At its core, “selling” a product or service is a fairly simple concept – an exchange of money for something in return. However, being successful at selling things is much more difficult to do well. You have to know how to sell that particular product or service, and you have to also know and understand when to try to make that sale.
Salesforce lays out a very general structure of how to proceed from Marketing to Sales. A Lead comes in, that Lead gets converted to an Opportunity, and sales works the Opportunity to Closed Won. While this might seem like a simple process, the truth is that there are huge gaps of time and a lot of nebulous space between each of these steps.
In this post, we’re not going to focus on how to convert a Lead to an Opportunity. Instead, we’re going to focus on when and why a Lead should be converted to an Opportunity.
The TL;DR
I (and probably everybody who has ever worked in sales ops) could probably talk about this ad nauseam. However, at the end of the day, there’s really only one right answer: convert the Lead to an Opportunity when that Lead meets the conversion criteria for your business.
The worst part about this is that I have no idea what the criteria are for your business, so I can’t even tell you the exact right answer here. Every business process and sales cycle is unique, so there are no universal criteria.
It’s also very easy to do this wrong. Convert a Lead too early, and sales is going to receive prospects that are totally unqualified. Convert a Lead too late, and you might miss out on a deal or skew your metrics to make it look like there’s a shorter sales cycle than there really is. Combine these factors with a bunch of people’s strong opinions about what is right and a seemingly perpetual rivalry between sales and marketing, and it’s a recipe for chaos.
So, if I can tell you what’s generally wrong but can’t tell you what is right, then what is this article even about? When you don’t have a map on how to get somewhere, your options are to use someone else’s, or to blaze your own trail.
A pre-existing guide to Lead Conversion criteria might be something like BANT or MEDDIC. Alternatively, you might want to create your own based on some of the successes your business has already experienced, or use a combination of the two. So, if you need to create a set of Lead Conversion criteria, let’s talk about what is typical.
What’s Most Common?
After over ten years of working with Salesforce teams, here’s what I’ve seen:
- Automatically create an Opportunity based on demographics (target or ABM models).
- Automatically create an Opportunity when a Lead takes a certain action (like filling out a “Contact Me” form on the website).
- After marketing has pre-qualified or “Marketing Qualified” the Lead.
- After a marketing or sales person has had one meeting with the Lead.
- After a marketing or sales person has had two meetings with the Lead.
- After a sales rep has received the Lead from marketing, and then “sales” qualified it.
None of these are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (except for the second one, which might be a little overzealous!). Your business needs to strike when the prospect is ready, willing, and able to make a purchase.
What about BANT and MEDDIC?
BANT and MEDDIC are sales methodologies that have specific criteria, usually populated as fields on a Lead and/or Opportunity in Salesforce.
- BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing.
- MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identified Pain, and Champion. You may have also heard of MEDDPICC, which is similar but includes a couple more criteria: Paper Process and Competition.
These aren’t the only two methodologies, but they do seem to be the most common. These methodologies fit well into Salesforce because they are very specific, align nicely with fields an admin can create, and are required at various stages in the lifecycle.
Who Gets to Decide?
The decision on what Lead Conversion criteria your business decides on should be agreed upon by your sales and marketing leadership. In fact, an admin might not get a say at all and only be expected to implement the decision from leadership. Any disagreement between these teams is going to cause conflict.
For admins, the best thing you can do is guide their decision to fit within the boundaries of what is best in Salesforce. For example, if you’re going to have a set of criteria, like “At least one meeting has occurred with the Sales Development team” then that criteria should be:
- Easy for the user to enter in Salesforce.
- Easy for leadership to analyze results.
- Enforced for the Lead Conversion, e.g. with a Validation Rule.
What will certainly happen with criteria like “Initial Meeting with Sales Development” is that very quickly you will get leadership asking questions like, “How long does it typically take from Initial Meeting to Close Won?” and without that date, you won’t be able to answer that question.
You also don’t want to get into a situation where somebody converts a Lead without that criteria – that will result in almost immediate complaints from the recipient of that new Opportunity. And keep in mind, you can’t ‘unconvert’ a Lead. Once it’s done, it’s done forever. You could delete the offending Opportunity, but you can’t change a Contact back to a Lead.
Enforcing the New Criteria
Once you have decided on the right criteria for your org, you’ll need to decide on the right way to enforce that criteria. One option is to use a Validation Rule enforced upon Lead Conversion. This allows you to set a field to required only when the user attempts to convert the Lead (or, if you want to get very specific, only when a Lead is converted to an Opportunity).
Copy/paste here:
ISCHANGED( IsConverted ) &&
IsConverted = TRUE &&
ISBLANK( Initial_Meeting_Date__c )
&& NOT(ISBLANK(ConvertedOpportunityId))
The second row isn’t really necessary, but I like it because it clarifies for future admins what the exact intent here is: “only when a Lead is converted.” The third row would be your specific custom criteria. The final row you would only use if you want to enforce upon Lead conversion to Opportunity specifically. If the user were to convert a Lead to only a Contact and Account, this criteria would not apply.
Lightning Record Pages are another great way to indicate readiness for conversion to your users.
In this example, three fields have been added to the “Conversion Criteria” field section. When these three fields are not all completed, a Rich Text Component gives a warning. When they are completed, a different message appears.
Analyze and Get Feedback
Once your criteria have been decided upon, enforced, and used for a period of time (perhaps a few months), it’s a good time to go back and analyze how well that criteria worked.
Check in with the leadership team, but also the individual users to get their feedback. You may need to adjust your criteria if needed, but if everything seems to be going well, you won’t need to make any changes.
Summary
This situation is one that commonly blurs the line between Salesforce Admin and Sales Operations. As an admin, your skill set might be more technical – how to do something rather than why or when something should be done. If you’re one of the lucky ones that wears multiple hats in your role, you may have to still work with your team on deciding the right process and procedures, even if they don’t have anything to do with the technical back end of Salesforce.
While you might not be able to give an immediate answer to the question “When should I convert a Lead to an Opportunity?”, hopefully, this article will help you guide your users and develop a plan that works for your business.
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