After a few weeks of exploring the new Prospecting tool, there are few roadblocks that I've come across that don't seem to make much sense. For instance, when I try to add leads to the prospecting lead page for one of our sales team members, it will only allow me to add contacts of whom the sales team member is assigned. This means that whenever we want to add a lead, we need to go into the contact record to update the contact property in order for us to add them to the correct prospecting list. It would be nice if we could have access to all contacts in our database when choosing which contacts to add to our prospecting list (Maybe even add an alert if they happen to be on someone else's lead list?).
Next, the prospecting lead list does this weird thing where there can be multiple entries for the same contact. It would be super helpful to either give us a choice of not allowing duplicate contact entries or provide us with a tool to quickly remove duplicate entries.
Lastly, I love how we are given the option to have contacts automatically added to our prospecting lead list based on their lifecycle stage, but again, if the leads are only getting added to the lists of those of whom are marked as the "Contact Owner" then this would just cause more work for us in having to go back and correct. It would be nice if we could use workflows to help us auto add contacts to the appropriate prospecting lead list.
Your assistance in providing some insight into the roadblocks above or implementing some of my suggestions would be superful helpful. Thanks!
I've been testing out the prospecting tool as well and while it has some great features already, the issues @JButler8 brings up are causing some reservations for our team to fully adopt the tool.
We also have a suggestion: Select a topic for which the person should be contacted. Then the lead list could be sorted accordingly by topic. Example: a team would like to see leads on the topic of software and consulting in the list and also be able to select them accordingly. Then we would have a good addition to be able to carry out small sales campaigns with it.
Agree with the contact owner point. I think it should bring in any that we want to bring in and then the default for each person like in other areas of HS is 'assigned to me' but you can click the X next to it to remove the assignment if you want to see all, or can select another contact owner if you want. This would be necessary for Sales managers in particular who would want to be able to see other people's leads and not just their own ones, and also if someone is off sick you can easily change owner and see that person's ones.
@Em111 there is a permission in set up under sales that allows you to view prospecting as another user. Then on the main prospecting summary page, where you see your name in the upper left corner, you can drop down and choose another user.
- Have access to all contacts when choosing which contacts to add to anyone's prospecting list - An alert if a contact to be added is on someone else's lead list
- Option to not allow duplicate contact entries in leads
- Ability to use workflows to help us auto add contacts to the appropriate prospecting lead list - Sales managers to see every salesperson’s Leads all at once on the Prospecting Dashboard.
We ended up with 3k+ dupes when setting up new lead records- definitely need a native dedupe functionality. We ended up engineering a very complex work-around that is too much of a rabbit hole to go into here but I'll just say it took our team of 3 to figure it out and execute it.
We also need to be able to see un-owned leads in the owner drop on the list view.
