Retaining Salesforce Lead Owners When Bulk-Converting to Contacts

Do you find that Salesforce leads changing owners when they are converted into contacts is causing confusion among your sales team?

In Salesforce, companies set their own rules and thresholds for when leads need to be converted into contacts. Often, the conversion is triggered by the lead reaching an important milestone in the sales process. In some companies, this may be when sales reps first make contact with a lead. In other companies, it may be when contract negotiations start. In some, a lead may not be converted into a contact until a deal is signed. It all depends on each company’s processes and how they use both leads and contacts within Salesforce.

This pivotal point is both a milestone and, often, a cause of operational pain, due to how the Salesforce lead conversion process handles merging and creating new records. 

In Salesforce, if the lead is matched to an existing contact record by email, the lead will be merged with the existing contact. But not all data from both records is retained during the merge, particularly when using automated tools to convert Salesforce leads in bulk. This operation uses the APEX programming language to merge the records, employing different logic than the logic used to manually convert Salesforce leads through the user interface. As a result of this different logic, the lead's ownership often does not carry over to the contact during this conversion process.

Failing to retain lead ownership information after conversion is not just a minor hiccup; it can be a significant challenge.

Sales teams rely on clear and consistent data to inform their strategies and actions, and they may be confused by the lack of updated information. This can lead to inefficiencies in follow-up processes, miscommunication within teams, and, ultimately, a degradation of the customer experience.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into some of the reasons that reliable contact owners are critical for sales teams.

Why Reliable Salesforce Contact Owners Are Critical for Sales Teams

Accurate contact ownership plays a pivotal role in sales teams operations. Here's why having reliable contact owners in Salesforce is critical:

• Streamlined sales process: Assigning a clear owner to each contact ensures that sales representatives know who is responsible for nurturing and advancing each prospect through the sales pipeline. This prevents overlaps in communication and fosters a coordinated approach.
• Improved customer experience: Clear contact ownership promotes better customer relationships and experiences, as the owner is fully aware of the history and context of each interaction.
• Enhanced accountability: Reliable contact ownership ensures that each sales representative is accountable for their contacts.
• Data integrity and consistency: Reliable contact ownership contributes to maintaining data integrity and consistency within Salesforce.
• Better reporting and forecasting: Clear contact ownership allows for more accurate and reliable reports on sales activities, pipeline status, and forecasted revenue.

Reliable Salesforce contact owners are foundational to the success of sales teams, impacting everything from the operations and sales processes to the overall customer experience. Let’s look at exactly how lead-to-contact conversion works in Salesforce, and explore some of the common issues companies experience as a result of the conversion.

How Record Owner Retention Works When Converting Salesforce Leads

The process of converting leads in Salesforce is designed to streamline the transition of a prospect from an initial lead to an engaged contact within the CRM system. However, the intricacies of this conversion process can present challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining continuity of ownership.

The process of converting leads in bulk, either through Salesforce automation, the use of third-party conversion apps, or your own custom-developed solutions, involves the APEX programming language. APEX’s default behavior creates some issues that companies need to be aware of.

When a lead is converted via APEX, and no matching contact is identified in the system by email, Salesforce creates a new contact and an associated account. However, if Salesforce identifies an existing contact using the lead’s email address, Salesforce will merge the lead's information into that contact record.

In the latter scenario, the existing contact will retain its owner. This is not a desired result for most companies. Depending on their processes, they may wish to retain the record ownership information from the lead record, because that is the person who most recently engaged with the prospect, who may be in active deal negotiations.

This discontinuity can disrupt the sales process, as the original lead owner might have developed a rapport with the prospect and accumulated valuable insights that are crucial for further engagement.

There is no simple way around this problem. For many companies, the only realistic solution is to manually update the record's owner after conversion. But in large companies that have many deals moving through their pipeline, this can create a lot of manual work—and an opportunity for people to forget to reset the owner after converting.

Salesforce administrators and users must be proactive in managing these situations. For companies that do not have the resources to monitor a process like this manually, a third-party app to handle the conversion and retain the lead's listed owner may be a good choice.

How Insycle Solves Bulk Salesforce Lead Conversion While Retaining Owner Information

Insycle is a powerful tool for Salesforce users that addresses one of the common challenges in CRM management: bulk-converting leads into contacts while retaining the original lead owner.

Bulk Salesforce Lead-to-Contact Conversion While Retaining Lead Owner

Insycle makes bulk lead conversion dead simple. You simply instruct Insycle to update leads in bulk using a filter. In the example screenshot below, we are filtering by leads that have been contacted by a sales rep.

This capability is particularly beneficial for sales teams dealing with high volumes of leads, as it enables them to process conversions efficiently without losing the personal touch and ownership continuity that are crucial for effective sales follow-up. For example, maybe you want to convert leads to sales automatically after they speak with a sales rep.

Insycle allows you to bulk-convert all leads that meet your filter criteria while also allowing you to retain the lead’s owner post-conversion.

This functionality addresses a critical gap in Salesforce's native conversion process, ensuring that the sales representative who has been nurturing the lead continues to own the relationship post-conversion. This continuity is vital for maintaining the rapport and insight gained during the lead-nurturing phase.

You can automate this process to run on a schedule, ensuring leads are consistently converted while retaining ownership of the record.

Insycle's Custom Logic for Salesforce Lead Conversion

Insycle employs rules that intelligently navigate Salesforce's default conversion behavior. This custom logic ensures that when a lead is converted, the lead record retains both the correct owner and associated account. These are often the most crucial data points for a smooth sales process.

• If a contact exists with the same email and the same associated account as the lead, the lead will convert into that EXISTING contact
• However, if the existing contact is not associated to the same account as the lead, the lead will convert into a NEW contact

With this additional layer of logic over the top of Salesforce APEX’s default behavior, companies have more control over their lead-to-contact conversion process, and logic that aligns with their needs.

Case Study: Appcues Solves Salesforce Lead Conversion Issues That Caused Them To Overlook Deal Stakeholders

Samantha Allen was the first dedicated Salesforce Administrator hired at Appcues in August 2023, and she immediately had her work cut out for her. The SaaS company's Salesforce instance had years of data accumulated from systems integrated with Salesforce and scattered system usage which was impeding the company’s processes and creating confusion between sales and marketing operations.

One of the biggest fires Samantha had to put out was an issue with Appcues' lead conversion process in Salesforce but unfortunately there were outstanding issues with the HubSpot/Salesforce sync. Once leads got into Salesforce, there was a gap in the process which would leave the new lead owner in the dark as to whether this person could possibly be tied to an existing Salesforce account - eating up valuable time in the sales process. This is where Samantha used Insycle—a leading solution for HubSpot/Salesforce integration issues— to bridge this gap.

Insycle had two key hourly jobs: 

• match new leads to existing accounts based on email domain, 
• and convert qualified leads to contacts on those matched accounts.

However, due to a separate integration that created new contacts for Appcues trial users without properly linking them to the company's account, Appcues had accumulated many orphaned contacts in Salesforce. So when Insycle tried to convert those leads to existing contacts to prevent duplication, it failed to carry over critical lead details like company information and owner assignment. 

"It was matching by email to convert the lead into an existing contact, but those existing contacts didn't have an account, so they were only shells of records. It wasn't really pulling the information needed to the contact," Samantha explained. This caused newly converted leads to go unseen by sales reps for vital follow-up.

Samantha's diligent marketing counterpart was the first to catch wind of the issue while auditing lead flow. She noticed new leads weren't appearing on the expected account records, tipping Samantha off to investigate the root cause.

After quickly pinpointing the problem, Samantha paused the integration creating the orphaned contacts. She then used Insycle's custom Salesforce lead conversion logic to bypass conversion when no account could be matched—keeping new leads intact for sales engagement, and ensuring that leads with matching contact records kept the record owner and company data after converting. 

Within days, the lead leak was plugged. Samantha had adeptly resolved the Salesforce lead conversion issues that could have severely disrupted Appcues' sales funnel and onboarding processes. Her swift actions, along with the keen eye of her colleague in marketing, unlocked fluid end-to-end lead management across both HubSpot and Salesforce, without hassle.

Streamlining Salesforce Data Management With Insycle: Beyond Bulk Conversion

Insycle is a robust solution for preserving the continuity of customer relationships. Insycle helps companies avoid the creation of duplicate records, which can clutter the CRM and lead to confusion.

But Insycle is not just a tool for Salesforce lead conversion. It’s a beacon of comprehensive control and efficiency in Salesforce data management, helping companies to audit their Salesforce data, identify dozens of data issues, and correct them in bulk and automatically on an ongoing basis.

We invite you to explore the full capabilities of Insycle for Salesforce and discover how it can transform your Salesforce data management strategy. Learn more about how Insycle can streamline your processes, enhance your data integrity, and empower your sales team to achieve greater heights.