- [Christopher] The leads data object maintains

a clean separation from the existing customers,

clients, and partners in your Salesforce organization

and offers an intuitive way to track prospects.

Leads within your Salesforce organization will allow you

to maintain a list of prospects

for the type of outreach your organization manages.

Leads are an optional aspect of Salesforce.

You can use contacts to track people,

but leads is a step before contacts

for folks that aren't already doing business with you.

The idea is to keep the data

for customers, clients, or partners,

separate from those who have not yet converted.

Access to leads is enabled by default

and can be hidden if you don't want it.

The nice thing about keeping it separate

is that once prospects have become part of an outreach,

the leads who have not yet converted can be quickly removed

from the system.

All of your Salesforce data types called objects come

with standard fields.

And leads starts with a robust list of fields

that work well for most teams,

but you can also add custom fields as well

if you'd like to add additional data types.

There are some powerful features within leads.

Let's talk about them.

Emails can be quickly sent manually

or using pre-made templates.

Leads can be followed, tracked,

and shared through social media feeds

called Chatter within Salesforce.

Leads can be followed, tracked, and shared through Chatter,

which is a social media style feed

within your Salesforce account.

Leads can also be marked with a status to help visualize

the strength or weakness of that prospect.

Leads support notes and connect

with the prospect's social media profiles.

Once a lead has been qualified,

it's converted and split into an account and contact pair.

All calls, emails, notes,

and other activity data are moved

to the account-contact pair upon conversion

so that nothing is lost in the conversion translation.

So let's check it out.

We're going to review how to use leads

in your Salesforce system.

And we're starting at the Home tab.

First of all, you need to be signed in, of course.

So let's review a few things.

Let's talk about adding, editing, and deleting a lead,

very simple stuff.

You may already know how to do it.

But if you're new to Salesforce,

let's check it out.

First, we want to go over to the Leads tab,

so let's click on that.

Then from here, click on New.

Then we're going to go ahead and enter our lead data.

Salesforce has a convenient status option

to help with tracking the leads journey

through the Salesforce pipeline.

Now, the red asterisks

that are within the form indicate required fields,

so you'll have to fill those out.

They're not optional.

So let's go ahead and do that.

When you're done, click Save.

And here's your new lead.

We can also do other things with our lead

to track important information, details, and files.

Let's go ahead and take a look at it.

Under the Activity tab,

we can log a call by entering notes from the call

and then clicking Add.

Let me give you an example.

When you're done, you can go ahead and click Save.

This tab is called the New Task tab.

It can be used for many things,

including noting reminders for future calls,

reminders to send birthday cards,

or noting any past or future completed task,

anything at all you can use the Task tab for.

Here's the New Event tab.

Here, you can record meetings on your calendar

or other calendar-specific activities.

Events are cross-reference to your Salesforce calendar.

And this last tab is the Email tab.

This is very helpful.

It allows you to send emails to this lead prospect.

And editing leads is quite simple.

All we have to do is click the Edit button

here on the top right,

and you can make your changes.

And once you're done making the changes,

you can go ahead and click Save.

The clone option is helpful

if we'd like to duplicate this lead.

All you have to do is click Clone.

And you can make a few changes to the clone,

and you can go ahead and save it,

and it becomes a new lead in the system.

Now, if you no longer wish to pursue this prospect,

you can click Delete,

and it's gone.

We can list our leads using

the different list views pulled down right here.

You can see things like Open Leads, New Leads,

your Recently Viewed leads,

and also Today's Leads.

Let's go ahead and click Home.

So we're here on the Home tab,

and if we scroll down a little bit further down the page,

we see on the left-hand side,

down at the bottom,

recent records that have been added to the system.

The leads data object maintains a clean separation

from existing customers, clients, and partners,

and offers you a very intuitive way

to track your prospects in a clean,

separate manner within your Salesforce account.

(upbeat music)