One of the age old defaults of Salesforce is the leads object, and once you use it, it’s hard to move away to any other process. But the leads and lead conversion system system feels antiquated with the way most companies use SFDC today. And a new idea is starting to catch on, one using a leads-less CRM, and living entirely in the contacts object.
This is interesting on paper, but poses all sorts of challenges. For instance, how do you deal with accounts that potentially house hundreds of contacts. What about accounts for no-name businesses?
Are you simply moving the mess from one place to another?
I won’t claim to have one true solution here, but were you to consider a shift to a contacts-only model, there’s a few steps needed first.
Before you even think of tackling a move away from the lead object, you’ve got to get your filtering dialed in for what justifies an account to be created. The junk just can’t make it over to the contacts object in the first place. Ideally, it shouldn’t be created in the system at all.
You also still likely need some sort of lead-to-account (L2A) matching system in place, as figuring out where to place a lead initially is still required, especially for most marketing automation systems. You can’t just shut off that object and functionality. Plus, whatever you use for matching must be dialed in precisely to the way your account hierarchies work. If you have global and regional accounts in a parent-child relationship, or subsidiaries housed in the same account, you must account for these nuances in any L2A system.
The most likely scenario is a world where you have the lead object solely housed for the junk that couldn’t get matched, and any truly net new accounts that have no home yet on the accounts table. Plus any records matched to existing accounts are auto-converted to live on the account where they belong.
Perhaps this solves the data organization challenge, but the next issue, arguably the most tricky, is properly prioritizing contacts for sales teams. Unlike with a lead queue where a team can just work through a big list of new names, contacts must be sorted from inactive to those showing buying behavior.
The irony to this is that such prioritization of contacts has always been necessary, but removing leads from the equation tends to shine a light on these systemic issues.
The shift to a contacts-only model can be worth all this trouble – but it takes a serious investment and partnership between sales, sales and marketing operations, and business systems teams to pull it off successfully.