How Salesforce Opportunities Fall Through the Cracks (and How to Save Them)

Every software vendor wants you to believe one thing—that their solution is all it takes to eliminate your biggest problems. But the reality is that any piece of software is only as good as its users. This is as true for Salesforce as any other system even though it’s a massively powerful CRM.

Just because Salesforce gives you everything you might need to organize customer and prospect data doesn’t mean the software is perfect. Time and time again, deals fall through the cracks of Salesforce. And whether it’s a user error or a software flaw doesn’t matter. All that matters is figuring out where you’re losing opportunities and making sure you never miss a deal again.

Here are a few Salesforce mistakes that could cause you to lose opportunities (and how to fix them with intent data).

Mistake #1: Assuming Every Lead Is Ready to Convert

You have a lead nurturing process for a reason. Bringing new leads into the top of the funnel doesn’t mean that they’re ready to have a sales call or convert. However, in the name of speed, many teams go for the hard sell right when a lead is added to their CRM.

Instead of bombarding new leads with sales communications in the name of speed, you need to implement more stringent qualification rules in your Salesforce instance. This means taking advantage of web-based intent signals that automatically generate qualification scores.

By tracking account activity and mapping behavior to Salesforce profiles, you can ensure time and resources are spent pursuing leads that are truly ready to convert (rather than spreading your team thin chasing leads that aren’t ready).

Mistake #2: Thinking Web-to-Lead Forms Are Enough

One benefit to using Salesforce is that you can replace traditional lead gen forms with the CRM’s Web-to-Lead forms. This shift ensures that submissions for content downloads and demo requests automatically create lead entries in your CRM to begin qualifying the prospect for sales.

By leveraging Web-to-Lead forms, sales teams can:

• Automatically assign leads to the right reps
• Create structured data around lead gen campaigns for greater backend organization
• Set themselves up for more accurate measurement
• Link leads to campaigns to generate insights for future sales and marketing efforts

But just because you’re using Web-to-Lead forms doesn’t mean you’ll capture every opportunity. Beyond the insights generated from interactions on your own website, you need to understand the keywords, websites, and advertisements that leads engage with outside of your owned properties. Infusing your Salesforce instance with third-party intent data gives you the account intelligence necessary to go beyond Web-to-Lead forms and understand when opportunities are really qualified.

Mistake #3: Maintaining a Gap Between Sales and Marketing

In a perfect world, account-based marketing (ABM) gives sales and marketing a common language to improve collaboration. But for many marketing teams that embrace ABM, the next challenge is to get the sales team to buy in. Salesforce shouldn’t be a barrier between these two teams.

Even if marketing teams have access to Salesforce, it can be difficult to add enough value to the sales process. And when marketers aren’t adding value within Salesforce, the sales team won’t embrace ABM and business results will suffer.

Resolving this problem requires marketers to change their conversations with sales. Instead of just filling the pipeline with leads, go a step further to fully qualify those leads. By bringing intent signal scoring to your Salesforce instance, marketing and sales can find common ground with intent qualified opportunities (IQOs). Completing CRM profiles with deeper behavioral data and intent scoring ensures that sales can embrace ABM and improve their close rates.

Never Miss Deals in Salesforce Again

In early 2019, we released Aberdeen Intent for Salesforce. This Salesforce-native solution is designed to eliminate these mistakes by pushing intent-qualified opportunities directly into your Salesforce instance.

This solution gives you the tools to augment Salesforce to help you:

• Tailor intent signals to best fit your specific products and market
• Track account activity across your website with intent scoring incorporated
• Continuously monitor all accounts within your target market for potential intent signals
• Create opportunities that exceed your customized intent threshold
• View keywords, top websites, ad engagement, and intent scores for in-market accounts
• Track IQOs contribution to pipeline with the Visualforce dashboard

Our solution brings the power of intent data to your Salesforce database so that deals never fall through the cracks again. But if you haven’t worked with intent data in the past, you might not know what exactly that can do for your sales and marketing teams.