Salesforce CRM Basics - An Overview

Salesforce gives you a 360 degree view of your customers and insight into your own business.

If you’ve been running your business from multiple systems, it’s likely that your customer data lives in different places. You might have data in emails, spreadsheets, various databases, or point solutions. Multiple systems are a barrier to understanding your data and getting a complete picture of your customers. With your data in Salesforce, you have a single source of truth and a single point of engagement.

Salesforce technology is a game-changer. It’s a single place to create, view, and update your customer data from anywhere on any device to drive lasting engagement with your customers.

You don’t have to install software to access Salesforce. You just need an internet connection and a Web browser.

Salesforce is your customer success platform, designed to help you sell, service, market, analyze, and connect with your customers.

Salesforce has everything you need to run your business from anywhere. Using standard products and features, you can manage relationships with prospects and customers, collaborate and engage with employees and partners, and store your data securely in the cloud.

But standard products and features are only the beginning. Our platform allows you to customize and personalize the experience for your customers, partners, and employees and easily extend beyond out of the box functionality.

What Is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. This technology allows you to manage relationships with your customers and prospects and track data related to all of your interactions. It also helps teams collaborate, both internally and externally, gather insights from social media, track important metrics, and communicate via email, phone, social, and other channels.

In Salesforce, all of this information is stored securely in the cloud.

Salesforce organizes your data into objects and records. 

Salesforce comes with standard objects already set up and ready for use.

Here are some of the core standard objects, and a description of how each one is used. 

Accounts:- Companies you’re doing business with. You can also do business with individual people, like solo contractors, using Person Accounts. More on that later.

Contacts:- People who work at a company you’re doing business with (Accounts).

Leads:- Potential prospects who are not yet ready to buy or you haven't determined what product they need. You don't have to use Leads, but they can be helpful if you have team selling, or if you have different sales processes for prospects and qualified buyers.

Opportunities:- Qualified leads that you’ve converted. When you convert a lead, you create an Account and Contact along with the Opportunity.

Industry	Use Case
Financial Services	Integrated service, sales, and marketing for wealth management firms and banks
Healthcare	Solutions for personalized, connected, and responsive care
Government	Connecting citizens, agencies, and processes in the cloud
Higher Education	Use social, mobile, and cloud to become a connected campus
Manufacturing	Mobilizing sales teams, simplifying order management, and integrating external systems

• If your organization uses both business accounts and person accounts, you’ll have to select which type of account you’re creating whenever you add an account.Person accounts are forever. After they're turned on, you can't turn them off.
• Person accounts can’t have contacts.
• Person accounts don’t have an account hierarchy.

1. From Setup, enter Social Accounts and Contacts Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Social Accounts and Contacts Settings.
2. Select Enable Social Accounts and Contacts.
3. Select the social networks that your organization can use. By default, all social networks are selected.
4. Click Save.
5. Let your users know that they can configure Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads for their individual use.
6. From your personal settings, enter Social Accounts and Contacts in the Quick Find box, then select My Social Accounts and Contacts, My Social Accounts and Contacts Settings, or Settings—whichever one appears.
7. Set up Social Accounts and Contacts so that it works the way you want it to.
8. Click Save.

Best Practices for Managing Accounts and Contacts

• Establish naming conventions for accounts
• Don’t allow orphan contacts
• Audit your accounts and contacts
• Handle inactive accounts and contacts
• Organize an outreach campaign to re-engage with them.
• Exclude them from list views, reports, automated processes, campaigns, and more so you can focus marketing, sales, and service efforts on active customers .
• Maintain active ownership

Keep your records updated

• FirstName
• LastName
• IsPesonAccount
• Languagespc
• Levelpc
• PersonAssistantName
• PersonAssistantPhone
• PersonBirthdate
• PersonContactId
• PersonDepartment
• PersonEmail
• PersonEmailBouncedDate
• PersonEmailBouncedReason
• PersonHomePhone
• PersonLastCURequestDate
• PersonLastCUUpdateDate
• PersonLeadSource
• PersonMailingCity
• PersonMailingCountry
• PersonMailingPostalCode
• PersonMailingState
• PersonMailingStreet
• PersonMobilePhone
• PersonOtherCity
• PersonOtherCountry
• PersonOtherPhone
• PersonOtherPostalCode
• PersonOtherState
• PersonOtherStreet
• PersonTitle
• RecordTypeId
• Salutation
• Parent Account
• View Hierarchy
• Reports To

Person Account Considerations

• Person Accounts can be associated with activities using either the Name or Related To fields.
• Person Accounts can be invited to group events and requested meetings.
• Person Accounts can be added to campaigns and have a Campaign History related list.
• For cases, Person Accounts can be entered in the Account Name field, the Contact Name field, or both.
• You can add Person Accounts to the Contact Roles related list on cases, contracts, and opportunities.
• Custom objects with relationships to either accounts or contacts can be added as related lists on Person Accounts.
• Person Accounts can be enabled as users for your Customer and Self-service portals.
• Person Accounts are currently supported in Connect Offline and Connect for Outlook version 3.2 and later. They are not currently supported in Connect for Lotus Notes.
• You can send individual emails and mass emails to Person Accounts.
• For field history, Account fields for Person Accounts can be tracked using the account field history settings, but contact fields for Person Accounts are configured on the contact field history settings page.
• Person Accounts have an unique import wizard so make sure you check the Salesforce.com Help for more info.
• Leads with a blank Company field are converted to Person Accounts. The default Person Account record type for your profile is applied to the new Person Account.
• You cannot add a contact formula field that references the account object to Person Accounts page layouts.
• Contact sharing is not available if you have enabled Person Accounts. The organization-wide default for contacts is set to Controlled by Parent and is not editable.
• If your organization has customized your contact sharing settings and you want to enable Person Accounts, change your organization-wide default for contacts to Controlled by Parent, which removes all your contact sharing rules and manually shared contacts.
• Person Accounts count against both account and contact storage because the API considers each Person Account to consist of one account as well as one contact.
• Creating or editing a Person Account triggers account workflow rules.

1. From Setup, enter Account Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Account Settings.
2. Select Allow users to relate a contact to multiple accounts.
1. From Setup, enter Accounts in the Quick Find box, then select Page Layouts.
2. Next to the appropriate page layout, click Edit.
3. Select Related Lists.
4. Drag Related Contacts onto the page layout. Because the Related Contacts related list automatically includes all direct contacts, you can remove the Contacts related list on your account page layouts.
5. Click Save.
3. Add the Related Accounts related list to the contact page layouts your reps use. It’s similar to what you just did in step 3.
4. Decide whether you want to prevent activities from automatically rolling up to a contact’s primary account. If so, from Setup, go to the Activities Settings page and deselect Roll up activities to a contact's primary account.
5. If you want to look at the relationships between contacts and accounts, create custom report types.
6. From an account record, use the Related Contacts related list to create or edit relationships between accounts and contacts. Create a relationship by clicking Add Relationship. Edit an existing relationship by clicking Edit Rel(in Salesforce Classic) or Edit Relationship (in Lightning Experience).
7. Fill in the information on the account contact relationship information.
8. Save your changes.

• Account Hierarchies
• Best Practices for Establishing Account Hierarchies
• Global Enterprise Account
• Location-Specific Accounts
• Account Teams

1. From Setup, click Customize | Accounts | Account Teams.
2. Click Enable Account Teams.
3. Select Account Teams Enabled and click Save.
4. Select the account page layouts on which to include the new Account Team related list and click Save. Optionally, you can also select Add to users’ customized related lists to add the Account Team related list for users who have changed their personal settings for Account record pages.
5. Optionally click,Team Roles to review or edit team roles.

Assign an Account Team

1. On the Accounts tab, select an account to view and scroll down.
2. On the Account Team related list, click Add.
3. Click the search icon to select a Salesforce user to assign to the team. If you haven’t set up any other users, the only person that you can assign to the team is yourself.
4. For each team member, select a level of access to the account and to opportunities and cases related to the account.
5. For each team member, select the team member’s role.
6. Click Save.

After you add an account team, the button Add Default Team displays right next to Add button. Default Teams is a shortcut that saves you from having to enter the same members into the same form over and over again. If the same people usually work together, create a default account team and assign them to it. You can even set Salesforce to add your default account team every time and eliminate the need to click buttons at all. Visit Setting Up Default Account Teams to find out how.
Opportunities are deals in progress. In Salesforce you can create opportunities for existing accounts or by converting a qualified lead.

• Prospecting
• Developing
• Negotiation/Review
• Closed/Won
• Closed/Lost

1. Create the opportunity stages needed in the sales process.
2. Name the sales process, and select what opportunity stages are included in that particular process.
3. Optionally, create an Opportunity page layout specific to the process. For example, you might include a field called “Custom Embroidery” on the page layout for the sales process for small, custom shoe orders but not on the page layout for standard retail orders.
4. Create a record type for the sales process. Record types link the sales process to the page layout that goes with it.

Set Up Opportunity Stages

1. From Setup, click Customize | Opportunities | Fields.
2. Click the Stage field label.
3. Click New.
4. Enter a name for the stage.
5. Enter a number to indicate the probability that any given sale in this stage will be successfully completed. For example, if 1 in 5 deals in this stage complete, enter 20 to indicate 20%.
6. Click Save.

Set Up a Sales Process
You might sell different items using different processes. You must set up at least one sales process in Salesforce, but you can set up additional processes to match how your business actually works.

1. From Setup, click Customize | Opportunities | Sales Processes.
2. Click New.
3. To create the first new process for your organization, create a Master process.
4. Give your sales process a unique but descriptive name. For example, Retail Sales.
5. Optionally, add a description.
6. By default, all stages are included in a new process. Remove stages you don’t want to include by clicking the stage name in the Selected Values area, and then clicking the Remove arrow to move the unwanted stage to the Available Values area. For example, if you qualify all leads before converting leads to opportunities, remove Qualification from the selected values.
7. Click Save.

Create an Opportunity Record Type
The record type is how you link a particular page layout and sales process to a type of product. Record types determine which types of sales opportunities pass through which sales process.

1. From Setup, click Customize | Opportunities | Record Types.
2. Click New.
3. Enter a record type label and a record type name.
4. Select a sales process to apply the record type to.
5. Optionally, add a description of this process.
6. Select which profiles can access the new sales process.
7. Click Next.
8. Apply the page layout to the Opportunity Layout.
9. Click Save.

Create an Opportunity

1. On the Opportunities tab, click New.
2. If your organization has more than one record type for opportunities, select the type that best represents this opportunity.
3. Give the opportunity a name.
4. Select the account that the opportunity relates to.
5. Select a close date for the opportunity.
6. Select the stage that the opportunity is currently in.
7. Salesforce adds a probability based on the stage selected. You can change the probability if it isn’t accurate for this opportunity.
8. Click Save.

As you work on the new opportunity, you’ll change the opportunity stage to indicate your progress toward a sale. In the full Salesforce site, you can edit the record to change the opportunity stage. In the Salesforce1 mobile app, tap Mark This Stage as Complete.

Contact Roles on Opportunities
Contact Roles for opportunities tell you which contacts you’re dealing with for the opportunity, and how each is related to the opportunity. You can also link contacts from other accounts to the opportunity using contact roles.

Add a Contact Role on an Opportunity

1. In the Contact Roles related list of an opportunity, click New.
2. Click the lookup icon to select a contact or person account.
3. Choose a role. If you don’t select a role or the role is set to None, changes you make to this record aren’t saved.
4. Optionally, select a primary contact for this opportunity.
5. Click Save.

Enable Team Selling

1. From Setup, enter Opportunity Team Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Opportunity Team Settings.
2. Select Enable Team Selling and click Save.
3. Select which page layouts to include opportunity teams.
4. Optionally, to add the Opportunity Team related list to all opportunities for all users, select Add to users’ customized related lists.
5. Click Save.

Add or Edit Team Roles
If the roles provided don’t match how your company’s sales process works, you can add new roles or change the existing ones.

1. From Setup, click Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Teams | Fields.
2. Click the Team Role field label.
3. In the Team Role Picklist Values area, do one of the following:
1. Click New to create a new role.
2. Click Rename to give an existing role a different name.
4. Click Save.

Add Members to an Opportunity Team

1. Open the opportunity and navigate to the Opportunity Team related list.
2. Click Add.
3. In the User column, enter the member’s name. Opportunity team members are granted read access to the associated account automatically.
4. Select the member’s opportunity team role.
5. Select the member’s opportunity access level. The access level can’t be less than your organization’s default opportunity sharing access.
6. Specify values for any custom fields that your administrator has created for opportunity teams.
7. Click Save.

Add a Lead

1. Click the Lead tab.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the first and last name of the lead.
4. If the lead works for a company, enter the company’s name in the Company field. If the lead is an individual consumer, leave the Company field blank.
5. Select a status for the lead. Enter any other information you have available.
6. To have the lead automatically assigned using lead assignment rules, select Assign using active assignment rule.
7. Click Save.

Save your users time by customizing the page layout to select this option by default.
You can also add leads by importing a file into Salesforce or through an automatic process, such as a Web-to-Lead form that collects leads from your business website.
Assign Leads
If Salesforce hasn’t been given rules for assigning leads, you own all the leads you create. Leads created from a web form or other automatic process are owned by the administrator who set up that process. You can manually change ownership of leads to another Salesforce user or to a queue. (Queues are not covered in this course, but you can learn more about them in the Salesforce online help. The assignment process is the same for individual owners and queues.)
It’s more efficient to set up Salesforce to assign leads to the right owners based on criteria, such as where the lead is located, which industry they’re involved in, or the type of products they’re interested in. For example, suppose you have a sales rep, Dan Lang, who handles all sales for companies in the entertainment industry. To have leads assigned to Dan as soon as they’re entered, create a lead assignment rule called Entertainment Leads with the criteria that all lead records with “Entertainment” in the field “Industry” are assigned to Dan Lang.
Before setting up lead assignment rules for your company, you should carefully review your existing business process to determine how leads should be assigned. After leads have been assigned according to your process, be sure to include a catch-all assignment rule to catch any leads who don’t somehow qualify for any other rules.

Set Up a Criteria-Based Lead Assignment Rule

1. From Setup, enter Assignment Rules in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Assignment Rules.
2. Click New.
3. Enter a name.
4. Click Active to turn the lead rule on immediately.
5. Click Save.
6. Click the rule name.
7. In the Rule Entries area, click New.
8. Enter a sort order for the rule. For example, to process this rule before all other lead assignment rules, enter 1.
9. To create a criteria-based lead assignment rule, select criteria are met.
10. Select a field, operator, and value. To assign all entertainment industry leads to Dan, select the field Lead: Industry, the operator equals, and the value Entertainment.
11. Use the lookup icon to find the user to which to assign the lead. If you haven’t created any other users in your Salesforce organization, you can’t select a user.
12. Click Save.

Convert Leads to Opportunities, Accounts, and Contacts Convert a Lead

1. On the Leads tab, select a lead to convert.
2. Click Convert.
3. In the Account Name field, either select a new account or search for an existing one. For existing accounts, details about the lead appear in empty fields. If your company uses person accounts and the lead is an individual consumer, leave the Account Name field blank.
4. If you update an existing person account, the option to overwrite the Lead Source field in the person account with the value from the lead.
5. In the Opportunity Name field, enter a name for the new opportunity or select Do not create a new opportunity upon conversion.
6. Optionally, schedule a follow-up task under Task Information.
7. Click Convert.

So that’s the basics of the standard object model. But what you have access to use depends on which editions and products you purchase.

Salesforce features are available by purchasing products and editions. What you buy depends on what you need. You can visit this page for a deeper dive: www.salesforce.com/products.

After you decide which product you need, you can select which edition to buy. It’s important that you understand that the edition you use determines what features you can access. Each edition is priced differently and contains different sets of features. For example, if you’re a Sales Cloud customer, Territory Management is only available in Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

To learn more, check out this list of features available in different editions of Sales Cloud.

While we’re talking about Salesforce, it’s a good time to look at a few use cases for Salesforce CRM.

So far we’ve been using an example of a traditional goods and services sales model, that sells a product (custom sneakers) to customers (individuals or businesses). But how does Salesforce support different industries?

Here are a few examples.

To learn more about how Salesforce can help you succeed in your specific industry, check out www.salesforce.com/industries

You need insight into your business and your data and that starts with the people you're doing business with. In Salesforce, you store information about your customers using accounts and contacts. Accounts are companies that you're doing business with, and contacts are the people who work for them.

If you’re doing business with a single person, like a solo contractor or an individual consumer, you use a special account type called a Person Account.

For the purposes of this module, we’ll assume you’re selling to businesses only, and your accounts are all business accounts. But almost everything you learn here can be applied to both types of accounts.

Accounts and contacts are related to many other standard objects, which makes them some of the most important objects in Salesforce. Understanding how to use accounts and contacts is key to getting the most out of Salesforce CRM.

In Salesforce, the companies that you’ve sold to are Business Accounts.

One of the most important things you need to know about a company is who works there and how to reach them. In Salesforce, the people who work at your accounts are called Contacts.

Like an account record, a contact record can have its own related lists of information, such as cases that each contact has filed, meetings you’ve had, or logs of calls to that contact.

If you have customers who are individuals, not companies, your Salesforce organization can be set up to use Person Accounts.

Person Accounts let you store information that applies to human beings rather than corporations, such as a first name and a last name.

Person and business account have a few important differences.

The Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature adds social network information from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Klout to your records. To use it, you must have an account on each social network that you’re using, and you have to link the account or contact record to a user profile on each social network.

After you’ve set that up, the social network information for the contact or account is available on the account record or contact record on the full Salesforce site. On Salesforce1, you can view social network information for Twitter users only.

You can’t see anything about an account or contact that wouldn’t normally be available to you when you’re logged in to the social network. But you can see that information at a glance and easily switch between networks. If you connect a Facebook or Twitter profile for an account, contact, or lead, you can use the social network profile image as the profile image for that account, contact, or lead in Salesforce.

Before you can use the Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature, your admin must enable it for your organization and you have to configure your personal settings.

In the organization you’re using for this module, enable the feature.

To configure and use the feature, complete the following steps.

If you don’t already have standards for account names, now is a great time to establish some. It’s important to consider how best to record an account’s name, and how you can use naming to denote relationships between accounts. For example, if you work with multiple franchises, you might need to use names that make sense in a hierarchy but also help you differentiate between two stores with the same name in a similar geographic area.

Always associate contacts with an account. Contacts without accounts—private contacts—are like a forgotten boat adrift at sea. They’re hidden from all users except their owner and system administrators, which makes them easy to forget, hard to find, and useless to colleagues.

Use exception reporting in Salesforce to find accounts and contacts without activities in the last 30, 60, or 90 days.

Or create an “inactive” checkbox field on your account and contact objects, and use mass update to denote inactive accounts. Set up an automated process to mark accounts and contacts inactive for you, based on criteria you specify.

After you’ve located inactive accounts and contacts, you can handle them in many different ways. For example,

It’s hard to actively manage an account if it’s assigned to someone who isn’t using Salesforce. When an employee moves to a different position or leaves your company, assign that person’s accounts and contacts to new owners.

Use features like Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads, and Data.com to gather up-to-date information. Make it a policy that all updated data is entered into Salesforce.

Out of the box (so to speak), Salesforce.com is a B2B product. But what if your company provides home healthcare services or lawn care services or any other type of service for individual consumers. You don't hear alot of talk about it but Salesforce.com can be tweaked for this scenario using "Person Accounts".

By default, Person Accounts are not enabled. You'll need to call support to have them enabled and they will repeatedly ask you if you really want to do this and if you understand the consequences. Once enabled, Person Accounts cannot be disabled. I would recommended you enable a Developer Edition first and test out your solution there before enabling your Production Org.

So what actually happens when you enable Person Accounts and what are the consequences? The Salesforce.com Help has alot of good info on Person Accounts but I wanted to dig in and really see what was happening in the background. In most situations, you can use person accounts as if they were contacts. You can include them in all contact list views except the Recent Contacts list on the contacts home page.

So when Person Accounts are enabled you'll see a new set of menu items under Setup -> App Setup -> Customize -> Accounts

You can configure Person Account page layout like you would any other type of page layout. You'll need to go and assign the new record type to each of the profiles that need access to it.

Once you've done they you will be able to create accounts for Business and Personal record types. When you click the "New" Account button you'll receive a picklist asking you which type to create:

So what happens when you create a new Person Account. So a Person Account is a combination of both an Account and Contact record. When Person Accounts are enabled, the following fields are added to the Account object:

The following fields are not available for Person Accounts:

You can go to the Person Account page layout and add these fields to the page layout. However, you cannot add the Contacts related list to the page layout. The Partner related list is available though so you can related Person Accounts to one another..

So when you create a new Person Account records, Salesforce.com creates not only a Account record but a Contact record in the background. You cannot access the account record directly (it always relocates you back to the Account record) but it is needed for the functionality that requires a contact (emails, customer portal, etc.). Here's what the records look like from SOQL:

Account

Contact

Some other things to take into consideration for Person Accounts include:

For more details on Person Accounts, check out the Tip sheet: Tips & Hints for Person Accounts and the Salesforce.com Help in general.

By understanding the relationships between contacts, accounts, and your internal team of sales reps, you’re able to close deals more effectively and efficiently.

There are three specific types of relationships, each which offers a different view into the complexities of business relationships. Contacts to Multiple Accounts lets you relate a contact to more than one account so you can track the relationships between people and the companies they work with. See who has an indirect relationship with ABC Genius and might be able to help move the deal forward. Plus, add roles to direct and indirect contacts so you know who’s your best bet. Account Hierarchy lets you see what companies ABC Genius is affiliated with. Perhaps they have a parent company that you’ve already done business with. Finally, Account Teams tells you which sales reps are working on the ABC Genius deal so you can better coordinate with your internal team.

Your contacts might work with more than one company. A business owner might own more than one company or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple organizations. Your relationships may be complicated, but keeping tabs on them doesn’t need to be.

When you relate a single contact to multiple accounts you can easily track the relationships between people and businesses without creating duplicate records. The relationship rules are still simple. Every contact needs to be associated with a primary account. This is the account that appears in Account Name and is usually the company the contact is most closely associated with. Any other accounts associated with the contact represent indirect relationships. The Related Contacts list lets you view current and past relationships, and capture unique and custom details about these relationships so you always know who you’re talking to—or who you should be talking to.

Setting up Contacts to Multiple Accounts is quick and easy. Just follow these steps.

1. Add the Related Contacts related list to the account page layouts your reps use.

Easily see who’s a direct contact for the account when you add the Direct field to the Related Contacts related list.

Creating relationships between Contacts and Accounts.

Alan and Leung work at the ABC Genius Tech Consulting corporate office in Boulder, but you noticed that when you searched for ABC Genius that you have several other accounts with similar names: ABC Genius Tech Consulting East, ABC Genius Tech Consulting West, and ABC Genius Tech Consulting Canada. In the ABC Genius Tech Consulting West account record, ABC Genius Tech Consulting is listed as the Parent Account.

How are all these companies related? Are you going to have to dig through every single record to find out? That could take a lot of time!

If you’ve recorded the Parent Account for each account that has one, Salesforce can generate a family tree for your account. The hierarchy shows this relationship for the ABC Genius Tech accounts.

To view an account’s hierarchy, click on the Accounts tab and select an account. Click the View Hierarchy link next to the Account Name field.

You have two basic choices when you’re deciding how to establish accounts for businesses with multiple locations.

You could establish one global account and link all contacts, opportunities, cases, and so on to that single overarching account. Using one global account makes it easy to find that account’s records and to report on that account at the enterprise level. But it’s harder to manage a large mass of information, and not being able to easily view the big picture might make it hard to see what each location needs from you for your relationship to be successful.

Establish accounts for each location and create contacts, opportunities, cases and so on separately for each location. With this option, you maintain more accounts and need to set up a few more complex reports to get the big picture. But using multiple accounts means you can take advantage of account ownership, hierarchies, specific sharing settings, and more granular reporting. You can also more easily track and report on opportunities, cases, and other interactions for each account.

We recommend establishing accounts for each separate location, rather than squeezing all locations into a single global account. This arrangement lets you concentrate on customer success in each location while still giving you the ability to put the big picture together.

Unless your company is teeny tiny, it’s likely that more than one person works with each account. For example, the team of employees for an account might include a sales rep, sales manager, support agent, support manager, and marketing personnel.

A Salesforce Account Team can contain up to five people, each of whom can be assigned different roles and different levels of access to the account and its opportunities and cases. Like Contact Roles, Account Teams isn’t set up automatically. An administrator must turn it on and set up the roles that each team member can be assigned.

The opportunity stages you usually go through might look like this:

When determining which stages you will use, consider bringing together some of your sales leaders and key team members to map out your sales process. Determine which of the standard stage names to use and whether to add custom stages for your company. If you customize your stages, make sure that the names are intuitive for your salespeople who will be using them on a daily basis. Make it a semi-annual or annual practice to revisit your sales process and ensure that your stages are still relevant.

In Salesforce, you can set up separate sales processes for each type of sale you make. For example, Cloud Kicks may have one sales process to handle standard retail orders for large quantities of shoes, and a separate process for small, custom shoe orders. Setting up each process takes several steps.

Let’s try setting up a new sales process now.

It often takes a team to close a deal. In Salesforce, adding an Opportunity Team helps team members work together and track the opportunity’s progress.

Opportunity Teams are a bit like Account Teams. Both allow you to relate particular people at your company to accounts or opportunities. But where Account Team members can be expected to form a long-term relationship with the customer, an Opportunity Team is a temporary group composed of people who can help you close the deal. Being a part of the Opportunity Team gives the team members special visibility into the opportunity, such as updates on Chatter. Salesforce offers the Opportunity Splits feature to incentivize team members to complete the deal.

If you often use the same team for opportunities, you can create a default opportunity team and automatically add that team to all new opportunities. See Guidelines for Setting Up and Adding a Default Opportunity Team in the Salesforce Help.

Leads are people and companies that you’ve identified as potential customers. You find leads in a number of ways. Many of your leads might be referred to you by your other happy customers. You might also gather leads when customers contact you on your website, stop by your booth at a conference, or through information exchanges with partner companies. In Salesforce, information about leads is stored in Lead records

You don’t have to use leads, but there are some big advantages to using them, like knowing what’s in your pipeline and focusing your energy on the right deals. You can better track, report on, and target marketing campaigns to prospective customers. Leads may help you concentrate on the potential deals most likely to close. They also help executives maintain visibility and help on key deals. If your company has separate sales teams for prospective customers and existing customers, using leads helps everyone work more efficiently.

To control the quality of account and contact data, some organizations only permit accounts and contacts to be created from qualified leads.

If everything is an opportunity, you must use the early stages, like qualification, to segment your unqualified opportunities.

When you qualify a lead, you can convert the lead record into an opportunity. You’ll then work your opportunity until you close the deal either by completing it or canceling it.

Qualifying a lead indicates that you believe that the lead has a use for and interest in your products, and that a sale to the lead is a definite possibility. Some businesses choose to qualify leads more quickly than others. The exact criteria for qualifying and converting leads is part of your company’s unique business process.

Suppose you call Aparna at ABC Tech Genius West to talk about her deal. She likes what you tell her, and you’re sure she has a genuine interest in your product. Your lead is ready to be converted to an opportunity.

When you convert a lead, Salesforce uses the information stored in the lead record to create a business account, a contact, and an opportunity. If your organization has person accounts enabled and the lead record didn’t include a company name, the lead is converted into a person account and an opportunity.

If your company doesn’t already have a standard naming convention for leads and opportunities, now’s a great time to implement one. Naming conventions help everyone work more efficiently, because users can more easily locate a deal and understand what each deal on a list is about. A naming convention for opportunities could include a standard method for using product names, new business, add-ons, and quantities. Salesforce automatically appends the account name to your opportunity name.

Now that you’ve converted your lead, you’re ready to work on the deal.