50%

When I inherited this org, leads existed in name only.

Nobody touched them directly. They flowed into an external sequencing tool, got worked there, and that was it. The lead record in Salesforce was a placeholder, nothing more.

When I looked closer, I found out why.

A previous admin had built a custom object to track qualified leads. The intention was probably good. The execution broke everything. Native Salesforce lead conversion was effectively disabled. No field mapping from lead to account, contact, or opportunity. Every conversion required someone to manually create three records, in the right order, with the right data, without making mistakes.

Thousands of leads a month. All of them flowing through a process that generated numbers nobody could trust. Conversion rates were being tracked on the custom object, filled with errors. Every forecast built on top of funnel data was built on a guess.

I wanted to remove the custom object and restore native conversion. The pushback was immediate. BDRs were paid when an opportunity was created. The custom object was how that got tracked. Touch it and you break compensation.

So I didn’t argue about the object. I asked a different question: why does compensation have to trigger on opportunity creation? It could trigger when the opportunity moves to stage two instead. Sales reps advance it or kick it back to the BDR for more qualification. Everyone still gets paid. The data stays clean.

The timing helped. A new BDR manager was coming in and open to rebuilding from scratch.

The custom object came out. Lead statuses got rebuilt from scratch — logical progression from start to finish, no dead ends in the middle. Native conversion went back in with proper field mapping.

For the first time, the org had accurate top of funnel data. Leadership could see what was actually happening. Good BDRs got credit for good work. The ones hiding behind bad data couldn’t anymore.