A lead is a contact at any entity (company, institution, organization, etc.) that NYSERDA or its contractor would like to interact with for the purpose of outreach, but do not yet.

A Lead record assumes that your “lead” is a new contact at a  new account; therefore, a lead record contains a unique combination of Contact and Account fields. Once that lead is established and ready to be converted, those fields will be transferred to a new or existing Account, and a new contact.

The 2 Lead record types that should be used are NYSERDA Lead and Outreach Lead:

NYSERDA Leads are used primarily for Web-To-Lead functionality and hold generic contact information. 

Outreach Leads hold a lot of information specific to the NYSERDA Outreach process, including the ability to delineate specific program outreach.

Leads can be imported from an Excel sheet or manually entered. To import Leads, submit a Jira ticket and include the Leads Import Template file with all of your Leads.

Using the Salesforce web to lead functionality, we are able to create public facing forms that allow the capturing of lead information directly into a specified campaign.

For example, a web to lead form can be added to an outreach website to collect customer information. The information is collected and creates a new Lead in Salesforce .

For more information, please contact your Salesforce Liaison.

An Account is an organization or company that you want to track.  Examples: City of Albany; Solar City. Contacts are the individuals associated with Accounts.

When adding a new Account, you will be asked to choose a Record Type for which there are two choices:

Business Account: This is a company under which you will be adding contacts. This should be used a majority of the time when creating new accounts.

Individual Account : This is for residential customers or individuals that are no representing a company in the CRM. This is rarely used. The name would be something like John Smith Individual Account and would have once contact under it: John Smith.

Finding a Contact Record to Update

Use the Global Search to enter the name of the Contact that needs to be updated. Ensure the Account the Contact is assigned to matches the company your contact belongs to. There may be multiple Contacts with the same name but assigned to different Accounts for a reason; i.e. Jane Smith can be assigned to the Volkswagen Account and another Jane Smith contact is assigned to the Tesla Account.

In addition to checking the Account, there are other ways to help determine which Contact record to use:

• look for records that are more active and have an activity history like emails, calls, tasks etc.
• check what campaigns, if any, the Contact belongs to
• confirm if the Contact has any program partnerships (if applicable)

What Can be Updated?

After the correct Contact record has been located, all fields on the record can be updated except the Account Name assigned to the record. If the Contact doesn't associate with the Account listed anymore, select the No Longer with Company checkbox.

Duplicate Management 

Duplicate management features are set up and turned on by default for business accounts, contacts and leads. Here’s how duplicate management works:

• When a user tries to save a new record, the record is first compared with existing Salesforce records to identify possible duplicates. The criteria used to compare records and identify the possible duplicates are defined by a matching rule . 
• Next, a list of possible duplicates is returned. What happens when the record being saved is identified as a possible duplicate depends on what’ s defined in the duplicate rule. For example, the duplicate rule could block users from saving the possible duplicate record or allow them to save it anyway. Both the Block and Allow options include an alert, which tells users why they can’t save the record and what to do about it. The Allow option includes the ability to report on the duplicate records.

How to Select Which Account & Contact Record to Use

When duplicate results display for Accounts and Contacts, first look for the one that most closely matches your search criteria. Look for records that are more completely filled out with information, have activity history, project history, has a supplier ID, etc. More often than not, the erroneous duplicate record will have little-to-no activity on the record.

An Opportunity can be added to an Account or Contact and used to track interactions such as a response to a NYSERDA offering or an indication that an Account is a prime candidate to partner with NYSERDA.

An activity may be a task or event completed or scheduled by a Salesforce User. All interactions with Customer and/or Strategic Partner Accounts and Leads should be entered as Activities. 

A Campaign is a grouping of contacts used for marketing outreach.  It can be the vehicle for a direct mail program, seminar, print advertisement, email, or other type of marketing initiative. Campaigns have been organized into a hierarchy reflecting the NYSERDA Organizational Chart. The Program Campaign type allows program staff to create their own non-marketing campaigns in order to organize contacts, leads, and accounts.

Campaigns are a way to group all of your contacts together in a list which allows Marketing to send out an email to all campaign members.

The simplest way to track CRM Outreach activities as they related to email sends is to create a Program Import List for the outreach activity invitees. Submit an email request and advise which campaigns should be used for the email send.

Program communications are not sent through Marketing Cloud. Program communications should be sent via Outlook. Campaign member lists can be exported from Salesforce to use in your Outlook email. 

Marketing communications include NYSERDA branding, can be seen as a marketing deliverable, and are sent through the Marketing team.

Reports allow you to view a collection of data points and filter them in different ways. Reports can be stored in a public folder to be shared with other or saved in a private folder. Reports can be scheduled to run at specified times and can be exported into Excel.