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Topics#Sales And MarketingKsenia Choate's Question
Ksenia Choate (Prime Corporate Services) asked in #Sales And Marketing
Oct 22, 2015, 8:22 PM

Need reasons why it would be a bad idea to not use contacts and accounts and switch to leads entirely

I have a client who wants to do away with contacts and accounts and start attaching opps to leads and work out of leads in general. He says he only needs to see these through the closing of an opp, and that no further tracking of these individuals happens. He works with some small marketing automation platforms that deal only with leads and that's his reason for the switch. I know there are a lot of risks and potentail complications in switchign to this model, and I can think of a couple, but would like to hear others' opinionions. (Basically, I need a list of bullet points to help me talk him out of it.) Thank you!
5 answers
  1. Brian Makas (N/A)
    Oct 22, 2015, 9:29 PM
    Well that's a first, I've seen good cases for not using leads but never for only using leads.

     

    To think this through:

    • Leads can technically be connected to Opportunities: https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000ghbjAAA but I don't know what impact that will have on reporting.  It may make sense to spend some time in a developer org https://developer.salesforce.com/signup to see if you can still reproduce the pipeline/forecasting reports they’re looking for.
    • You'd need to make sure leads are never converted because you'd lose the associate to the Opportunity and any other custom object (without code) plus you can’t go back from Account to Lead without physically deleting and recreating.
    • If you’ve been working with Accounts for some time it would take a substantial amount of effort to move them back and there’s a risk of data loss (though it is now possible to override the created date and make it look like are old leads).
    • You can’t have multiple contacts associated to one “lead” (again without custom code).

    At the end of the day this certainly could work but the main risk is that SFDC isn’t built around this model ... as the system evolves you may not be able to take advantage of new features and when you need support it will be much more difficult for vendors (AppExchange tools may not work and custom coding will cost more) to work with.

     

    My main question here would be: what tool(s) only works with leads? My gut tells me that there’s a misunderstanding in what said tool(s) are capable of.  If the tool(s) are truly essentional and can only work with leads, you can get desired forecasting reports and there isn’t a need for multiple contacts or third party support … perhaps it does make sense to go lead only.
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