The Salesforce Marketing Blog continues its Best Practices in Lead Management series with a discussion on automating various parts of your process. Specific how-tos on getting that set up are in the Salesforce.com For Dummies book. I wanted to specifically call out the discussion on Lead Scoring, which is yet another way to make sure Marketing and Sales are in agreement as to how Leads are prioritized:
Pre-score your leads so only the most qualified are getting passed over to sales. You can create some basic lead scoring formulas using custom formula fields.
That way, Marketing can focus some specific campaigns to the lower-scoring Leads, or Sales can use those for “rainy day” calling.