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How to Leverage Salesforce Field Types for Your Sales Needs

salesforce field types

Gathering firmographic data to inform your B2B sales interactions is only the first step. To be usable by your relevant teams, it then needs to be identified, categorized, and organized into easily referenced and actionable client information. 

The Salesforce platform allows you to better understand leads and interact with clients by organizing data into relational databases that incorporate specific data types and fields, themselves representing columns that define different aspects of a client profile in context. 

There are a number of Salesforce field types which may be leveraged according to your unique needs. Users may also customize their own fields.

Salesforce field types

Intricately’s platform supports Salesforce field types relevant to a number of business operations. For sales, this means firmographic field types, as well as use cases for your most promising leads. These field types include:

Address - Contains specific geographic information relevant to outreach and communication, digital address, or more general regional information.

AnyType - A customizable field that can incorporate other field types for quick-reference information. 

Calculated - Contains a formula; useful for figuring average spend over time of various clients, etc. 

Currency - Field type related specific to currency values i.e. money. 

Email - Contains contact values relating specifically to email addresses. 

Location - Contains coordinate information relating to geographic location and region; latitude and longitude. 

MultiPickList - Contains multiple numeric values; useful for storing multiple points of contact within a specific organizational department. 

Percent - Contains percentage values like growth, spend averages, share of a company’s use case, etc. 

Phone - Contains information specifically related to phone contacts. 

URL - Contains digital address values, usually data relating to client applications, profiles, and other points of online interaction. 

Why using Salesforce data is important in sales

B2B sales interactions are about more than simply selling a product to your customer. The best sales reps are there to build mutually beneficial and long-lasting relationships between your organization and your most promising leads. 

Understanding client data before a sales interaction is comparable to reading over a blind date’s profile before you reach out. It allows you to understand compatibility and potential, and what you each might have to offer each other, before you extend your hand. Sticking with the metaphor, Salesforce data in B2B sales can be the difference between a fling (or outright rejection) and a long-term connection. 

Here are a few ways Salesforce data and field types directly support sales performance at your organization. 

Delivering spend and product insights to sales and marketers

Organizational spend data might not mean all that much out of context. But field categories in relational databases convert raw stats into actionable information. Knowing which products your clients use, and how much they drop on those products every year, give marketers insight into how to pitch your solution to clients, and sales reps the numbers they need to generate a conversion with qualified leads

Intricately/ Salesforce field types including Percentage, Calculated, and Currency can tell you a lead’s potential value, as well as the value they might get from your company’s solution.

Lead routing based on key cloud spend or product details

If you’re an enterprise organization, you probably have a lead routing procedure in place that sorts accounts to specific sales teams based on a number of factors like location, potential deal size, or even cultural connection. Whether or not you are engaging an automatic strategy, you need firmographic data that tells you enough about the company so you know who should be handling the interaction. 

Salesforce fields like Address and Location and Intricately’s Spend field offer insight into firmographic insights that will quickly tell you where to send this account for optimal relationship cultivation.

Lead or account scoring models

The most successful sales teams qualify their leads before ever reaching out. This means filtering through your lead pool to find those potential clients who are most likely to make a conversion: they understand your product, know your company, have a use case, and want to buy. 

Salesforce fields compiled into a reference-able database allows you to easily compare and score your leads based on their conversion potential, among other factors. Line your candidates up and take a critical look at their spending habits, products used, and interactions with your platforms to determine which leads have the best possibility of becoming a long-term client. 

Analyzing competitor market share

Understanding who your leads give their money to is just as important, if not more-so, as understanding how much they spend. Buying history not only includes average expenditure over time, but also past proprietors and – ideally – the logic behind their spending choices. 

Of course this data is important to have in regards to your leads, but it is also useful in helping you to understand the market and broader competition in general if similar data is gathered against relevant organizations you don’t necessarily need to cultivate. 

Understanding ideal customer profile and total addressable market

Take a look at your top-scored leads and try to see what all of them have in common, beyond spending habits and familiarity with your organization. B2C businesses define their ideal customer profile based on  often extremely specific demographic information, sometimes down to appearance descriptions such as hair color. 

Your B2B business can also get this specific in defining a client profile, as well as the outer bounds of your potential market. Maybe your ideal client is a digital media startup specializing in programming for children’s cartoons. Salesforce fields will help you find out.

Intricately and Salesforce field types

Intricately is a cloud-based sales and marketing data solution that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce to help you more easily build relationships with your highest-potential leads. Salesforce fields defining Intricately-gathered firmographic and market information neatly organizes client information to help you build a better go-to-market strategy and boost your bottom line. 

Learn more about different data types in our other insight: First party data.

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