Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice on streamlining our lead/contact lifecycle in Salesforce. We’re encountering two main challenges:
Re‑engaging Churned Contacts from Existing Clients
Once a contact churns or a deal falls through, they remain as a Contact record—not a Lead—so they aren’t part of our nurture or re‑prospecting campaigns.
What’s the best approach to convert or tag these contacts so they can be reintroduced as Leads at the appropriate time?
Handling Unclosed New Sales Opportunities
We convert Leads into Contacts when New Opportunities are created when we’re working with a decision‑maker, but not all Opportunities close. Often we’re told to “circle back in six months.”
After conversion, those records are locked as Contacts/Opportunities and can’t be reactivated as Leads for follow‑up, complicating marketing automations and rep outreach plans.
This disconnect is causing confusion for both Marketing and Sales:
Marketing can’t easily include churned or unclosed prospects in drip campaigns.
Reps aren’t sure which list to reference for next‑touch planning.
What we’re hoping to achieve:
A clear, repeatable process (or technical solution) for moving contacts back into the active Lead lifecycle when appropriate.
Seamless integration with our marketing automations so no one falls through the cracks.
A simple, user‑friendly setup for reps to know exactly who to reach out to and when.
Has anyone tackled a similar scenario? I’d love to hear about recommended business processes, Salesforce configurations (e.g., person accounts, custom object/status workflows, automation tools), or third‑party apps that can help bridge the gap. Thanks in advance for your insights!
which data provider are you using for enrichment (ie. so you know when a contact churns)? Do you have a Contact Status field or something similar? You could have the data provider update the status field when a contact changes jobs and use that as a trigger for a flow to create a new lead for the contact at their new job. Just make sure they actually changed companies and didn’t just change their job title or add another current role to their linkedin. Closed lost deals are easy. You could use a flow to update the status of each contact on the deal then add them to nurture campaigns based on whatever criteria you want (ex. timing, job title, buyer role, etc). To address your 2nd challenge, I’d have reps hold off on creating an oppty until after basic qualification criteria has been met (ex. timing). If they convert a lead to a contact and it turns out they aren’t qualified, the rep can update the status field and you can add a custom field to capture disqualification reason as well. Then, use a flow to direct contacts to nurture campaigns or follow up sequences based on the contact’s status and DQ reason
To Re-engage the Churned contacts you could set up a scheduled flow for a set number of days and tag them either in a new status or another field. for example, it runs daily at night and looks for any contacts that were created 30 days ago and have unresolved opps and tags them appropriately
