and now you can see that I’m on the account. So, if I scroll down, you can see my new opportunity that I’ve created, and it has my Opportunity name. Now, we did override that opportunity name with some workflow logic in there. So that’s why the name has changed. So don’t worry about that. But it would come through under the name we gave it. Then came the activities.
As you can see, this task has not been started and is currently outstanding. And also, it’s linked to that existing company account with the new opportunity on it. So that looks all really good, but if we go through with the opportunity, you could say that actually there’s some information on here that would be really handy, like that field that we got on the lead that says which product series the inquiry is about. And that would be a really handy thing to put as a field on the opportunity so that we can kind of get that information and do reports and things on it and maybe even reassign the opportunity to people who are specifically responsible for that product series. So if we go back to my lead and go into this one, You can see it here. I’ve got my product interest list, 1000series, and I want to get that onto the lead. So this is where all the field mapping comes in. So I’m going to go onto my lead object, scroll down, and I’m going to look at the fields. Scroll down again, and you’ll see here that you’ve got this map lead field on the leads fields object. When the lead is converted, I can then map the fields on the lead object to the opportunity account and contact. So I’m going to click in here. And here we have the mapping. So I’ve got all of my leadfields down the left side. So all these custom fields are there, and I’ve got them along with my Contact and Opportunity objects.
As you can see, no fields are currently mapped from the lead to the account. Or these are the custom fields. The standard fields are mapped automatically. Then on the contact, you can see yes, I’ve got nothing linked there, and opportunity has nothing linked there either. But there’s the Product Interest field that I want to map across. Now, if I open up here, you can see that these are the fields that I can map to. And you can see there’s actually no field for this product’s interest. So I’m going to have to create it first. So I’ll simply open my opportunities in a new tab, open this up, and add a new field. I’ll make use of the Picklist interest. Now this is where the global picklist values can work really well because we have a product interest field on the lead and a product interest field on the opportunity.
But essentially, we want the pick list to be the same. So this is a perfect opportunity to use the global pick lists because then we can create one pick list that has all our products in it and that can be mapped across all the product series. Essentially, the groupings of the products that can be mapped across both objects But I’m not going to do that for now. I’m just going to call it GC 1000 or GC 2000. I think the last one—I can’t remember what we called it—was GC 5000. Quick look. Oh, I put “series.” No. 1000, 3005 thousand. As a result, the 1000, 3005 thousand number series I think it was lowercase. Cool. So I’ve made that selection list. I’m just going to unpick that. Now. This restricts the values defined in the value set. But then, because we’ve got independent picklists, it may be that somebody puts the picklist value in the lead. And so if I click this and then maybe forget to put it on the opportunity, if I pick this, there’s going to be an issue converting because the field isn’t going to match in here. But if I untick this, if somebody happens to create a 10,000 series on my lead and it converts, that value will still go into my opportunity field. So that’s why I just unticked that. But, of course, if we’re using Global Picklists, it’ll be a lot easier. So I’m going to create that field; I’ve got it now.
Now I’m going to go back to my lead conversion. Now I’m going to have to reload this because I’ve already created that field after I loaded it up. So I’m just going to go back to the field, scroll down, go map lead fields, and dive onto my opportunity. So here’s my product interest, and I can now map it to my product interest field on my opportunity and then click save. Now of course you can do thiswith all the other fields because essentiallythis information is just going to disappear. So perhaps the count is useful. Sick code. So, yeah, we don’t have any custom fields for that yet. So, yeah, that might be another one to push in because, essentially, when that lead gets converted, you can’t search for that lead any longer, and essentially that information has gone. So you really do need to convert and map those fields over to an opportunity contact or an account. So I’m going to click save, and there we have it. So I’ve now mapped my fields. So now if I go and convert that lead that has that information on it, there we go, I’ve got my GC 1000 series.
Okay, so now I’m going to click convert, and I’ll get my convert. And as you can see here, it’s just saying “Create account.” Because Net Stronghold UK Limited does not exist, I am unable to link it to an account. So, yes, I want to convert my opportunity. I’m going to create a task contact, client, or customer. Sorry, give it a due date of Wednesday. And, yes, keep it as “not begun.” That’s all good. Okay, so I’m happy with that. And now I’m ready to hit the convert button. So let’s see what happens. Bang. See, I’ve hit a validation rule, and this is because when you hit convert, Salesforce is creating an account, creating a contact, and creating an opportunity unless it finds one. And essentially, the validations on those records are going to fire. And as you can see, that has resulted in a validation error on the contact, stating that you must fill out the level field if the billing country is the United Kingdom, and that is a rule that I created on the contact to ensure that the data is all nice and formatted. Now, this situation, you havea couple of different options. Now that the first thing is actually on the lead object, you could create the same validations so that it says, “Okay, if the country is okay, then we need to fill out the level field first.”
So maybe putting that level field on the webform for when the customer fills out the form But it’s not great. It’s possible that it’s not on the web form and the lead is created anyway. And then, as part of the qualifying stage, that level field gets filled out before it gets converted. And then you map the level field on the lead to the level field on the contact, and everything’s good. But there is another option that you could do, which I don’t really recommend that you do it.There is an option to disable validations when you convert a lead, which basically means it’s going to ignore all validations and create records. But that basically means you’re creating messy records—essentially, records that are bypassing all your validations. So it’s an option you have, but I wouldn’t recommend it. So I’m just going to click cancel, come back, and quickly change my country to the United States instead. Click save. just to get around it for now. Cool customer. Give it the date. Wednesday has not started. All good.
And now, hit convert. Now we get an option to find existing contacts within salesforce.org. I’m happy just to convert and create a new record. And with that, the book is finished. So it’s created the account and mapped over the fields it needs to map over based on the standard fields. So that’s all good. It’s created my contact, so that’s all well, as well. It’s also given me a new opportunity. And there we go. It’s also pulled over the lead’s product interest, which is brilliant. But if I search for Net stronghold UK Limited, you can see it’s only come up with the opportunities, accounts, and contacts, and it hasn’t come up with any leads because the lead has now been converted. It’s kind of disappeared from view. Now again, there is another permission that you can set in Salesforce to allow it to still be searchable, but by default, it does disappear. Okay, so that’s about it for lead conversion. So we’ve seen how we can list our leads and find a lead that we want to convert, so we’ve qualified that we hit the convert button on the lead we asked to see. Okay, what’s the name of the opportunity? Do we want to give it to them?
Do we want to create an opportunity or not? Which account do we want to link it to? Based on the company name on the lead, if it matches all the company names of all the account records in our salesforce.org, then we’ve got the option to create a task, and then we convert that lead. So we’ve got to remember that the validations could fire on those leads. And there is one little thing about leads that you need to know, and that is that you can’t convert any roll-up summary fields on a lead. For one thing, you can’t have roll-up summaries on the lead object, so you can’t have any objects that have a master detailed relationship to the lead object. So then you can’t have roll-up summary fields, but essentially apart from that, you can map all the custom fields that you need to, but the standard fields are already mapped for you. So that is essentially it. So if you do have any questions about the lead conversion process, be sure to chuck them in the comments. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
7. Assignment Rules
Rules. So assignment rules allow you to reassign the owners of cases or leads to specific people or a queue of people. So this essentially allows you, based on the data on the record, to reassign the owner. And this could be, for example, if the lead has captured what products the person is interested in buying, you could then reassign the lead to the particular person who’s an expert at selling that particular product. Or it may be that, based on the country that’s been filled out on the lead, you’ve assigned the lead to a queue of people that are in that particular country or responsible for that country. So, for example, if somebody’s typed in United States in their country field, then you could reassign that lead to a queue of all the salespeople that are in the United States, and they just pick up which lead they want, sign it to them, and they get working on it.
So that’s the kind of thing you can do with assignment rules. So let’s take a look. So if I dive into my setup and search for assignment, you’ll see that there are actually only two places you can create assignment rules: on the lead object and on the case object. So if we dive into the leads, you can see that I’ve got a standard lead already set up. And if you have a developer.org, you all have the same thing. So I’m going to dive into standard. And I can see here that I’ve got the rule name, whether it’s active or not, and then I’ve got the rule entries.
So if you’ve created autoresponse rules before, you’ll see that this actually looks very familiar. And it is exactly the same, except that you’re assigning leads or cases to people and therefore making them the owner of them rather than sending an email. So in the assignment, you can tick this box to send an email to those people to say, “Hey, you’ve had a lead assigned to them.” But essentially, it is very similar. And you see, we’ve still got the order here as well. So when a lead gets created, Salesforce is going to evaluate all the active assignment rules and start going through the entry.
So you can see the first criteria is, well, if the country field equals USA, United States, or the United States of America, then reassign it to James Johnston, and don’t send him an email; just assign it to him. But if that’s not the case, then it’s going to go on to the next rule. And the next rule says, “Well, if the country is not equal to the United States, or USA, or United States of America, then assign it to me because I’m not in the US.” I’m based in Europe. And again, if you want to send them an email, you can. But this is just reassigning the ownership to me, and that’s it. So let’s take a look at how this works. So I’m going to dive into my leads. I’m going to create a new lead. So I’m going to call this James Peters of Peters, Inc. And I’ll assign the country to us. Now, if I save this, you’ll probably notice that nothing happens and it’s still assigned to me. And this is because lead assignment is a little bit odd in the way that you kind of need to activate it, either on a per-lead basis or by default. So I’m going to delete this lead, and I’ll do it again.
So I’m going to create another lead. Peter Jones. This is the time of Jones, Inc. I’m going to scroll to the bottom, and you can see here that it says assign using active assignment rules. So I’m just going to check that my assignment rule is active; otherwise, it’s not going to work. So, yes, lead assignments are active. So I’m going to change the country to the United States. And then, based on this, it’s going to get to the first rule and assign it to James. So I’m going to click save. And sure enough, it’s now been reassigned to James Johnson, which is really cool because it’s in the US. But I could if I wanted to, if I edited this action. So I can change the sort order, I can change the rules, and I can also change who it gets assigned to. So you can see here that it’s actually being assigned to this specific person, James Johnston. I can actually assign it to a group of people using a queue. And then also, if I select an email template here, they’re going to get an email as well. So James will know that a new lead has been assigned to him.
But you see, one of the problems with creating the lead is that essentially everybody who creates a new lead has got to make sure they check this box, which is annoying. However, there is a workaround: if you edit the lead, then edit the page layout on the lead, and then go into your layout properties, there is an option to say “lead assignment checkbox” and set it ticked by default. You can also uncheck it so that it does not appear on the edit page. So it’s always defaulted on, essentially. But I’m going to leave it in the edit as well. So I’m just going to turn it on by default. And now, if I save that, every lead that gets created that uses this page layout will now automatically have it ticked. So there you go. You can see when I’ve created a new lead that it’s automatically ticked, which is great. So then it will always use the lead assignment rule. So let’s create a new rule. So I’m going to create a new rule here. I’m going to make it number three, and I’m going to say where the city equals London, and I’m going to set it to the security user and click save. So now I’ve got my three rules. So now I’m going to go to my leads and create a new lead. But this time I’m going to say, “Well, it’s only a check.” Did I do the city? I think I did. Let’s just tweet the assignment rules. Yes. City is synonymous with London.
So I’m going to type the city here as London in here.I’m going to did. Let’s just tweeAt Londoninc. I’ve said it for the city. Now it is definitely a tip. So it’s going to assign using the active assignment rules. And who do you think, based on this information, is it going to assign it to? Is it going to sign it to James? Is it going to assign it to me, or is it going to assign the lead to the security user? So I’m going to click Save on here, and you’ll see that it assigns it to me. And this is one of the important things you need to understand about the rules and the orders. So, even though I said that the city does equal London and you expect it to assign to the security user, the rule above essentially overrides that by saying, “Well, if the country does not equal any of that information and it doesn’t because it’s blank, it’s going to assign it to me.” And because that rule is true and the criteria are correct, it’s going to assign it to me and not continue. So for this rule to work, it needs to be at least this one and ideally right at the very top.
So if I then reorder this, you’ll see it’s now plunked at the top because I said I wanted it as order one. Now, if we rerun the same thing, create a new lead with London as the city, and this works. London at London, Inc. It is again checked by default, and saving it has assigned it to the security user. As a result, you must be very careful about the rules and their ordering; otherwise, you risk having ones evaluated midway and messing up your rules. But that is essentially it. So assignment rules allow you to reassign the owner of leads or case records based on criteria you set in the rules. And those criteria can be either assigned to specific users or groups of users as a queue, so you can put people in a queue and use the queue, and you can also email them to notify them if they do get a lead or case assigned to them.
Now, here’s one final feature that I would like to mention, and that is that on the rules at the bottom, you’ll notice that there’s an option saying do not reassign owner. So this is a really important feature because it allows you to stop the reassignment of a lead. So based on the criteria, you can say, “Well, actually, whoever created that lead in the first place, I want to keep them as the owners of that lead and not reassign it.” So that can be really useful. So you could use that for, say, VIPs or some specific generic information. You could put that high up in the list if you wanted to, which basically said, “Okay, if that fires, it’s not going to run any of the reassign rules that you’ve got below it,” and that’s it. So that can be a really handy little feature. So if you do have any questions about assignment rules, be sure to put them in the chat. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next video.
8. Opportunity Overview
Welcome to the overview of the opportunity and sales process. So we’re going to just take a look at opportunities and where they fit in Salesforce, what information is on the opportunity, and how that fits into the sales process within Salesforce. So here I am on the Opportunities tab. Now, when you convert the lead, it gives you the option to create an opportunity.
And when an opportunity is created, it’s linked to an account and a contact within Salesforce. So if we dive into an example, “opportunities,” I’m going to dive into this one here. As you can see on this record, we have the record details along the top. We then have this section or related list called “Products,” where we can add products, choose our price books, and sort the order of products within our list. We have a similar Opportunities section if that is enabled, as well as Campaign Influence. Again, if you’ve enabled Campaign Influence and a number of other bits and pieces here as well, Now, the key bits at the top of the record detail are these fields over here. Then the main one is the stage.
The stage is now driving the sales process. So if we open up this stage, you can basically list all these different steps in the sales process. and this is determined by the stage. If I set the opportunity to the very first stage, which is prospecting, you can see that the probability has changed to 10%. And that’s because there’s a 10% chance of turning this opportunity into a sale because it’s so early in the sales process, right at the beginning of the prospecting stage. But as I move through this sales process, this probability will increase, and therefore, the chances of a sale will increase with it as well. And these figures are basically used for forecasting if you use forecasting within Salesforce. But let’s cancel that. Those two are essentially linked, but you have some control over the probability. So, for example, if you are in the qualification stage but know you have a 99% chance of making a sale, you can choose that and click Save, and it will remember that information. So even though it is at the qualifying stage, you know, the probability is 99%, then we’ve got the next steps, which is a key field for salespeople to say what they’re going to be doing in the next steps of this opportunity.
So move on to quoting for products. Then we got the closing date. Now the close date is the date on which the salesperson thinks they’re going to close this deal. And this is really important because it drives the forecasting process as well. Because essentially what Salesforce does is say, “Well, if this is the close date, if I change it to “just save it back next,” come back today.” So, if I select April 29th and click Save, the probability is set to ten. Then you see here that the expected revenue is currently $59,400. When I click Save, it drops to 6,000 because there is a 10% chance that this is an opportunity. The total amount of this opportunity is £60,000, so the expected revenue or forecasted revenue by this date is £6,000, and that essentially feeds into your forecasting. So these fields are quite important. Then we’ve got our campaign source, which is where this opportunity has come from, and from which marketing campaign, which is an optional field.
Then there could be some more customised fields here as well. So these are fields that I’ve entered in or that there are standard fields that you can take out or add in as you feel fit, as well as the standard salesforce description field, which you can put wherever you like in. So that’s the top level of the type of record, as well as all the record details contained within it. Next, we have the product section, so the products will get into a bit more detail in the next video, but essentially, it allows you to add products onto this opportunity, which affects the amount of the opportunity. So I set that amount manually on this opportunity, but the moment I add a product, it’s going to ask me for a pricebook, but we’ll go into this a bit later on. I’m just going to add in a product so I can show you how it affects the opportunity. So I’m just going to put one product on here with an amount of 100,000, and you can see here that the amount on the opportunity has changed. So every time I add a new product, the amount is going to increase based on the quantities and prices of those products. So similar opportunities for campaign influence are addressed in other videos. We do have contact roles.
Contact roles are now customers who are involved in the sale of this opportunity. So if I click New, it brings up a list of contacts associated with the account. So if I click the lookup button here, I can search across all the different companies to find a specific person that is working with me on this opportunity. Now these are all customers, partners, or things like that. So I’m just going to say that Peter Jones is the decision maker, which is really important within your sales process to identify who that decision maker is. And Peter Jones is just the evaluator of the solution that I’m selling. So if you scroll down, you can see now that I’ve added these two people on, as those are the people that are working on this opportunity. Also, because Peter is the decision-maker, he is the primary contact, which I forgot to check, so I’ll just put it there. So Jones is the primary contact for this opportunity. So that’s all good. Then we have the history. Now this is tracking the history, which is very similar to what custom objects or standard objects history looks like, and you can see here that the stages have been changed, the amounts changed, or the probability of expected revenue changed, and you can see who’s made those changes. Finally, we have the Opportunity Team, which is covered in a separate video. So essentially, that’s a quick high-level view of what the opportunity looks like. Now let’s take a look at the sales process.
So, if you go to Set up and search for Salesprocess, and then click in there, we have the sales processes. Now, if you’re using record types on an opportunity, sales processes are important because they essentially contain the stages for your opportunity for your sales cycle. So it’s very similar to record types, but you can have a sales process assigned to a record type that defines what your stages are in your opportunity. So, if I click New now and name it my main sales process, I can assign the stages that I want from my opportunity to this specific opportunity. So all these are selected at the moment, but maybe this particular sales process doesn’t include the price and quote, and there’s no need to do any analysis either. So I clicked save. Now I’ve created my sales process. I can now associate it with an Opportunity recordtype, which I don’t have on this opportunity. So essentially, it allows you to define your stages against different record types. So that’s a high-level look at the opportunity record and the related list on it, as well as the sales process. Now, a lot of this has been covered in other videos, so this is literally just a quick look at how it all fits together. So if you do have any questions, be sure to slap them in the comments. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
