Hi everyone, this is Billy with RingLead and today I wanted to talk about some of the new practices that I see on the Salesforce side, when it comes to matching the relationships between leads and accounts.

Back in the old days, people would always go with this specific example, and this is what they would do with a lead that’s related to an account inside of Salesforce. They would take that lead and convert it to a contact within an existing account.

Today, I want to talk about a new strategy that I see with a lot our customers here at RingLead, in regards to how they match the relationship between leads and accounts. And what that’s called is “Lead to Account Linking.”

So why link leads to accounts? Well, here’s 3 reasons why RingLead customers are currently using the RingLead functionality of linking leads to accounts in Salesforce to benefit their organization.

Benefit #1 of Lead to Account Linking: Any account field can be viewed on a lead object.

What that means is that if your lead typically doesn’t have firmographic fields, such as industry, employee size, revenue, we can take those fields from the account level and show them on a lead.

So you may ask, “Why is this information valuable on the lead level?”

Well, what happens is, if we can take the account data, say, for instance, an account RingLead, has a specific industry field filled out, employee size field filled out, and revenue field filled out, but on a lead, Billy Finnen with the company name RingLead, I don’t have any of that information available. When we link the Billy Finnen lead to the RingLead account, we can pull that firmographic data down onto the lead, so that you can then use that information to segment your marketing in a much more hyper-effective way. This will also allow your sales team to build reports in Salesforce, based on specific firmographic data points, that will allow them to be highly targeted with their prospecting.

Benefit #2: Account fields can now be used on the lead level to help with the routing of a lead.

Utilizing account fields for routing

For example, a new lead comes in through a webform and doesn’t have an address. You route your leads based off of territories. What we do is when we link this lead to an account, we can pull that address information from the account down onto the lead, which will allow us then to route this lead to the appropriate sales rep that manages a particular territory.

Benefit #3: All leads linked to account can now be seen from the account object.

This will allow your sales team to be able to reach out to multiple decision makers within an account, without having to struggle to navigate through Salesforce to find all these leads that are associated with one particular organization.

So linking leads to accounts can be great with prospect account types, but what a lot of RingLead customers currently do is ensure that if an account type is a customer, and a new record coming into Salesforce is associate with an account type customer, they will convert that record to a contact within the account.

With the RingLead DMS platform, you have the ability to link specific leads to accounts based off account types, and also convert other records to contacts within accounts. What most of our customers do, is we’ll link prospect leads to an account, and we’ll convert net new person records to contacts when the account type is a customer. This allows their sales team to know that contacts are customers of theirs currently or open opportunities that they may be managing in the pipeline.