Salesforce Marketing Blog
Salesforce Marketing Blog - Lead Management
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Best Practices in Lead Management: Step 3
Oct 19, 2007Keep 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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Batting Averages and Clickthrough Rates
Apr 5, 2007
John Gartner is obviously a fan of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,
as am I. Moneyball is a book by Michael M. Lewis released in 2003
about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, and
his team's approach to running the organization. One of the central
tenants of Moneyball, is that in the game of baseball, real statistical
analysis has shown that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and that avoiding an out is more important than getting a hit. In his article, Do Your Metrics Measure Up,
John analogizes a batting average in baseball, to a clickthrough ratio
for marketers. This begs the question, which metrics are most
important to your marketing organization? The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we all live an work. This has never been more true for marketers. As marketing dollars and advertising spend has shifted from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway, marketers can measure almost every aspect of the performance of their marketing programs in real-time. One of the potential effects of this, aside from Google's repeated quarterly revenue home runs, is a potentially overwhelming amount of statistical information associated with your various marketing programs. If you get lost in a sea of stats, and lose track of what is important, it is very easy to miss your targets, which in the b2b world is likely along the lines of pipeline, revenue, and profitability.
John's article certainly shares our mindset. While clickthrough rates, quality scores, and conversion rates are key metrics to track closely, if you live in the b2b world, be careful not to get so bogged down in the myriad of metrics that you lose sight of your original goals:
Driving new leads, pipeline, revenue, and profitability for your organization.
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Associating Web Leads to a Campaign
Mar 9, 2007We recently decsribed the process of setting up web-to-lead forms on your website. In addition, it is also quite simple to auto-associate inbound leads to a Campaign. Every Campaign record in Salesforce has a unique ID, which can be found by looking at the Camapign detail record:
Once you have the Campaign ID, simply insert an additional "hidden" field in your web-to-lead form that passes the campaign ID along with the form submission.
Republish your enhanced form to your website and Salesforce will take care of the rest! Every new lead submission from this form will be automatically associated to your Campaign.
Additionally, we recommend creating unique landing pages for every marketing program. This will allow you to optimize conversion rate by custom tailoring a landing pages to the offer(s) you present in your targeted email, advertising, events, or other. Every landing page can contain unique Campaign ID field and auto-associate new leads to the appropriate Campaign.
You can learn more about Salesforce's lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales lead processes optimized for sales growth.
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Capturing Leads from Your Website
Mar 6, 2007Companies often contact us with basic questions about website name/lead capture forms. To our surprise, many Salesforce customers are unaware of the standard web-to-lead functionality that comes out-of-the-box with every salesforce account.
There are a few simple steps to get started with website lead capture:
(1) Enable Web-to-Lead functionality
Enabling web-to-lead is a simple step that should take only a few sceonds. Log into Salesforce and navigate to the setup area for web-to-lead (Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead). From here click on the hyperlink to enable web-to-lead for your organization. You will be required to assign a default user as the lead creator for new inbound leads.
(2) Create a Web-to-Lead form
Salesforce does not host web pages for customers, but we do our best to make the process of creating a web-to-lead form as simple as possible. From the web-to-lead setup area, you can get started by selecting the hyperlink labeled Generate the HTML. You will be asked to select the Lead fields that you want to capture on your website, and specify a return URL. The return URL is a web page where you direct visitors after they have filled out your web-to-lead form. This is often a "thank you" page, a "download whitepaper" page, or something similar.
(3) Cut and Paste the HTML
Salesforce will generate a working HTML page that contains the web-to-lead form you generated. It's not very beautiful, but it works! From here, you can copy and paste the HTML and load it onto your site, or send it over to your web designer to apply your corporate stylesheet. Here is a sample web-to-lead appearance after applying a corporate stylesheet:
(4) Get Smart with Landing Pages
A landing page is simply a web-to-lead page that is highly tailored to a specific offer. As a best practice, instead of driving users from programs to your homepage, we recommend that you create for every marketing program you run. In addition, you can include Salesforce Campaign IDs in your web-to-lead forms and automatically associate inbound leads with email, search, telemarketing, or other programs. -
Marketing in the Google Era, Part 1
Feb 28, 2007Thank you for the overwhelming attendance and feedback from yesterdays Marketing in the Google Era webinar. Here you will find the details from yesterdays presentation.
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe Breeze Presenter, Streaming)
Also, many of you have asked us for the 7 techniques reviewed in the webinar, the bookmark set and blogroll that was listed at the end of the presentation.
Bookmark Set: http://del.icio.us/kswensrud
Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kswensrudSpread the word:
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The Era of Trackable Media
Feb 16, 2007Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.
Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.
Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.
They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that:
Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet the largest trackable advertising system ever invented, the Web. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.
The era of trackable media is here...Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.
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The Web is a Marketing Platform
Feb 11, 2007The Web is a marketers paradise. A community of connected individuals talking, reading, publishing, collaborating, syndicating, discovering, and sharing information around the world and around the clock. A community where every individual participates by contritbuting content, tags, links, descriptions, comments, bookmarks, and opinions.
So when we came across this video on You Tube last week, we figured there was no better way to kick off the new Salesforce Marketing blog:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
The video is itself informative, describing the changes that are at the very heart of the web and the internet marketing revolution. Even more interesting is the manner in which this information is disseminated. The format is video, published for free on You Tube. Over the course of 10 days, the community has viewed the video 806,077 times, posted 2749 comments, and republished the video or the link on countless other websites and blogs (such as this one) that resyndicate the content via RSS.
To take it a step further, search engines crawl the web and index its content and links. As of the date of this post, the video ranks #4 out of 164,000,000 search results for the term "web 2.0 video" ...and it all happened in a matter of days
It really makes you think. If your prospects and your customers are online, how are you reaching them? How are you disseminating your message and interacting with your community?
The Salesforce Marketing blog is designed to help marketers answer this question and discover new ways to take advantage of the web as a marketing platform. Stay tuned.
- The Salesforce Marketing Team
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