How to add qualified leads to Salesforce

To add a qualified lead to Salesforce, you create a Lead record with the person's name and company, fill in the fields your sales team relies on, and assign it to an owner. Salesforce only requires a last name and a company, but a useful lead also carries a title, a work email, a Lead Source, a Lead Status, and often a Rating of Hot, Warm, or Cold. The lead stays a lead while your team works it. When a rep confirms there's a real opportunity, they convert it, and Salesforce turns the one record into an account, a contact, and an opportunity.

Salesforce gives you three main ways to do this on your own:

• By hand. You click New on the Leads tab and fill in the record. That's fine for a handful of people.
• The Data Import Wizard. You upload a CSV file of up to 50,000 records, map each column to a lead field, and choose whether to match existing leads by name or email. You can also tell it to run your lead assignment rules, so each lead lands with the right rep. For larger files, admins use Data Loader instead.
• Web-to-Lead. Salesforce generates a form for your website, and every submission becomes a new lead.

Behind all three, your admin can set up assignment rules, which route leads to reps by territory, size, or source, and duplicate rules, which warn or block when a new lead matches an existing one.

These routes move records well, but none of them decides which records should exist. An import of 300 conference badge scans creates 300 leads. That includes the person who changed jobs last quarter, the company that's already your customer, and the contact a rep spoke to last week. A lead with only a name, a company, and an email also tells the rep nothing about why it's there, so the first call starts with research the rep has to do from scratch.

A good result is a set of leads your reps would actually want to call. Each one fits your ideal customer profile, still holds the role, and isn't someone your team already knows. Each one has the right owner, a status and rating your reports can use, the reason it qualified, and a next step on the rep's task list. Kite does that work. It checks each lead before it reaches Salesforce, reads your org to see who's already there, and writes the lead, the note, and the task together.

Start by telling Kite which leads you want in Salesforce and who should work them:

"Add the people who visited our booth at SaaStr to Salesforce. Keep only the ones who fit, run our assignment rules, and add them to the SaaStr campaign."

You can also ask Kite to find the leads itself:

"Find 40 VPs of finance at US healthcare companies with 200 to 2,000 employees and add the best ones to Salesforce as leads for the enterprise team."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Because it has already researched your company, it knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors, so it can judge fit without a long brief. You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack.

Kite can start from leads in several places. You can paste them into the conversation, upload a spreadsheet, or point Kite at a Google Sheet you've connected. It can work from inbound leads that arrive through a form on a site Kite hosts or by email to your team's Kite address. It can also find new leads through its built-in research sources, such as Apollo, so you don't need a separate data provider.

You'll need to connect your Salesforce account through OAuth so Kite can read and write your records. Kite then reads your org and tells you which owner or assignment rule, which Lead Source, and which campaign it plans to use. Creating leads is routine CRM work, so once you confirm, Kite adds them and then tells you what it did. If you'd like to see the list before anything reaches Salesforce, say so in your request.

Kite checks every lead against your ideal customer profile before it writes anything, because a person who qualified when the list was made may not qualify today. Qualifying a lead comes down to three questions. Does the company fit, by industry, size, and location? Does the person hold a role that owns the problem you solve? And is there a reason to reach out now?

Kite answers each one. It confirms that the person still holds the role at that company, using their public professional profile or the company's own pages, and it drops anyone who has moved on. It checks the company against your profile and removes your competitors. It also looks for recent events that make now a good time to get in touch, such as a funding round, a new executive, or open roles on the team your product serves.

Each lead that passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason a rep can read at a glance. When the batch runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so sales knows where to start. If fewer leads qualify than you sent, Kite tells you how many passed and why the rest fell short.

Kite searches your leads, your contacts, and your accounts before it creates anything, because in Salesforce the same person can already exist in more than one place. A duplicate lead is the obvious problem. The less obvious one is a new lead for someone who is already a contact on a customer account, which sends a rep after a person your account manager already talks to.

Kite searches leads and contacts by email address and confirms each match on the exact address. It searches accounts by company name and website. What it finds decides what happens next:

• A person who is already a contact stays a contact. Kite doesn't create a lead for them, and it lists them in its summary with the account they belong to.
• A person who already has an open lead keeps that lead. Kite updates its title, email, or phone if the research found something newer, and adds the new research as a note.
• A person whose company is already an account in Salesforce gets a new lead, and Kite names the existing account and its owner in the lead's note so the rep can coordinate. When the account is a customer, Kite leaves the person out unless you've asked for expansion leads.
• Everyone else becomes a new lead.

Kite also leaves your duplicate rules in charge. If Salesforce flags a new lead as a match for an existing record, Kite doesn't override the warning. It reports the match instead.

Kite reads how your Lead object is set up before it fills anything in, so each lead passes your validation rules and uses the values your reports already count. It reads every field on the lead, including the custom fields your admin added and any that are required. It reads the picklist values for Lead Status, Lead Source, Rating, and Industry, so it writes "Trade Show" or "Outbound" only when those are real options in your org.

That reading matters more in Salesforce than in most CRMs, because a picklist value your org doesn't recognize, or a missing required custom field, causes the record to be rejected. Kite fills those fields correctly the first time.

Kite assigns each lead the way your team already routes them. When your org uses lead assignment rules, Kite runs them on each new lead, so it lands with the rep your rules choose, just as it would from a web form. When you name an owner in your request, such as "assign them to Priya" or "the enterprise team," Kite assigns the leads to that user. When the company is already an account, Kite can give the lead to the account's owner so one person handles the relationship.

Kite creates each lead with the details a rep needs for the first conversation. A new lead gets the following:

• First and last name
• Company
• Job title
• Work email, and a business phone number when the research source has one
• Company website, industry, number of employees, and annual revenue
• City, state, and country
• Lead Source, set to the value in your org that matches where the lead came from
• Lead Status, set to your first open status, such as "Open - Not Contacted"
• Rating, set from the fit score, so the strongest leads are Hot and the rest are Warm or Cold
• Owner

Kite writes the fit score and its one-line reason into custom fields, and if your org has no fields for them, it can create them. Salesforce's standard lead has no field for a LinkedIn profile, so Kite puts the link in a custom field when your team has one, and in the note otherwise.

Kite attaches a note to each lead that explains why the person is worth contacting. The note gives the fit score and the reason behind it, the person's LinkedIn profile, and the recent event that makes now a good time to reach out. It records the verification status of the email address exactly as the research source returned it, whether that's verified, catch-all, or unverified, and it cites where each fact came from. When the company is already an account, the note names it and its owner. A rep who opens the lead has the context for the first call without redoing the research.

When the leads came from an event, a webinar, or a specific outreach push, Kite adds them to the matching Salesforce campaign. That makes each lead a campaign member, so the campaign's lead count and your campaign influence reports include them. Kite finds the campaign by name in your org, and it can create one when you ask for a new campaign.

For each primary lead, Kite creates a Salesforce task for the lead's owner, so the follow-up appears on the rep's task list and on the lead's activity timeline. The subject says what to do, such as "Call about their new finance systems hire." Kite sets a due date, links the task to the lead, and puts talking points in the task's comments. You can set the deadline in your request, such as "within one business day" for inbound leads.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked, in the Kite web app or in Slack. It says how many leads it created, how many existing leads it updated, and how many tasks it scheduled. It lists who it left out and why, including people who are already contacts, customers, competitors, and anyone who no longer held the role. It also reports how many leads it delivered against how many you asked for, and how many have a verified work email. The full set of leads comes with it as a table, so you can scan the result without opening Salesforce.

From there, Kite can write a personalized email to each primary lead and send it with your approval. If leads arrive regularly, ask Kite to run the same job on a schedule, such as every Monday morning, and it will post each batch's summary in the same place.

When Kite finishes, your Salesforce org holds a set of qualified leads your reps can work right away, and your conversation with Kite holds the record of what changed.