FAQ

Ideally, no. You should send only marketing qualified leads to avoid adding non-relevant records and cluttering your CRM. The leads must have gone through a nurturing process and/or a marketing qualification process, which aims to evalutate if they have the potential to become sales prospects.

The best way to determine the criteria for the qualified leads is to ask the sales team.

• What kind of leads are they looking for?

• What are their attributes (role, industry, region, etc)?

• What kind of activities they should have done (downloaded a white paper, attended a webinar, signed up for free trial)?

• How engaged they shoud be (high lead score, opens emails, visits pages, engages on social media, etc)?

Lead qualification is a trial and error process. Often you will need to adjust your criteria if you think that you are sending too many leads with less quality, or too few leads that you're missing out on other potential prospects.

Yes, in most cases. Some sales team add leads directly to the CRM and sending them to FunnelBud allows the marketing team to nurture them or send relevant marketing communications. Customers also need nurturing and to receive relevant news and updates.

Make sure that when you send them to SharpSpring, all essential information that will allow the marketing team to segment them properly are included in the sync. You can put them in a list or update a custom field. Likewise, they must be assigned to a campaign that indicates they came from the CRM.

Sync can be one-way or two-way or a combination of both.

Syncing one-way means that you want the data to flow from one system (source) to another (recipient), and updates from the recipient will not sync back to the source. Syncing two-way means that data from both systems will sync back and forth.

One-way sync is good if you don't want data from the source to be overwritten by data from the recipient. For example, if you want to keep the CRM as the master data and don't want any updates from SharpSpring to overwrite any information in the CRM.

Two-way sync is good if you want to keep both systems updated with the latest information. For example, if leads update their contact information like phone, title, company information, etc and you want both systems to reflect these changes. (Note: Email address is the main ID of the lead in FunnelBud, and changes in the email address in the CRM will create a new lead record, instead of updating the existing lead in FunnelBud.)

Contacts/Leads, Accounts (Companies) and Opportunities (Deals) are the most commonly synced objects.

That's okay. While we recommend that you sync deal information to make the full customer lifecycle available in SharpSpring, we understand if you want to restrict the sync only to contacts and/or accounts. But at the very least, send back the status of the lead - whether it's accepted, rejected, or sent back to marketing.