Preventing duplicate opportunities in sfdc for multiple web form requests for B2B customers

If you are using web to lead forms in salesforce for B2B customers and let us say there is a email campaign which you had generated to multiple contacts in a company, there is a possibility that all the contacts in the company have submitted the form requests on your website based on the campaign promotion. Now this would result in duplicate leads in your salesforce org or if there is an automatic lead conversion enabled, this would result in duplicate opportunities created for the same company.

This would cause your sales rep to make multiple phone calls with different contacts chasing the opportunity resulting in waste of time and some times annoying the customer and losing the sale. So how do you prevent duplicate opportunities from getting created and what is the best way to handle the situation? This is a classic problem impacting all marketing departments who try to generate campaign influence reports on their campaigns.

Automatic lead conversion.

Using an automatic lead conversion solution which would look at the company of the lead , the solution will create one opportunity with the right contact role as decision maker. Now if another web to lead request comes in from another contact in the same company, the lead conversion solution would check for the same account, campaign source and would automatically update the opportunity and insert a new contact role for the contact. This would eliminate duplicate opportunities from getting created.

Update lead or opportunity score

Now if you are not using an automatic marketing solution, every opportunity which gets created or updated with multiple requests from the same company should be assigning a higher lead score  or opportunity score. This should also create an automatic task for the sales rep to follow up on the opportunity immediately. This would result in quick wins and increase in sales for your sales department.

Update campaign influence

We also can create a campaign influence score on the opportunities. So the more the number of duplicate web form requests on the same campaign and account, the campaign influence score on the campaign can be increased to a high or medium resulting in better ROI value on campaign reports.

If you use only leads 

If you do not use accounts,contacts and opportunities, then your salesforce org would result in duplicate leads created for the same company. Using lead creation triggers, duplicate leads can be prevented by having the trigger update the same lead with multiple contacts. The lead trigger should be intelligent to look up on existing leads for the same company and populate a custom object which would bind all the leads by creating one lead request for the company linked to multiple leads. The lead score should be increased and automatic tasks created for salesreps to follow up on the leads.

So by using the above 3 techniques of automatic lead conversion, updating campaign influence and opportunity score, duplicate opportunities can be prevented resulting in increase in sales. Automatic task creation would result in an actionable insight which would help sales department to act on the opportunity immediately. I would appreciate if you could let me know if you have any questions on this problem and feel free to email me at bthyagarajan@eigenx.com for further questions.

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buyan47

Author: buyan47

Hi there! My name is Buyan Thyagarajan. I am a Salesforce consultant specializing in Higher Education, Manufacturing and Marketing Automation. My blogs will help you to maximize your Salesforce CRM investments, prevent problems beforehand and make the right decisions. If you need to talk to me right away, you can email me at buyan47@gmail.com or call me at 302-438-4097

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