How to Manage Closed-Lost Leads in Salesforce that Comes Back Again

As a salesperson, you want to successfully convert every lead you get but the task is actually a tall order. Based on initial interaction, you change a lead into an opportunity but moving an opportunity to closed-lost leaves you crestfallen.

There could be a number of factors (that are not in your control) behind the lost opportunity. This, however, could be constant or transient. There could be a possibility that a lead comes back, maybe within days, weeks, or months.

If it happens, the chances of conversion are brighter than before. But what will you do next?

Reopen the old opportunity

If reopening the opportunity is what comes to your mind first, think again! When reopening an old opportunity, Salesforce cannot discern an account for this period of dormancy when calculating your sales cycle, throwing those numbers out of whack.

Create a new opportunity

If not reopen, the only option you have is to create a new opportunity. But here lies the problem. Supposedly, if you have converted 20 out of 100 opportunities in a quarter, creating a new opportunity ends up leading to a new conversion rate of winning 20 out of every 101, throwing off your quarterly report slightly on the funnel conversion rates.

Here’s how we helped one of our clients who was stuck in a similar situation of our customers had encountered a similar case. He expressed his concern during one of our routine calls. After assessing the possibilities.

The Context:

Most organizations use both marketing automation and CRM tools. And largely, Marketo is used for marketing automation and Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM).

In this blog post, we will be discussing the solution to one such challenge: The challenge to manage leads in Salesforce once the status is converted to closed-lost and that leads fills out the Marketo form again.

The Problem:

Once a lead is closed-lost, that’s where its journey in Salesforce CRM is rounded off. But what if the same lead comes back after a while?

Well, in that case, a new lead is created in the Salesforce instance but that is synced with the existing one that is closed-lost. So, this causes discrepant data and often, these leads get missed. You, certainly, don’t want that to happen.

The Solution:

Grazitti’s Salesforce experts developed a custom solution to deal with the problem. The solution was developed after intense thought that involved:

The fact that the existing lead that is closed-lost shouldn’t get deleted. A duplicate lead should be created if a closed-lost lead comes back. Deciding on what parameters a duplicate lead can be created. Is it possible to sync the Marketo form in Salesforce for a better understanding of the lead and more? Keeping all of the aforementioned points in mind, a customized solution was created by Salesforce experts. And it came out to be exactly what was expected.

The custom solution was capable of the following:

If an opportunity has been closed-lost, and it comes back again in Marketo, it will automatically be further synced in Salesforce. Following the customization, a duplicate lead will be created. The duplicate lead is created on the basis of the lead score i.e if the person’s score crossed a specific threshold (a defined person/behavior score), only then a duplicate lead will be created. Not just that a duplicate lead will be created but the activities and details (activity feed) of the closed-lost lead will also be synced with the new duplicate lead. To better understand the behavior or a lead, a custom solution was also developed that lets sales folks fetch and see the Marketo from within their Salesforce instance. Thus, making it easier to better target a lead based on the browsing history and not losing any track of the lead data.