We absolutely love Salesforce.com, and the discussion here will center on this CRM system, but apply to other CRM systems as well.

Capture 'Em! One of the first things you need to ensure is that you're getting all leads into Salesforce.com. Some propose that leads should be kept in a separate database, but we believe that it's better to have everything in one spot. Too often in past lives we've seen leads squirreled away in other places, and they get lost!

Also, Salesforce.com is set up to market to those leads, by either doing mass emails against from within Salesforce.com itself, or by nifty add-on email packages such as Eloqua, Vertical Response or Got Marketing, that work very slickly in tandem with Salesforce.com.

Connect to Outlook With a simple Outlook connector, you can also make it easy for your salesforce to add an email communication or appointment to a lead or contact record, which means that you'll capture an on-going history.

Opt Outs Also, Salesforce.com automatically capturse opt-out reponses, and you want a single go-to area to pull this list.

Reporting for Marketing In addition, Salesforce.com has very nice reporting tools for Marketing (as well as Sales), so you can see how Marketing is doing? For example, you can easily set up dashboards showing statitistics such as:

• How many new raw leads did we get last week? last month? last year?
• How many people came and downloaded something from the website?
• How many people signed up for our webinar?
• How many new leads are actively being followed up on?
• How many leads turned into contacts?
• How many new opportunities were there last month?

Tradeshow Leads Be vigilant after trade shows in making sure you extricate leads from Sales from business cards.

Any list that you load should have an associated Campaign (you'll need to upgrade for Campaigns, but do it!), and it will be a good check that you're getting leads in. Plus, you can click on a Campaign and check to see how many leads have progressed down the funnel.

Web to Lead Salesforce.com has made it very simple to funnel leads from your website into Salesforce.com. This is very cool functionality, because it again ensures that you don't lose leads, and it also means that you can do same-day response to a lead.