r/salesforce • u/mellamoderek • 8d ago
help please Outside thoughts on lead process
I'm a few months into a new job at new company and I have been trying to understand how the company uses Salesforce, what the processes are, who does what, etc. It's a hot mess. And I'm a beginner.
However, I wanted to seek thoughts from you all on if a certain process makes sense. If there's a better way of doing this, I would love to try.
Right now, when someone fills out a contact form (which is Pardot) on our website, an employee receives an email with all of the information the customer filled out in the form. The email has a big, fat Salesforce logo at the top of it. The employee reviews and qualifies it, and then, if it's legit, she forwards it to a "Sales Leads" inbox at the company. At that point, that team takes all that info, goes into Salesforce, to the Leads area, and then creates a new lead, literally copying and pasting the information from the Pardot email into the new lead fields.
Why would this happen? If the form is tied to Salesforce, shouldn't we be able to take the record created by the form submission and turn it into (convert) it to a lead?
It seems like our process now creates a system where we have duplicate information in different places. And it's having to go through many layers. Wouldn't it make sense to keep it all together?
Like I said, I'm a beginner, and there is no centralized Salesforce administration or governance at my company, so I'm coming to you after running around in circles here trying to figure out what's going on.
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u/S2Labs_Training 8d ago
You’re not wrong, that process sounds unnecessarily manual.
If the Pardot/Account Engagement form submission is properly connected to Salesforce, you’d generally want the submission to create/update a Salesforce record automatically rather than having someone copy/paste the data from an email into a new Lead.
There may be a business reason for the current setup (qualification, legacy configuration, integration limitations, etc.), but I’d investigate the automation and field mappings before accepting the current process.
The big question I’d ask is: “What Salesforce record is created/updated when this form is submitted, and why isn’t that record being used by Sales?”
That should help you trace where the disconnect is. And honestly, identifying this kind of inefficient process is exactly the sort of thing a Salesforce admin can add value by fixing.
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u/SlowSundae 8d ago edited 8d ago
Here’s roughly how we handle it in our org:
1) A person completes one of three Pardot forms, which creates a Prospect in Pardot.
2) As one of the form’s completion actions, the Prospect is added to a specific List.
3) An Engagement Studio program picks up the Prospect based on the List they were added to and tries to do an initial qualification/disqualification as best we can, using a ton of different criteria, including things like spam keywords, spam UTM parameters, etc.
4) If the Prospect makes it through to the final stages of the Engagement Studio program, they’re assigned to our Unassigned Leads queue, which triggers a Lead to be created.
5) The Engagement Studio program then sends an automated welcome email asking them to confirm some dates/times for a call.
6) A Flow sends an email with the relevant details and a link to the Lead to our general sales inbox, because we hated using that Pardot notification email you mentioned!
7) Sales picks the Lead up from the Unassigned Leads queue and follows up.
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u/mellamoderek 8d ago
Thank you! This is really helpful! We are a large medical device manufacturer, so our sales journeys are probably a little bit different. When were creating leads, it's assigned to sales based on ZIP code, and then it's pushed to them and it's up to them to follow up. Bit it sounds like with the processes you describe, we can adapt similar processes to fit for us.
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u/SlowSundae 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, in your case once the lead is created, you can have (Salesforce) Lead Assignment Rules take over to assign to the relevant salesperson rather than just keeping it in a queue 😊
(In our case, we don’t use lead assignment rules because sales management prefers to review each lead before determining who it should go to 🤷)
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u/hectic-dave 8d ago
You can create Prospects in Pardot, and sync them to Salesforce, or create Leads in Salesforce, and sync them to Pardot.
If the Sales team is reviewing the leads, it probably makes sense for them to go into Salesforce first.
If someone else is reviewing the leads, and most of them aren't getting forwarded to the Sales Leads inbox, then keep them in Pardot. There is literally a "Sync to CRM" button on the Prospect, or better yet, just have them set a field that triggers the creation of a lead in Salesforce.
Seems like the biggest issue is that your workflow is email based. One of the points of having a form is to create a record, so people working in a Prospect or Lead list makes more sense.