One of the most common goals for B2B marketers is being able to tie marketing efforts directly to revenue. Achieving accurate ROI reporting in Salesforce requires very simple relationships to be made between different tables. Although essentially straightforward, it seems this is an issue which has remained foggy for decades. This guide clears the fog by breaking down the essential steps needed for successful ROI reporting in Salesforce, common challenges we see that prohibit these steps, and the options available to address them.
The BIG Ask: Tie Campaigns to Revenue
To tie your marketing campaigns to revenue and produce accurate ROI reporting, you need certain foundational elements in place within Salesforce.
These include:
- Opportunity field data: date, stage, amount
- Opportunity contact roles (connects humans to opportunities)
- Opportunity “primary campaign” field (connects campaign to opportunity)
- Campaign members and campaign influence (connects humans to campaigns)
- Campaign member status (determines successful interaction with the campaign)
- Campaign data: date, investment
- Person field data: Lead Source, Lead Source Detail, and other key fields (not a requirement, but a best practice)
Bonus: Salesforce Campaign to Marketo Program Sync
The sync between Marketo programs and Salesforce campaigns is the best in the business. Not even Pardot (Account Engagement) which is native to Salesforce is better. Seriously. This isn’t the point of this article, but click here to see an infographic that explains why it’s so great.
Opportunity Field Data Considerations
Let’s start simple! What fields do you need on the opportunity itself?
Why Is It Important?
This list includes the values that are universally important, but will not be exhaustive to your reporting needs. When thinking about your required fields, consider how marketing (and/or other departments) will want to segment or group data in reports.
Common Challenges of Opportunity Fields:
- Amount: Many companies house multiple amount fields on the opportunity. For example, one field might have software costs and another might house service costs. One might be a monthly recurring revenue roll-up, while another might be annual. Make sure that the standard, out-of-the-box “Amount” field on opportunities is the value you want to actually report on. This is the field that syncs to most systems, namely marketing automation.
- Stage: You’ll want to understand what stages are actually incorporated into pipeline, as many companies will create an opportunity, but not actually consider it “pipeline” until a specific stage. Also note that changing stage names adjusts time calculations in Salesforce, so only edit them after thorough consideration.
Best Practices for Campaign Member Statuses:
It can be tempting to want to write a bunch of data right on the opportunity object, but remember that sales reps should be mostly selling, not inputting data. Be really critical when adding another required field to the process.
Opportunity Contact Role Best Practices
Why Are They Important?
Opportunity contact roles build a relationship between individuals and their role in a deal.
Roles are customizable, but common values are influencer, decision maker, procurement, finance. This provides essential visibility into how specific people will be involved in a deal. As an added bonus, instead of hunting for contacts in a large list of those associated to an account, sellers can simply act directly from the opportunity, where all the key players are shortlisted. It also allows for more seamless collaboration. For example, say you want your CEO to connect to executives when a deal moves to a late stage, like “Contract Review.” By creating the Contact role relationship, that motion can be automated.
Common Challenges with Opportunity Contact Roles:
- Building contact roles is typically left to sales reps who do not prioritize the behavior or are unaware the relationship exists and why it’s important. The result? The majority of opportunities have NO contacts associated.
Opportunity creation is restricted to contact creation (opposed to allowing opportunity creation from an account) and therefore only the original contact from which the opportunity was created is associated.
Impact of Incomplete or Inaccurate Contact Roles:
- Inefficient deal management
- Stifled collaboration within sales teams
- Stifled collaboration between sales and cross-functional teams (finance, executives, marketing)
- Misrepresentation of marketing’s contribution to revenue
Solution Options for Improving Opportunity Contact Roles:
Fear not! There are a variety of solutions for this issue: some easy, some more complex. If you’d like help working through them, that’s what GNW is here for. Contact us to get an assessment of what’s right for you.
- Keep Doing What You’re Doing with Improved Training and Enablement
Biggest Risk: Behavior may not change significantly, leading to continued data inaccuracies.
- Only Allow Opportunity Creation from a Contact Record
Biggest Risk: Opportunity creation may be delayed as reps have to ensure a contact is linked before they can proceed.
- Implement Stage-Based Validation Rules
Example: To move to “Contract” stage an opportunity must have “Financial DM” and “Power User” contact roles assigned.
Biggest Risk: Frustration from sales reps when forced to adhere to strict rules, especially in fast-moving deals.
- Automate Contact Role Association Based on Defined Rules
Example: Anyone on the account where “finance” is found in the job title is associated via a “Finance Influencer” contact role.
Biggest Risk: Automated rules may miss key influencers or not keep up with changes in account structures.
Opportunity Primary Campaign Best Practices
Why Is This Important?
The “Primary Campaign Source” field is used to directly connect opportunities to a specific marketing campaign. As its name indicates, most organizations prefer it to be the campaign that had the most impact on the deal.
Common Challenges with Primary Campaigns Usage:
- As insinuated above, how can one truly associate a single marketing initiative as the most impactful for long, complex B2B buying journeys? This is often a point of considerable contention when looking at primary campaign data. With that said, it is directionally helpful information for most organizations trying to go from no data to something.
- Sales reps are often responsible for selecting the campaign they believe had the biggest impact. This can lead to low confidence that the most relevant campaign was selected, causing underrepresentation of more effective marketing efforts.
- It is common for the last campaign associated with the contact where the opportunity started from to automatically populate in the primary campaign field. Issues with timeliness of campaign membership is often problematic in this situation.
Impact of Inaccurate or Inconsistent Primary Campaign Selection:
- Poor budget allocation due to inaccurate representation of marketing’s contribution
- Misleading ROI reports
Solution Options for Opportunity Primary Campaign Selection:
- Keep Doing What You’re Doing with Improved Training and Enablement
Biggest Risk: Behavior unlikely to change, leaving data inaccuracies in place.
- Cease Using the Primary Campaign Field Entirely and Focus on Campaign Influence
Biggest Risk: Resetting reporting expectations and adjusting focus to multi-touch attribution models rather than single-campaign attribution. Basically, the story of “what’s working” becomes more complex, albeit more accurate.
- Automate the Association of the Primary Campaign
Biggest Risk: Automated rules may struggle to identify the most impactful campaign.
- Create a Marketing-Led Process for Manual Population
Biggest Risk: This is time-consuming and requires dedicated marketing oversight. It also scales horribly, but for teams with under 10 opportunities closed per month, often makes the most sense.
Campaign Influence
Why Is It Important?
Campaign influence logic allows you to create many-to-many relationships between people, campaigns, and opportunities. It’s a more advanced approach to understanding how multiple marketing initiatives across buying committee members impact a deal, especially over lengthy sales cycles.
Common Challenges with Campaign Influence
- It’s simply not turned on.
- Models are not created.
- Timeframe is too long and not agreed upon.
- Missing campaign membership due to delayed association. This is very common in events where sellers create an opportunity real-time at the event, but the events team does not associate people to the event campaign until after the event.
Impact of Missing Campaign Influence Logic:
- Incomplete understanding of marketing’s true impact on revenue
- Missed opportunities to optimize campaigns that are contributing to deals
Implementing Campaign Influence Logic:
Salesforce offers flexibility in building custom campaign influence models. Start by implementing these common models:
- First Touch: Attributes revenue to the first marketing interaction.
- Last Touch: Attributes revenue to the last marketing touchpoint before an opportunity is created.
- Even Distribution: Distributes revenue evenly across all influencing campaigns.
Best Practices:
- Require “Responded = True” for campaign member statuses included in campaign influence. This means that someone responded positively to a marketing initiative, not just that marketing attempted to communicate with them.
- Align campaign influence timeframes with your sales cycle. If you’re unsure what timeframe is right for you, you can choose a timeframe, pull a report and see if the data makes sense; then adjust the timeframe, pull the data again and compare. In general, being more conservative (shorter timeframes) work better than longer, where more campaigns will be included which will likely make sales skeptical and muddy your data. Remember that the more campaigns included, the less total revenue the rest of the campaigns will get. So you want it to be as accurate as possible, rather than attempt to prove more campaigns had influence.
- Be sure to regularly review and update your campaign influence rules as your sales cycle evolves and marketing strategies change. Depending on how you build your rules, you may have to add new campaign types or statuses.
Campaign Member Statuses
Why Is It Important?
Campaign member statuses determine whether a contact has successfully engaged with a campaign, which is crucial for influence reporting.
For example, the statuses for a webinar might be Sent, Registered, Attended and No Show, with “Responded” = TRUE for Registered, Attended and No Show.
Common Challenges of Campaign Member Statuses:
- Inconsistency is the biggest issue for statuses. Small differences like “attend” versus “attended” can cause many issues. Ensure all your statuses are consistent for campaign types.
- Erroneous “Responded” flags. As mentioned above, a common criteria for including campaign members into influence reporting is the qualification of “Responded” to the campaign. However, that means we need the responded flag to be accurately set and again, consistent.
Impact of Inconsistent or Missing Member Statuses:
- Inflated campaign engagement
- Reduced ability to attribute revenue to specific campaigns accurately
Best Practices for Campaign Member Statuses:
- Remain consistent and don’t make changes unless absolutely necessary. It is painful to retroactively align everything. If you’re only slightly annoyed that it’s “attend” when you’re used to “attended” … let it go.
- Use clear and standardized member statuses across campaigns to ensure consistency in reporting.
- Document what you use and why so new team members can learn and adhere to what’s been set.
Campaign Data (Dates and Costs)
Why Is This Important?
Dates are essential for determining the timeframe of reports, while investment data is necessary to calculate ROI. Without the “I” (investment), there’s no way to determine the return.
Common Current States We See:
- Campaign investment data (budget and actual spend) is often missing.
- Investment data is also commonly wrong.
- Large swings in campaign data, for example $1 in email sends and $500,000 for a tradeshow, which makes quick insights from any visual reports very challenging.
- Erroneous end dates, which exclude campaigns that extend over quarters
Impact of Missing Campaign Data:
- Reporting by specific timeframes excludes campaigns
- Manual calculations required to assess ROI, increasing the risk of errors
Best Practices for Campaign Data Entry:
- Ensure campaign start and end dates are diligently entered into Salesforce.
- Always input both budgeted and actual campaign costs. To avoid visibility concerns, adjust permissions to ensure only marketing staff can access this data.
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