There are certain key concepts in Salesforce that help you managge your business.
The most central concept is that of an Account.
If you’re selling “B2B an Account will typically mean a company or an organization that is your customer or who you are working to acquire as a customer.
An Account is different from a Contact, which is another key Salesforce concept- usually related to an Account. In the sense that you might be selling to a business but there are multiple contacts (people) at that company (Account) — and each of them might have a different role.
So there is also a difference between the concept of “a Lead” and an Account.
Difference between a Lead and an Account.
An account is typically ‘qualified’ to a certain extent. Maybe it was someone from your marketing team or sales development who do not fur sure know that a company has budget, timing and need for what you sell.
So they would work on leads to the point where they’re qualified- that is we learn through campaigns or conversations that the company has budget, timing and need for what you sell and so the sales team would then become the main point of contact for this type of company — or they would be engaged in your digital sales process.
And then the idea is that you would take the information gathered by marketing efforts or maybe Sales Development (SDRs) and then the “lead record” who be converted to an Account record of some sort.
Most businesses would, benefit from having at least two types of Accounts in Salesforce:
- a prospect Account- this is someone that hasn’t purchased from you but it has a high likelihood and potential to become a customer and their marketing qualified at that point.
- active account- this company or organization has become active when they made a purchase from you- they are your customer
Then your job as an organization, either digitally or direct or some hybrid of those two is to sales qualify that account, and when they become sales qualified that usually means they’re gonna buy or they have purchased.
In my next article, I will explain additional data concepts in Salesforce, including next the difference between Contacts, Opportunities and even Cases at each of your Accounts
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