Years ago, marketers did not attend Dreamforce. But now more than ever, marketing must be involved in conversations about Salesforce. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer; 91% of Salesforce customers say that marketing has a strong executive voice. And with that, marketers are involved in more of the customer journey than ever before — 64% of marketers spend more focus on existing customers than retaining new ones (Source: State of Salesforce). But the right tools are lacking for marketers to clearly and accurately measuring all their efforts.

Bluewolf’s Corinne Sklar, Thomas Gaydos, and AJ Bellarosa divulged tips for marketers to start reaping the benefits of Salesforce. Here are my top three takeaways:

Tip 1: Use Contact Roles

Only 29% of marketers are using Contact Roles! How can marketers measure and prove campaign effectiveness on sales ROI if there is no connection between the marketing campaign and sales opportunity? Contact Roles fills this gap, connecting marketing influence to ROI. Make creating opportunities from contact roles a must-do, as it enables better customer engagement for both Sales and Marketing. Opportunities do not come about without a conversation with a person; therefore, hold Sales accountable in documenting who they’re engaging with. Opportunities must be created from the contact level in order to be tracked, so don’t allow them to be created on the account level.

When enforcing use of contact roles in your organization, it’s key to communicate to Sales their WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for adopting this process. Only through this aligned effort can Marketing gain better visibility into individual campaign effectiveness to better inform future decisions and investments.

Tip 2: Cleanse Your Data

If you’re like most marketers, you’d much rather come up with creative marketing tactics than think about data quality. But the fact is that your creative campaigns won’t make an impact or really even get to your customer base if you don’t have clean data. Indeed, 48% of marketers are not confident in the accuracy of their data, but as they take on responsibility of the entire customer lifecycle, they must partner with IT or Sales Ops to align and prioritize these initiatives. Here are four steps to beginning this conversation and initiative across the organization:

• Identify the State of your Data
  
  How many duplicate records do you have? What are the key fields that each team: marketing, sales and service needs to do their job? 
• Normalize Key Fields
  
  What fields can you eliminate or what fields can you standardize for better segmentation and quality? A common normalization is turning the open field Title into the pre-populated fields of Function and Role.
• Implement Data Cleansing Tools
  
  Data cleanliness is not a one time thing, it’s an ongoing project. Get out on the expo floor tomorrow and talk to some of the organizations offering data cleansing tools. This is a fast growing space that is key to evolving your engagement strategy. 
• Create a Data Governance Process
  
  Now that you’ve gotten marketing, sales, and IT speaking to each other, keep that up! Create a group that is responsible for evolving this initiative, along with a cadence of conversation and ownership across all departments.

Tip 3: Put Your SLAs in Salesforce

Search the query “marketing and sales SLAs” and you will find many Excel spreadsheet templates to create this. Although this is a start, this is not sustainable. SLAs must live in Salesforce where sales lives everyday. Marketing and sales must sit together and define agreed upon stages of the funnel  — in order to do so, they must speak the same language. identify a clear definition of MQL, SAL and SQL, as well as the process through your funnel. Then hold everyone accountable to this. Have buy-in from sales management and executive on a escalation process if the SLA is not met. Build a dashboard that shows when these agreements are broken, and develop a feedback loop with sales on the quality of leads. Building visiblity and trust through an demand funnel dashboard, along with SLA dashboard, will automatically align sales and marketing more than ever before.

Want to connect with Corinne, AJ, or Thomas? Tweet @csklar, @jaumeprimero, and @ThomasGaydos respectively. Head to bluewolf.com/df14 for more Dreamforce content and coverage.