Marketing Operations

6 Ideas to Consider Prior to Creating Lead Goals for Your Marketing Team

March 2, 2012 by Prashant Kaw • Best Practices, Lead Generation, Marketing Operations • 0 Comment

Whether or not you believe the aphorism, “What Gets Measured Gets Done”, lead volume is an important metric to most businesses. Measuring your lead volume on a consistent basis is critical to hitting business goals such as your Sales targets. A lead volume report is something the executive team expects at the end of the month, or often in the middle of the month if Sales is not on target. However prior to pulling lead volume goals and quotas for your team out of your hat, there are some key things to consider.

6 Ideas to Consider Prior to Creating Lead Volume Goals For your Marketing Team

  1. Track the correct lead volume metric. The particular lead volume metric varies from business to business. Number of raw leads generated may be important to some and to others it is number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). If you have an SLA (service level agreement) with your Sales team that metric may be the number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) or Sales Accepted Leads (SALs). Think about the appropriate metric(s) for your business and plan to measure that.
  2. Establish your lead volume goals based on your Sales goals. Work backwards from your Annual revenue goals and use historical deal conversion and lead conversion data to establish your goals. e.g. Say your Annual goal is to hit $5 million revenue and your average deal size is $100K, you need to win 50 deals to hit that goal. If your Opportunity to Win rate is 50% you need 100 opportunities to get to 50 deals and if 50 leads yield an Opportunity, you need 5000 leads (or qualified leads, depending on your business) to hit your Sales targets. This allows you to calculate the number of leads you need to generate every month.
  3. Plan to track your lead volume consistently (i.e. daily). Tracking your lead volume consistently will allow you to control it and provide leads to Sales when they need them most. Hitting the proverbial hockey stick at the end of the month or quarter might make your marketing team look like heroes in theory but will not make you popular with the Sales team. The lead volume needs to be ahead of plan in the early part of the sales cycle so reps are working on raw leads early and at plan towards the end of the Sales cycle when Sales is busy closing out qualified opportunities. Low quality leads at the end of the month or quarter are not helpful and in fact will probably not get follow-up on till they are stale.
  4. Account for Growth.The world is flat, but unfortunately no one likes flat graphs. In the above example we established that your team needs to generate 5000 leads per year or approximately 415 leads per month. In theory you could average that number of leads per month and hit your goals but in reality your executive team wants you do be doing a little better every month. In fact if your Sales team is growing, you need to be doing a lot better every month.
  5. Break down your lead plan by Organic vs. Paid Leads. The reality is marketing is viewed as a cost center. To prove that your are a revenue source the majority of your leads should be inbound or organic. The shorter you are falling on your lead goals, the more money you are spending on PPC, advertising or other paid Channels to make up for that difference. Any goal is obtainable with an unlimited budget but we rarely have that liberty. If you plan and track your leads goals by organic versus paid leads you can manage that a lot better and keep marketing costs down.
  6. Measure recycled, older Leads. Every lead model, plan and goal should have a strategy to recycle older leads since those are sunk costs. What Marketing can achieve en masse via email or social media is atypical of what Sales can or will do. Your lead goals should contain some metrics for bringing older, dormant leads back into the Sales funnel through lead nurturing or recycling campaigns. Often that is taken for granted but it is up to the marketing team to demonstrate the value by tracking it and showing the conversion results to the organization.

How are you establishing lead goals within your marketing organization? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: Marttj

Salesforce.com vs. Marketing Automation: Which Should I Use for Reporting?

February 17, 2012 by Prashant Kaw • Best Practices, Marketing Operations, Reporting, Salesforce.com • 2 Comments

What system should I use for Marketing Reporting? Salesforce.com or Marketing Automation

A lot of our clients use Marketing Automation tools like Eloqua, HubSpot and Marketo in conjunction with their Salesforce.com or other CRM system. A frequently asked question from them is: Which system should we be using for reporting – Salesforce or Marketing Automation?

The Simple Answer

The simpler answer is, pick one and build good process and behavior around it. More often than not this system of choice ends up being Salesforce.com since it contains Opportunity and Sales data for closed loop reporting. Also APIs allow Salesforce to pull in the Marketing Automation data related to campaigns and user responses.

There are various benefits to using Salesforce for reporting over Marketing Automation.

  • The reporting is more flexible than the Marketing automation tools. With the ability to use custom objects and create custom report types the sky is the limit.
  • Salesforce typically has more users that allows you to share information across the organization using reports and dashboards.
  •  Marketing Automation reporting is often limited to out-of-the-box reports which are not ideal for every business. While these tools also have APIs, at this time they are better at pushing data to Salesforce than pulling from it.

The Not So Simple Answer

The weighted answer to the above question is, you should get the report from the system that best answers your business question. If you are looking for marketing campaign centric reports based on responses to an email or blog post, you might get better answers from your marketing automation software.

Some Areas to Use Marketing Automation Software for Reporting Over Salesforce

  • Web traffic conversion metrics – Since most marketing has moved online these days traffic conversion is an important metric for many businesses and that data point rarely captured in Salesforce.
  • Most marketing automation tools will provide you with an accurate count of names acquired or touched in a month whereas that can be a challenge in Salesforce which splits names across Contacts and Leads.
  • Pulling every touch point with an end user into Salesforce can be an overkill for the Sales Team and if your customer base is highly active it can end up being costly to store all that data
  • Marketing tools are getting better (than Salesforce) at allowing marketers to track Marketing spend, helping them to calculate ROI of Marketing

 

The Key Takeaways

Picking one system or a combination or both can really inform your business. Whatever process you choose, please keep the following in mind:

 

  • Keep it simple – Reporting needs to be done often, so you should be able to repeat your process easily every time you do it.
  • Make it Scale-able – Whatever process you choose, it should grow with your organization’s needs.
  • Work on Maintaining Good Data – Reports are only as informative as the data. If the data is no good, no one will believe the reports and will undermine the whole purpose of reporting.
  • Apply the Learnings – Again reports are only useful if you’ve learned something and applied those learnings to inform your behavior or processes to improve business results.

 

 

Photo credit: indabelle

Are You Tracking Your Return on Marketing Investment (Marketing ROI)?

September 9, 2011 by Prashant Kaw • Marketing Operations, ROI • 0 Comment

Historically, marketing organizations have been viewed as cost centers. However, that is changing. Thanks to the maturity of CRM tools such as Salesforce and the emergence of Marketing Automation and Analytics tools it is now a lot easier to track the true cost of Marketing and calculate your ROI.

CMOSurvey.org just published its August 2011 survey results of top marketers used to predict the future of markets, track marketing excellence, and prove the value of marketing in society. There were some interesting nuggets in the survey pertaining to Return on Marketing Investment, or simply, Marketing ROI. I’ve extracted the information from slides 26 and 27 and created a couple of graphs included below.

The CMO survey is conducted twice a year via the internet and is sponsored by the American Marketing Association and The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. The survey was conducted between August 1st-23rd, 2011, and was sent to 3500+ top marketers at Fortune 1000 and Forbes Top 200 companies, to top marketers who are members of the AMA, and also to Duke University alumni and friends. 249 individuals or 6.8% of the invitees responded to the questions. About 83% of the respondents were VP-level or above.

The most interesting piece of information as seen in the chart above was that over the past 3 years Marketers have been able to increase their ROI and the forecast over the next 12 months is even brighter. This trend might mean that marketers are getting better at proving themselves as profit centers and getting better at tracking metrics.

This second chart shows the ROI by sector, comparing B2B vs. B2C products and services, with B2C services showing the highest ROI in the last 12 months.

All Is Not So Well

At the same time, the CMO Council just published their 2011 State of Marketing Outlook report. The chart below caught my eye. In spite of all the optimism around ROI in the previous charts, it seems that only 5% of marketers rate their marketing performance as “excellent with high ROI and strong metrics for measurement in place.”

On page 3 of the executive summary, in 5 of the top 7 bullets, respondents struggle with issues that directly impact ROI. They state they are either challenged by or struggling to deal with:

  • Limited access to siloed customer data; internal competition over data sovereignty
  • Making sense of vast volumes of data; extracting and applying insight and intelligence
  • Legacy technology issues that make real-time data access and utilization difficult
  • A crop of hosted, SaaS solutions that are easy and inexpensive to deploy without IT help
  • A point solution orientation — CRM, e-mail marketing, Web analytics, campaign management

The CMO Council study was authored by Deloitte. The number of respondents was not included in the executive summary, but page 24 on out includes demographics broken down by percentage. Over 65% of the respondents were VP-level for Marketing or above.

Takeaways

It seems that the news here is bittersweet.

  • Tools and technology are available for organizations to do a better job at tracking ROI.
  • Marketing leaders are still struggling to leverage these available technologies and make sense of their data.
  • Only a small percentage of organizations rate themselves as doing an excellent job tracking ROI.
  • It remains to be seen if the ROI is significant enough. In certain industries, unless there is a 2x-3x return on investment, your marketing is not doing enough for you.

It’s Your Turn

How are you tracking your Marketing ROI? What tools are you using and how are they working out for your organization? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

New DemandTools Enhancements to Help with Your Salesforce Data Health

August 26, 2011 by Boom Bertetti • Lead Quality, Salesforce.com, Tips, Tools • 0 Comment

new demandtools enahancements to help with your salesforce data health Have you ever searched for a contact in Salesforce only to return a dozen or more Contacts and Leads with the same name and the same Account in your search results? What did you do after you saw those contacts?

Data duplication can cause a lot of problems when trying to run your Salesforce or CRM operations efficiently. Common issues are inaccurate numbers on reports, exceeding data storage limits and most importantly it can turn users away from using the system because they don’t trust the data.

System administrators spend a lot of time cleaning up data manually in Excel and import them back into the system with Salesforce DataLoader. While it may sound simplistic it involves more than deletion of duplicate data. Often admins have to reassign related objects from the duplicate data to the master record. Yes, it is very challenging and isn’t fun without a tool that can do it all.

DemandTools from CRMFusion is probably the best tool available to handle all of these issues. DemandTools is available on the Salesforce AppExchange and allows admins to cleanse duplicates in any type of object in Salesforce. Besides data cleansing it is also used for data maintenance, discovery and verification. It also includes a nifty data update tool that can mass transfer records to the new owners.

We use DemandTools at OpFocus and so do a lot of our customers so we thought we would share some of our favorite new features in their recent update:

MassImpact Enhancements

MassImpact allows admins to select a set of records in Salesforce and apply changes uniformly across the entire set without the need for importing or exporting data. This functionality allows admins to develop and maintain data standards by developing corrective actions (scenarios) to common data mistakes. Recent enhancements we liked:

 

  • Conditional Object Counts: With the “Limit by where condition” we can count records using the condition with any field in the sub-object or use “Field Sum” to sum number or currency field in the selected sub-object and use that number to update a custom field in the selected object.
  • NEW TrimSpaces Formulas: I remember trying to do VLOOKUP to match Account Names in Excel and they looked exactly the same but the formula returned #N/A. Later I found out that the source data had end spaces (a lot of spaces), which I couldn’t see. I’m glad that DemandTools has added this feature to the new version, so I can trim all invisible leading and trailing spaces before I do a VLOOKUP.
  • ProperCaseName Formula Enhancements
  • ONLY attempts to proper case when the input data is all in upper or lower case – No more funny looking account names. All the names with improper format will be taken care of.
  • Improved logic to better identify abbreviations when there is no punctuation between the letters (based on a word having no vowels)
  • NEW ProperCaseOverrides.txt file available in DemandToolsData\ReplaceList directory for user customization

 

MassEffect Changes

MassEffect is a fully international character compatible data loading tool for Salesforce that allows one to import, export, update and delete Salesforce and Force.com platform data. There’s one cool, new enhancement to MassEffect

 

  • Export UNLIMITED records to .csv: An unlimited number of records can now be exported to a csv file without any memory errors (Yes!).

 

Single Table Deduplicator Enhancements

As the name suggests Single Table Deduplicator is the industry standard for batch deduplication for Salesforce. It can find and merge data in any Salesforce objects including custom objects. The tool provides great flexibility in terms of how dupes are identified with multiple methods available for merging records. Single Table Dedupe just made some nifty Master Rule enhancements:

 

  • The Master Rule “Most Opportunities and Contacts” now runs 100+ times faster than before allowing one to process large sets of duplicate groups faster than before.
  • The tool can also display the calculated Opportunity, Contact and Active Contract counts AFTER a master rule is applied. As an example it is helpful to see which Account really has the most Opportunities in Salesforce.

 

Visit the DemandTools site if you are interested in learning more about the latest release. CRM Fusion also has some other great tools to help you manage data such as PeopleImport and DupeBlocker and worthy of your attention.

What tools are you using to manage duplicates or maintain database health at your company? Please share your thoughts in the comments.


Meet the OpFocus Team at Dreamforce 2011 This Summer

 
That’s right! The OpFocus team will be at Dreamforce to soak in all the information that Salesforce.com has to offer and meet with old and new friends alike. If you are a customer, a friend or a fan of OpFocus, please let us know if you will be attending Dreamforce. We would love to see you there!



im-attending-dreamforce



How to Convert a Lead In Use By a Time-Based Workflow in Salesforce

August 19, 2011 by MJ Kahn • How To, Marketing Operations, Salesforce.com, Tips, Workflow Rules • 4 Comments

How to Convert a Lead in Salesforce that is in Use by a Workflow Rule Have you ever tried to convert a Lead, only to get the “Unable to convert lead that is in use by workflow” message? Frustrating, isn’t it?

This message appears if the Lead you want to convert is waiting on the Time-Based Workflow queue, waiting for some event to occur. Salesforce prevents you from converting these Leads until they are removed from the queue. Your options are few:

  • Tell your user to edit the Lead to change whatever value(s) caused the record to be placed on the queue. This should cause the Lead to be removed from the workflow queue, so the user can try again to delete it. Of course, that’s a lot of work to ask your users to do, just to convert a Lead.
  • Tell your users to let you know when they get this message. You can go to the queue (Setup | Monitoring | Time-Based Workflow, find the record on the queue, and delete it. Then tell the user to try again. But do you really want to do that every time a user wants to convert a Lead that’s on the queue?
  • Remove the standard Convert button from the Lead page. Replace it with a custom button that uses JavaScript to call an Apex method that (1) edits the Lead to change the value that caused the record to be placed on the queue, and (2) redirects to the default Convert page. To do this, you have to write the Apex code, plus related unit tests, develop in a sandbox, deploy to Production…. Again, that’s a lot of work!

What you really need is an approach that can be automated so you or your users don’t have perform extra steps, and that doesn’t involve Apex. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just override the standard Convert button?

You can!

The solution involves overriding the standard Convert button, so that it sends the user to a Visualforce page instead. The page, which will be displayed for only a second or less, will check a new checkbox field on your Lead, then redirect to the standard Lead Convert page. If you change your workflow rule’s criteria to exclude any Leads that have this new checkbox checked, then by the time the standard Lead Convert page is displayed, the Lead will no longer be on the workflow queue, and you’ll be able to convert it without any problem.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Add a new checkbox field

Create a checkbox field named Cancel Workflow to the Lead object. By default, the checkbox is unchecked. The field doesn’t need to appear on the page layout.

2. Edit Your Workflow Rule

Change your workflow rule to add “Cancel Workflow equals False” to the criteria. In other words, if the new checkbox becomes checked, the Lead will no longer meet the workflow criteria.

3. Create a Visualforce page like this:

 <!-- Use this page to override the standard Lead Convert action. This page will check a checkbox field on the Lead record; checking that checkbox will cause the Lead to not meet the workflow rule's criteria, which will remove the Lead from the workflow queue, and allow it to be converted. --> <apex:page standardController="Lead" > <apex:form> <div style="visibility:hidden;"> <apex:inputField value="{!Lead.Cancel_Workflow__c}" id="cancelWorkflow" style="visibility:hidden; "/> </div> <apex:actionFunction name="quickSave" action="{!quickSave}" oncomplete="standardConvert();"/> <apex:actionFunction name="standardConvert" action="{!URLFOR($Action.Lead.Convert, lead.id, [retURL=$CurrentPage.parameters.retURL], true)}" /> <script language="JavaScript"> // When the page finishes loading, do the default window.onload action, // then call our fixLead() function. var previousOnload = window.onload; window.onload = function() { if (previousOnload) previousOnload(); fixLead(); } // Edit the Lead to set the Cancel Workflow flag. // When quickSave() finishes, it will redirect to the default Convert action. function fixLead() { var elemCancelWorkflow = document.getElementById('{!$Component.cancelWorkflow}'); elemCancelWorkflow.checked = true; quickSave(); } </script> </apex:form> </apex:page>

4. Override Lead Object’s Standard Convert Action

Override the Lead object’s standard Convert action with the new Visualforce page. (Use Setup | Customize | Leads | Buttons and Links, then click Edit next to the Convert link to get to the override page.)

With this in place, when you click the Lead’s Convert button, you’ll see a brief flicker as this page is loaded and does its work, but the page will then redirect to the standard Lead Convert page. By the time you get there, the Lead will have been removed from the workflow queue, and you’ll be free to convert the Lead.

Try it, and let us know how it works for you!

Something to Consider

There’s only one issue with this solution. If you decide not to Convert the Lead and instead click Cancel on the Convert page, the Lead will remain unconverted, but its Cancel Workflow field will remain checked, preventing the Lead from being placed on the time-based workflow queue. You could develop a Scheduled Apex process to detect unconverted Leads whose Cancel Workflow field is checked, and then uncheck them, but that involves developing Apex, which we’ve otherwise avoided in this solution. If you’ve got any ideas, please post them here!

Photo credit: Simon_sees


Meet the OpFocus Team at Dreamforce 2011 This Summer

 
That’s right! The OpFocus team will be at Dreamforce to soak in all the information that Salesforce.com has to offer and meet with old and new friends alike. If you are a customer, a friend or a fan of OpFocus, please let us know if you will be attending Dreamforce. We would love to see you there!



im-attending-dreamforce



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