Deal Registration – Start with Leads or Opportunities?

Delivering a deal registration process has been a top 3 reason companies choose to implement Salesforce Partner Relationship Management (PRM). But like many things in Salesforce you have a variety of implementation approaches to consider. Where do you capture deal registrations?

1. Leads
2. Opportunities
3. Custom objects

The answer is: it depends. There are a number of factors to consider when determining which approach to use. Consequently, this seemingly simple question has generated a lot of confusion and debate. To help guide your decision, we’ve identified 6 factors to consider when designing your deal registration solution.The factors revolve around a typical deal registration process of apply – approve – report.

Apply

Are you capturing deal registrations from your website?

For those that have not implemented PRM, deal registrations may be captured from your website. Using leads will make this process much easier as you can leverage native Salesforce Web To Lead features, which requires no custom development.

Are products required on the deal registration?

If you need products specified on the registration, then opportunities may be the best approach since this is a native Salesforce feature. Perficient has built custom solutions allowing users to choose products on the lead record, but we do not recommend it as a best practice due to it’s complexity.

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Approve

What is the volume of deal registrations?

If you have a large volume of registrations Perficient recommends using the lead object for the following reasons:

• Leads can be owned by a queue, which allows for a more pooled approval processes, versus opportunities, which can only be owned by a single user.
• Leads have a native assignment feature, which makes is easy to set up routing rules for lead review.
• Leads have a native ‘Find Duplicates’ feature to easily find possible duplicate registrations. You could do this with opportunities but custom development is required.
• The lead conversion process maps to existing accounts and contacts, where available, which is better for data quality.

Who Processes Deal Registrations?

The two most common scenarios are either a Channel Manager or a dedicated Deal Desk. A dedicated deal desks main job is to process deal registrations. They will have the time, training, and discipline to follow a process of searching for duplicates and mapping deals to existing account where they exist. Leveraging the standard lead features are likely a better choice in this case. Channel managers, who have less time, may prefer using opportunities to remove the intermediate lead step.

Report

How do you forecast registered deals?

At what point do you put deal registrations into your pipeline, and how do you handle multiple registrations of the same opportunity so they do not inflate your pipeline?

Who owns the opportunity for approved registrations?

If you using PRM you need to consider who owns the approved deal registration records and who has the ability to update the sales stage. Both of these factors impact how deal registrations and forecasts are reported. Salesforce provide many options, such as sales team, to include the partner on the registered deal with read or update rights.

So, where will you start?

You can likely tell that Perficient is biased towards leads. There are limited cases where opportunities are best. Perficient does not typically use custom objects, unless there are extenuating business challenges that require it, as we believe it’s reinventing perfectly good native Salesforce features. We hope that you found this blog helpful in making the decision that is best for your organization. Rest assured that Salesforce supports both equally well. Contact Perficient if you need help delivering the best deal registration solution for your company.