One of the most common struggles between sales and marketing is seeing eye to eye on defining and measuring marketing influence on revenue and pipeline. In many organizations, marketing runs a campaign in their marketing automation system, and then the leads get tossed over the proverbial wall into Salesforce for the sales team to follow up on. This inevitably causes marketing to struggle with gaining visibility into the quality of their leads and the true ROI of their campaign efforts.
To achieve sales and marketing alignment, build trust, and measure accurate ROI, both teams need access to the same campaign performance data, as well as an agreed-upon weighting of each marketing program’s influence on all sales pipeline and revenue. By tracking campaign influence in Salesforce, marketing gets better ROI metrics and can better optimize its budget, while sales can work with marketing to run campaigns that generate more higher-quality prospects.
Here are five easy steps to drive adoption of campaign influence, so you can align sales and marketing in your company:
- Familiarize yourself with campaign influence and commonly used influence models
In my last blog post, I discussed some common campaign influence models. To sum it up, the most commonly used models are single touch (first/last) or multi-touch even spread models. However, these models fall short in providing insight into which campaigns have had the greatest influence on an opportunity, or overall revenue. Single touch models, especially, often provide incomplete or inaccurate data. Using weighted influence models provides more insight into campaign performance, as it allows for custom weighting of campaign criteria, such as touch (first, last, etc.) and contact roles (decision maker, purchaser, intern, etc.). For example, you could give the first touch campaign a weight of two, and all other campaign touches a weight of one, if you feel that the first touch in the campaign is twice as important as subsequent touches.
- Socialize the concept of campaign influence with the sales and executive teams
Once you’ve educated yourself about campaign influence, the next step is educating others in your organization. The best place to start is with the key stakeholders in your company outside of marketing, sales, and the executive team. Make sure there is a clear understanding of the current campaign performance methodology being used. This is key because it allows the stakeholders to visually understand the shortcomings of the past campaign performance measurement that either captured incomplete or inaccurate data and lead to poor decision making. The key here is making sure that everyone understands that tracking influence helps companies get more out of their current marketing budgets and can potentially increase revenue without increasing costs.
- Determine which influence models provides the most benefit for your organization
Every organization is unique in the marketing strategy and selling process it uses; therefore, each organization requires unique influence criteria that can be weighted differently. For example, younger organizations, or those with shorter sales cycles, may be more focused on what sourced the deal and choose to weight the first campaign touch more heavily. Conversely, larger enterprises, or companies with longer sales cycles, may be more interested in what drove opportunity creation and weight the tipping point campaign more so than the first or last touch. Or you could weight campaigns that touch certain contact roles more heavily (i.e. a campaign that an executive interacts with is weighted heavier).
Figuring out the campaign influence models that work for your company is a conversation that should be had with all the stakeholders to ensure organization wide buy in. Once you have had these models in place for some time, you can move on from single touch models and only run multi-touch models to ensure every campaign gets some sort of credit.
- Setup influence dashboards that sales, marketing, and the executive team can easily consume
The best place to track and measure campaign influence is in CRM. Not only is this the place where all your revenue and pipeline data is stored, but it is where the sales and executive teams are looking at metrics. This provides one source of truth for sales and marketing and ensure that there is always exact alignment between the numbers that each department reports on; enabling both teams to have constructive conversations about which campaigns to run, which campaigns are working, and exactly how marketing contributes to pipeline and revenue.
- Keep the campaign measurement process organic
Tracking influence (and most other key marketing metrics) is not something that can just be set once and left alone. With sophisticated metrics like campaign influence, it is especially important to make sure that you are continuing to discuss the data and insights gleaned from your different influence models. Talk to the sales and executive teams regularly — it may make sense to refine your influence models or revisit your SAL definitions as you learn more insights about campaign performance. Your business won’t remain static so you need to make sure that how you track campaign influence evolves with your business needs.
If you have any questions about tracking weighted campaign influence in Salesforce please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our experts.
