What to Do with All Those Leads

You’ve explained to Ava how Sales Cloud Einstein automates the sales team’s busywork. Now you have to show how AI helps sales reps work smarter on the more important work of nurturing leads.

You take a trip upstairs to visit your colleague Pepper Black, one of Honeydew’s top sales managers. You ask Pepper what key challenges she and her team face in trying to turn stacks of new leads into potential deals.

Pepper tells you that while her sales team has an effective process for gathering leads, a core challenge is knowing which of those leads to prioritize. Without that knowledge, her team spends a ton of its time on leads that don’t pan out. When you press her for more details, she explains the challenges she faces.

• Her sales team has many more leads than they have time for.
• They don’t know which lead characteristics indicate a higher chance of closing a deal.
• Their attempts at prioritization have met with mixed success.
• They aren’t sure which prioritization method is most appropriate for Honeydew’s business.

Some of her sales reps have enough experience to know which leads have the highest likelihood of purchasing. They focus on leads in urban areas or from certain kinds of food businesses, for example. But this method is far from perfect, and many reps aren’t experienced enough to have this kind of feel for leads.

They’ve tried rules-based prioritization, but the rules they used were also based mostly on educated guesses and intuition. They’ve tried sorting by geography or by lead source, but these methods left some potentially hot leads unattended. The rules they came up with lacked sophistication.

Finally, Pepper mentions that the marketing department has even tried scoring leads as they come in, but only with a numeric score. Sales reps don’t have a clear idea how a given lead earns its score. Not knowing where the score really comes from makes it hard for reps to trust the scores. They want more information about what makes a lead hot, information that might help them break the ice during that first call.

As you listen to Pepper’s description of these challenges, you can tell she doesn’t notice the widening smile on your face. You’re smiling because Sales Cloud Einstein can really help her team turn their leads into opportunities faster.