Salesforce Marketing Blog - October 2007

• Best Practices in Campaign Management: Tips & Tricks

  Andrea Wildt Oct 31, 2007

  Now that we’ve covered the basics of how campaign management works in Salesforce how do you get the most bang for your buck? Here are some suggestions to get you started:

  • Naming Conventions. A must-have for any organization running a lot of campaigns. The campaign name is what appears in search so you want it to be unique and easy to identify. Campaign names should be structured in a consistent manner so they are easy to decipher by people outside of marketing. For example: Program - Tactic - Audience - Quarter

  • Add custom fields to campaigns that align to key metrics. You may want to know how your programs perform by offer or by tactic (email, web promo, etc). Add these as custom fields to your campaign so you can report on them later. If these metrics are key to decision making in your organization be sure to make them required fields.

  • Use the active flag on campaigns with purpose. There are 2 reasons why campaigns need to be active. The first reason, is so you can run the super secret “Campaign Call Down” report. The second reason is so your sales team can find the campaign name from the lookup on leads and contacts and manually add the campaign to the campaign history. If you have thousands of active campaigns, this look-up view for your sales reps gets pretty muddy and decreases the likely hood     they will use it, so try and keep your active flags up to date. (Tip: In the Winter ‘08 release you will be able to run the campaign call down report on both active and inactive campaigns removing the necessity to have campaigns active for reporting purposes only)

  • Create a section on your campaigns for follow up. This is a great way to communicate to your sales reps or inside sales teams what the appropriate follow up is for each particular campaign. This section could contain key messages, any email templates that should be used for follow up, etc. This way an inside sales person can simply click in to the campaign, and easily identify what their next steps should be.

              

  • Standardize your member status values. Reporting across campaign membership can be difficult without consistency. Maintaining standard values will allow you to compare the performance of your programs against each other. Some example status values are:

  • For web promotions set the default value to “Responded”
  • For events and webinars set the default value to “Registered” with additional values for “Registered – attended” and “Cancelled”.
  • For email marketing set the default value to “Responded”

  • If you don’t have it already, install the “Campaign Membership” web link from AppExchange. This web-integration link on the campaign detail page pulls up the “Campaign Call Down report I referred to earlier and allows you to see all of the campaign members (both leads and contacts) in one report. If you don’t have this already, install the link off the AppExchange here: https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?NavCode__c=&id=a0330000000j5OdAAI

              

   

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• Best Practices in Campaign Management: The Basics

  Andrea Wildt Oct 24, 2007

  What is campaign management? I think of it as managing a series of tactics and programs designed to achieve a specific business goal. This could be generating leads, pipeline, customer adoption, etc. Campaign managers usually leverage a campaign management system or tool that aids in the planning, execution, tracking and measurement of these programs.

  Why use a campaign management tool? To get a holistic view of how your marketing initiatives are performing and maximize your marketing investments by replicating successful programs, tactics, and channels.

  How does it work in Salesforce? That’s where the fun comes in….

  Let’s start off by talking about the campaigns tab since this is the heart of our campaign management system in Salesforce.  Campaigns allow marketers to track at a granular level how their marketing tactics are performing, from lead generation to pipeline creation. Some companies do this today using the lead source field or perhaps a custom field on the lead, but that can get messy and even unusable once your pick list gets too long. Campaigns are perfect for this level of detail. 

   

  Campaigns can be associated to leads and contacts in 3 ways.

  1. Through your web-to-lead form. If you are generating leads on your website and using the Salesforce web-to-lead form you can easily pass the campaign ID as a hidden value through the form so every lead that is created from that form is tagged with your specific marketing campaign.
  2. Manual association. You (or anyone with access) can manually associate leads, contacts to campaigns through the campaign history related list on the lead/contact record.
  3. Mass association. You can add leads and contacts to campaign through the “Add to Campaign” button on reports or through a csv file upload using the “Manage Members” button on a campaign.

  Campaigns can be associated to opportunities in 2 ways:

  1. Lead Convert. When a lead gets converted to an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated to the lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity
  2. Manual Association. You can manually associate any active campaigns to an opportunity using the look-up functionality next to the campaign source field on the opportunity.

  Now anytime a lead, contact or opportunity is associated to a campaign, you can see that reflected in the statistic fields back on my campaign. These fields are updated in real time as leads are converting to opportunities and opportunities are closing so marketers always have the most up to date information on how my campaigns are performing.

  

  You can see from the image above there is also the concept of a “response” reflected in the campaign statistic fields. For leads and contacts you can determine what the campaign member status of each record should be and if that status should be considered a response to the campaign based on your organizations business process. This is defined in the advanced set up are on campaigns and probably best explained through an example. If I am running an event, I would associate all of my leads and contacts to the campaign with a member status value of "Sent" with the responded checkbox set to null. At this point in my process I am using the campaign to identify my target audience and since individuals have not yet  registering for the event I want to keep the responded field set to null.

  When individuals do register for the event, I would update the member status to "Registered", with the responded checkbox marked. All records with a member status value with the responded checkbox marked are reflected in the responded statistic field. Now, I can tell my conversion rate and for future programs better project how many invites it will take to achieve a my desired registration number.

  

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• Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 3

  Andrea Wildt Oct 19, 2007

  Keep Those Leads Working!

  Just because a sales person has determined a lead isn’t qualified at the time it’s generated, doesn’t mean our job in marketing is done. Building a house list or internal database of names can be a gold mine for future opportunities, but mining those lists can be time consuming. I recently came across a great way to keep up communications to internal lists using intelligent workflow.

  I mentioned in my first post about lead management that it was important to have a ”pass back” mechanism from sales to marketing so marketing knows when they should continue cultivating a lead. I prefer the method of using a lead status value of "archived" to indicate the leads is back in marketing’s hands. Once a lead has been "archived" I want to send them a marketing communication based on the reason why it was archived. In this case I have a dependent picklist created so anytime a lead is archived, the sales rep identifies why the lead wasn’t ready and this is the criteria I can use to send my next email to them.

  
  
  Now, I’ve created some rules that say "If the lead is archived for reason A send Marketing communication 1. If the lead is archived for reason B send marketing communication 2. etc". I can even schedule the email, so it occurs a week after our sales team has archived the lead. All of this is done by using intelligent workflow and referencing an email template. Just click on setup ->customize -> workflow and approvals and follow the wizard through the process.

  

  Learn more about Salesforce's powerful lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales organization working to grow your sales.

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• Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 2

  Andrea Wildt Oct 18, 2007

  Automate it!

  Now that we have a process in place, how can we automate as much as possible inside the application? Here are 4 easy tools that can help.

  Web-to-Lead
  Are you generating leads on your website? Salesforce web-to-lead forms allow you to post all of your inbound web leads directly in to Salesforce. We’ll dive deeper in to web-to-lead in the web integration section but for those of you new to the concept check out Kraig’s previous post here to get you started: http://blogs.salesforce.com/marketing/2007/03/capturing_leads.html

  Assignment Rules
  Your lead gen machine is in full gear but where are all of the leads going? Assignment rules can help you get the right leads to the right people, and keep those Mickey Mouse leads far away from your sales teams. Located in the admin set up, these rules let you assign leads to users or queues based on any criteria you may be capturing on the lead or related objects. For example, all leads in the eastern US should go to one rep, and leads in the western US to another.

  

  Auto-Response Rules
  Your sales team is busy and might not be able to follow up on every lead in ample time, so let marketing handle the first point of communication. Auto-response rules can be based on any criteria that you are capturing or pre-populating on the lead record and can leverage text and html templates.

  
  
  Lead Scoring
  Pre-score your leads so only the most qualified are getting passed over to sales. You can create some basic lead scoring formulas using custom formula fields.

  In this example, we’ll leverage the lead source field and provide a higher score for leads generated through our “contact us form” than through “advertising”. Simply add a custom field to leads called “lead score” and use the following formula: Case(LeadSource, “Contact Us Form”,2,”Advertising”,1,0). Now I can leverage assignment rules and send all of my 0 and 1 leads to a queue for marketing to cultivate and send my 2 leads on to the sales organization.

  These are some out of the box ways you can start to optimize and automate your lead management process but don’t stop here – get creative! With all the developments to the platform in the past years, including custom formula fields, workflows, validation rules, roll up summary fields, etc. there are a lot of options for you to create a process inside Salesforce that is  aligned to your business process.

  Salesforce includes a number of powerful features to help you manage and optimize your lead flow - Sales Leads Tools ensure that leads are optimally routed while automatically recording all touches with prospects and customers. The Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product, ensures that marketing and sales are always in tandem when it comes to growing your sales. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.

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• Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 1

  Andrea Wildt Oct 15, 2007

  Define Your Process

  When I think about best practices in lead management, the first thing that comes to mind is process. A well documented process that everyone in your organization clearly understands and abides by is the key to success for any company trying to streamline lead management. Since this is usually the point of hand off between marketing and sales, it’s important that both teams are involved in defining the process, what the feedback mechanism is, and what the measure of success is.

  Some basic questions to get you started in defining your process:

  What is a lead?
  I know this may seem like a silly question, but it’s a great first place to start. Will everything that enters your CRM system be considered a lead and passed over to sales? In some instances this may be the right way to go, especially if your sales team has the bandwidth and their compensation structure incites them to follow up on marketing leads.  But keep in mind, sending over all of your  marketing generated leads could overwhelm your sales organization and if a large number of these leads don’t pan out, it could leave a bad impression and keep sales from following up on future leads.

  How many times will sales try to reach a marketing lead?
  This could vary depending on the type of lead. For example, whitepaper leads may only warrant 1 touch from sales but if a lead engages in a product demo, we might require 3 touches. Whatever you decide, the # of required touch points should be documented and if it varies by type of lead be sure you are capturing each type on the lead record.

  How will sales “pass back” a lead to marketing?
  Just because a lead isn’t ready for prime time when its generated doesn’t mean it is lost forever. Once your sales team has determined a lead isn’t qualified what is the process for passing it back? An easy way to do this is create a custom lead status value of "marketing" or "archived" that indicates marketing can continue to cultivate the lead until it is ready again for sales.

  What is a qualified lead?
  This is typically the key metric marketers use to determine the success of a program and where future budget dollars should be allocated so its important to be consistent across your organization as to when a lead is qualified and how. This could be as simple as creating an opportunity in Salesforce once a first meeting has been booked or when budget has been identified.

  I can’t stress enough the importance of documenting your process once it has been defined. It will help you identify any gaps in your process and it’s a great tool to get your entire company on the same page. Check out an example posted earlier on successforce here:
  http://blogs.salesforce.com/processes/2006/07/sales_process_m.html

  Learn more about how Salesforce can optimize the flow of Sales Leads, or view the Lead Management functionality within Salesforce Marketing, our Marketing Automation SaaS product. Salesforce.com - the world's favorite CRM Software as a Service.

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• Salesforce Marketing Best Practice Series

  Andrea Wildt Oct 10, 2007

  Being new to the Salesforce Marketing product team, I've had to get up to speed on what the Salesforce Marketing product is all about. As a long time customer and internal user of the marketing product I’m familiar with all of the features but I have to admit, even I’ve been guilty of propagating the concept that Salesforce Marketing = the campaigns tab. Well....no more! I’m here to tell you (in great detail) about all the cool stuff Salesforce has to offer to marketers and how you can leverage it in your organization.

  This is the first installment in a series of blog posts in which we’ll walk you through the basics of Salesforce Marketing from lead management to email marketing and everything in between.

  
  

  Bookmark this page and we’ll continue to update the topics below with links to the posts. If there are other topics or areas you would like us to cover, feel free to send an email over to awildt(at)salesforce(dot)com.

  
  

  Salesforce Marketing Best Practice Series

  
  

  Lead Management
      Step 1: Define your Process
      Step 2: Automate It!
      Step 3: Keep Working Those Leads!
  Campaign Management
      The Basics
      Tips & Tricks
  Website Integration
      Passing Hidden Values
  Salesforce for Google Adwords
      From Click to Customer
  Email Marketing
  Collateral & Brand Management
  Marketing Analytics
  AppExchange Apps for Marketing

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• How to Measure Campaign Influence

  Andrea Wildt Oct 1, 2007

  Thanks to everyone who came to Dreamforce! If you missed it, keep an eye out on successforce.com for the recorded sessions - they should be posted soon.

  In the last session of the Marketing track, “How Salesforce uses Salesforce Marketing”, many of you were asking about how to measure the influence of marketing campaigns on opportunities. Using Custom Report Types (CRTs) we can start get a better handle on this metric.

  Note: You will need to have the "Manage Custom Report Types" permission set on your profile in order to create and publish CRTs.

  To create a new Custom Report Type go to Setup -> Build –>Custom Report Types

  First thing you want to do is pick the primary object you want to report from (in this case it will be the
  Opportunity), name your report and identify what folder you want it to show up in.

  
  

   Next you will create the relationship between objects. In this case we want to report from the Opportunity to Contact Roles to the Campaign History.

  
  
  Once you have saved the report you can go in and edit which fields show up in the report by clicking the “Edit Layout” button highlighted below.

  
  

  At this point, we are finished creating the reporting structure for campaign influence, however I do want to point out one of the most powerful components of CRTs which is hidden on the edit layout page under the link “Add fields related via lookup”.

  This link allows you to extend your report even further by adding in fields from objects that are related by a lookup to any of the primary objects you are reporting from. For example, I could get to information on the account record from the lookup to the opportunity, or I could get to user data from the lookup to the campaign record. This hidden gem can come in handy, so keep it in mind for other reports you may be trying to run.

  
  

  Now, back to our influence report…I’ve saved the report type down and can get to it through our regular reporting wizard.

  
  
  Just like any other report, you can structure it in any way you like. I prefer to create a summary report grouping the results by campaign. This way I can see how much opportunity has been touched by campaign, regardless of what the campaign source is on the opportunity.  

  
  
  Once you’ve tested out your report, don’t forget to go back in and deploy it to all of your users so anyone with access to your report folder gets the benefit of this new report!

  Added 10/03:
  Thanks to Tom Tobin who packaged up this CRT and put it on the AppExchange here:
  https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000004IOTRAA4

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