Salesforce Automation Design and Usage – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Revenue Attribution Maturity Assessment: The Journey to Reporting Nirvana

Challenge: Accurately Reporting Marketing Contribution Without Over-Investing Time and Budget

For many years marketing teams have aimed to identify their contributions to their companies’ success. Over the last five years, there have been significant advances in the tools available as well as the business processes by which data can be managed to support greater insights and gain competitive advantage. In fact, marketing groups today are frequently responsible for driving a specific percentage of company revenue so identifying revenue sourced by Sales or Marketing is critically important to measuring business performance.

But measuring marketing contribution is time, resource, and budget hungry. So how much should you invest? What tools will contribute to success given the maturity of your organization? In working with many different organizations, I have noticed common themes on the road to attribution maturity. Knowing where you are on this maturity timeline will help you plan for what may come next for your organization. While every company is unique, I believe there are common attribution lifecycle stages – and companies move through them as they need greater detail and insight.

So check out where you in attribution maturity so you can balance investment against the value of increasing visibility.

Stage 1 – Early Startup

Definition: Sales and Marketing have agreed upon revenue contribution percentages
Typical Revenue: $0-$500K ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Handshake agreement on total new account revenue sourced by Marketing vs. Sales
CRM Deployment: Early deployment often still optimizing data and reporting process/structure
CRM Usage: Consistent campaign association is not yet defined for Leads, Contacts and Opportunities; Marketing automation may not be integrated with CRM
Attribution Process: Manual monthly or quarterly update of opportunities as Marketing vs. Sales sourced
Primary Challenges: Manual update of opportunities becomes overly time consuming

Stage 2 – Maturing Startup

Definition: CRM deployed with basic campaign attribution reporting
Revenue: $500K ARR – $5M ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Attribution to Marketing or Sales identified and defined by first or last touch for new business; starting discussion on up-sell and cross-sell attribution
CRM Deployment: CRM standard utilization enforced, Sales forecast process optimization ongoing, Marketing automation integrated
CRM Usage: Both Sales and Marketing have created a data dictionary and have established standard processes for updates that have moderately successful usage
Attribution Process: CRM reporting using first or last touch for Marketing vs. Sales attribution
Primary Challenges: Both first and last touch neither accurately describe opportunity drivers nor comprehensively reflect Marketing and Sales program impacts

Stage 3 – Growth Startup

Definition: Specialized attribution software deployed in first version
Revenue: $5M ARR – $50M ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Comprehensively defined Sales vs. Marketing source new business, upsell/cross-sell business and optimization of handoff processes
CRM Deployment: Utilize industry best practices for data integrity and reporting, generally solid compliance from Sales and Marketing teams, and relatively accurate sales forecasting; Initial deployment of third-party attribution tools
CRM Usage: Sales operations focusing on tight rep compliance with CRM, Marketing Operations focused on data quality and completeness
Attribution Process: Sales vs. Marketing sourced opportunities identified by campaign touches driving the MQL; utilizing both Sourced and Influenced models to optimize marketing performance
Primary Challenges: When sourced and influenced models do not accurately capture full account-based attribution impact or when weighted touch models are required to adjust campaign influence over customer journey

Stage 4 – IPO Readiness and Public Company

Definition: Specialized attribution software deployed in second iteration
Revenue: $50M ARR – $500M ARR+
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Business operations teams fully integrated across Sales and Marketing with BI dashboards/reporting; Monthly/Quarterly attribution reviews for program and process optimization; Early deployment of predictive revenue models
CRM Deployment: Sophisticated CRM deployment managed by business operations team with sophisticated reporting (BI tools) and data accuracy for regulatory compliance
CRM Usage: Well established guidelines and training; key processes are reinforced with end user compliance
Attribution Process: Multiple attribution models including weighted touch attribution and account-based models supported by analytics team to assist in utilization and interpretation of the data
Primary Challenges: Managing time, cost and complexity of attribution reporting as well as the ability of most marketing team members to absorb the complexity of these models

What has been your experience? Do these levels ring true? Was this helpful to your planning?

Lesson: As organizations grow, so do their needs for better attribution. It is important to make the right investments at the right time to keep attribution management time and costs in line with overall revenue goals.

Eliminating Leads: Migrating CRM to Support Account Based Marketing

Orchestration

Here is a recent presentation I gave at the OpStars event alongside Dreamforce. It describes the motivation behind eliminating the Lead object in CRM to support ABM and gives the experience of one startup making the transition.

Moving to Account Based Marketing – OpStars Event Presentation

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Here are the presentation slides from a DemandBase seminar I gave in January of 2016 describing a planned migration to ABM. I believe the structure and approach has stood the test of time and is still relevant today. Does this look like your ABM approach?

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Managing Leads as Contacts: A Marketing CRM Use Case Enhancing Account Based Selling

structured

Challenge: With Sales Increasingly Adopting Account Based Sales, How Do Marketing Systems Support the Effort?

I recently asked a simple question on LinkedIn:

Anyone know of an organization that has eliminated Lead management in Salesforce.com and moved to prospecting solely using Contacts/Accounts? Love to chat with them about their experience.

I was quite surprised to see a resulting 23 comments and over 10K views. Clearly this struck a nerve. Full disclosure: I am currently working with a client to migrate the management of prospects as Contacts rather than Leads.

In most B2B environments, sales reps have long thought about their efforts on an account basis. In fact, this recognition has driven the rise of Account Based Marketing to better support their efforts. Even when selling solutions with smaller ASPs (lets say ~$5-10K annually), reps map out their target account with key target personas. Further they use an array of modern account prospecting tools brought in by Sales Operations to support their outbound activities – tools like Tout, Yesware, Outreach.io, LeadSpace and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to name just a few. This complexity combined with the marketing team’s involvement in attempting to manage the customer journey at the Account level caused me to rethink CRM structure.

Certainly there is a data sync between CRM and these sales outreach tools, but it is far from perfect in creating a complete view of a given account. As new Leads enter CRM from a variety of sources, how does a rep maintain that complete view of their target prospect or customer? As more tools are added, reps find it increasingly challenging to view Account details – such as people, relationship, and activity – in both CRM and prospecting tools. Just a few short years ago, CRM was the central database as well as the destination for prospecting. That is no longer the case.

Back in the day, marketers used the CRM Lead object for qualification and nurturing until they were ‘sales ready.’ Best practices were for marketers to nurture Leads with content relevant to their sales stage (still a great guiding principle). However, because there is a visibility and reporting gulf between the Lead and Contact objects, this makes rep outbound efforts much more challenging. There are some newer solutions to help both Marketing and Sales ‘see’ an Account view of all Leads and Contacts like Engagio, LeanData and ZenIQ. Mapping or matching Leads to Accounts is nice – IF the reps lived in SFDC – but as noted above, this is becoming less common with new prospecting tools.

With a more complex martech infrastructure and with reps ‘living’ in systems other than the primary CRM, how can Marketing best support these efforts with CRM structure?

I now believe that most sales organizations with heavy outbound prospecting in third party tools would benefit by managing Leads as Contacts. Both marketing and sales teams will enjoy improved Account visibility. Making an effort to map key personas within the account, to convert matched Leads to these Accounts and to update the Account information will prepare marketing to best support sales in their outreach efforts. However, making this move requires a close look at several things, including: lead to account matching, Lead/Contact enrichment, management of Leads that don’t match to Accounts, Account statuses and progression, funnel stages for both Leads and Contacts, MQL processes, Lead/Contact scoring and Lead Development Rep process to submit opportunities — to name a few. As we progress through the customer journey, there will likely be other benefits like improved Contact and Account scoring, better Opportunity management, improved customer lifecycle marketing, etc.

I believe the modern marketing and sales tech stack has matured to a point where managing prospecting efforts in a more structured, account-based way will make sense for many more organizations today, even with lower ASPs. There are certainly many details to consider because this represents a fundamental shift and will require a new set of best practices that will be different for each organization. Additionally, for companies migrating a mature CRM instance, it will take careful thought and deployment.

Lesson: Marketing can better support sales and the account buying journey with an Accounted-based process for managing Leads as Contacts – and this may fit many B2B sales organizations.

Ever Heard This? “Do you want me selling or updating SFA?”

Challenge: Balancing time to update salesforce automation systems against lead development representative productivity

Lesson: Defining a minimum set of pick list field updates will actually make your entire lead qualification process more efficient by making lead development representative follow-up more productive.

Challenge: Balancing time to update salesforce automation systems against lead development representative productivity

Your lead development reps need certain fields to keep track of efforts. However, these same fields also represent overhead time required to update them. You must carefully consider balancing the fields they update and the frequency of their updates (this goes for the reps as well as management).

Certain fields are easy to include and to make mandatory. Lead Status, Lead Rating, Number of Dials, Last Dial Attempt, etc., are frequently included since these provide a way for the lead development rep to guide their daily activities. Lead Status is probably the most important in that this creates ‘buckets’ for leads and should be the first disposition applied to a lead. Categorizing leads as Junk, Not Responsive, Contacted, In Progress, etc., enables the lead development rep to use this system to build specific call lists. Lead Rating can be a way to separate the relative priority of leads within each Lead Status bucket (e.g., Hot, Warm or Cold) and can help differentiate the many leads that are likely to end up in the In Progress Lead Status.

Tracking the number of dial attempts, number of voicemail messages and other activities are important to give the rep feedback on when to stop pursuing a lead. Frequently, lead development reps chase leads for too long – and these subsequent dials are wasted. I have found that dialing a lead more than three or four times is often not worthwhile. While there are always counter examples, I find that there is a reason that the prospect has not responded to past outreach attempts. Therefore overall lead development rep productivity overall suffers with higher call counts to the same prospects. Of course, this assumes that they have other leads to call (a topic for lead flow discussion).

Once the lead development rep has made contact, updating the qualification criteria is imperative. The updating requirements may include size of organization, industry, computer standards, software standards, number of offices, and other key information. These will be useful to both the sales reps for those that are later qualified but also to the marketing organization to learn more about the prospect characteristics coming from their lead generation programs.

My general preference is for pick list values to make updates fast and to make database mining more effective. Ideally, the lead development rep can update key aspects of a lead in less than 60 seconds by using pick lists and a limited set of fields – possibly up to five or six fields.

Lesson: Defining a minimum set of pick list field updates will actually make your entire lead qualification process more efficient by making lead development representative follow-up more productive.

Sales Productivity versus Efficiency — Enforcing Sales Discipline

Challenge: Sales reps want to sell more and updating their SFA systems is frequently not a top priority.

Lesson: The argument ‘I don’t have time to update all this in SFA’ rings hollow.

Challenge: Sales reps want to sell more and updating their SFA systems is frequently not a top priority.

Lord Kelvin said: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Nowhere is this truer than in enforcing SFA utilization. It is easy for reps to complain about this as useless overhead. However, I would argue that they cannot effectively do their job without religious follow up to records in their systems.

An organization needs to set minimal expectations on the frequency and depth of updates. Clearly, lead development reps must update last call attempt, number of call attempts, last call outcome, scheduling next activity, key account details, and so on, or they cannot guarantee the right follow up with these prospects. Similarly, sales reps need to update opportunity records to accurately forecast their sales this month and beyond.

Furthermore, sales and marketing management personnel need these details to actively manage the business. Identifying average sales cycles, win/loss reporting, and more all require relatively deep updates by the reps to SFA systems. In this new Sales 2.0 world, updates to SFA are a job requirement – both for the rep and for management. You cannot run a business without accurate and up to date in information in SFA systems.

Lesson: The argument ‘I don’t have time to update all this in SFA’ rings hollow.