Bluewolf - Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes: The Making of The State of Salesforce Report

Michael Tauscher — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 03:21:27 +0000

The State of Salesforce is the focal point of the year for our corporate marketing team, representing the culmination of months of planning, data analysis, design, and promotion.

In this edition of our Behind the Scenes series, we take a look at how we constructed this year's survey, the design process, and our strategy for promoting the report across all of our channels.

Creating the Survey

Before we decide which questions will make the final cut for The State of Salesforce, we create a positioning survey asking our executives and consultants what they're seeing in the field.

Questions like "What do your clients want?" and "What should your clients do right now?" give us a big picture view of what the most common pain points are, how companies are choosing to address them, and how existing solutions could be improved.

In addition to the responses we get from our consultants, we also keep in mind any big changes to Salesforce from the past year that were likely to impact users.

"We knew that survey takers would have new things to tell us about Analytics Cloud, governance, and the end user experience, so we came up with questions that targeted the areas of Salesforce undergoing the most change."

– Jonathan Staley, Product Marketing Manager

Once we have a blueprint for which topics to cover, we craft the survey to be as concise as possible while still accounting for each type of user. To accomplish this, we include questions like "What are your top three objectives for the coming year?" and "Which task do you do most frequently in Salesforce?".

Building The State of Salesforce in Clicktools

Analysis and Design

With the survey data in hand (and there's lots of it—over 1,500 responses from all around the world), we start looking for stand-out trends, large year-over-year changes, and correlation between questions.

Statistics that are particularly interesting get pulled into designs, and the report starts to take shape as sections are built, moved, combined, and reorganized to present the report's insights in a clear, visually appealing style.

To make it easy for everyone to see the most up-to-date version of the report at a glance, the design team continuously updates an entire wall of the office with printouts of each page in its latest form. This is where most of the discussion about copy and graphics takes place, and where we hold meetings to bounce ideas around about what could change.

The State of Salesforce design wall

Cross-Channel Promotion

While the report's layout comes together, we consider how to promote the survey across our channels to start building momentum.

Using a calendar grid sketched out on another wall of the office, we're able to see all of our active campaigns from each channel's point of view, as well as the overall plan for the weeks and months leading up to the release of the report.

Our main goals are to keep our messaging and visual feel consistent while providing relevant content to email, social, and event audiences. This often means balancing the needs of multiple campaigns to make sure we're not sending too much of the same thing to someone's inbox, or posting too much similar content on social networks.

By keeping a shared calendar of all upcoming channel communications, we're able to quickly adapt our plans without worrying about potential conflicts with other campaigns.

An early draft of our cross-channel campaign calendar

Reserve your advance copy of The State of Salesforce today, and subscribe to our blog to be notified when new Behind the Scenes posts are published.

Have ideas for how we could improve The State of Salesforce? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @Bluewolf.

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Behind the Scenes: How Bluewolf Tracks Campaign Influence

Bel Gu — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 23:39:57 +0000

Actionable analytics are indispensable for an effective marketing team. At Bluewolf, we hold a meeting called "Metric Mondays" every — you guessed it — Monday, during which we discuss our lead funnel and examine metrics related to each stage, including conversions of marketing-driven inquiries to opportunities. We’ve been able to track our inquires all the way through the funnel to gain visibility into our top performing campaigns, and, in turn, better inform our future marketing investments. Our CRM (Salesforce) is a key part of this puzzle, as it gives us visibility into campaign attribution. Below are our top recommendations for implementing campaign influence tracking in your organization:

Create campaigns in Salesforce.

Each campaign owner must create a dedicated campaign for each marketing channel. We use a parent-child campaign hierarchy to nest channel campaigns under an umbrella campaign, which is usually a consolidated effort around an asset launch or major event. We also use a “type” picklist on campaigns to be able report on effectiveness by channel type. See an example of our set-up below. While this may seem like a lot of effort, it’s the best way to get an apples-to-apples comparison of channel effectiveness and will help you create a business case for marketing spend.
Pass campaign IDs via query strings.

For each promotional channel, we use a unique URL that passes the related campaign ID via a query string. We still only need one landing page (with a form) for each campaign, but the campaign ID in the URL overrides the campaign ID in the form so that each form fill gets associated to the correct channel campaign in Salesforce.
Use Contact Roles on Opportunities.

Using Contact Roles on Opportunities is critical to close the loop. We ask that our Sales organization add all contacts involved in an Opportunity to the “Contact Roles” related list.
Track campaign influence on Opportunities.

Native Salesforce functionality will pull the campaigns from the Contact Roles into the Campaign Influence section on the Opportunity. You can customize your Campaign Influence settings per your sales cycle length, business process, or other criteria to determine which Campaigns get added. At Bluewolf, we use Campaigns that have the status of “Responded,” 180 days from when the Contact Role is added to the Opportunity.
Create campaign influence Models.

This requires a blog post of its own, but native Salesforce Campaign Influence is fairly limited in its abilities. The Salesforce Campaign Influence reports basically take the entire dollar value of the Opportunity and give the full value to each campaign associated to the Opportunity. This is challenging because the reporting of Campaign Influence dollar value is inflated due to double counting. Luckily, there are several apps that solve this problem. At Bluewolf, we use Full Circle CRM for campaign influence reporting. Full Circle allows you to create three different attribution models based on your business process to report on campaign influence per model.

Full Circle has been effective for us because it allows a lot of customization. You can enable it to pull in “first campaign touch” if you want a sense of how marketing first brought the account into CRM. You can also change the weighting distribution based on Contact Role type, Campaign type, timing, and so forth.
Give visibility with dashboards.

The best way to give visibility of Marketing campaign attribution is via a dashboard. We have several dashboards set up that report on on attribution by campaign name, campaign type, etc. This is a good high-level view and supplements our weekly metrics meeting that I mentioned above.

I hope our team's process has provided your marketing team actionable steps to measure and report on campaign influence. Interested in learning more about attribution and proving marketing ROI? Get in touch, or tweet me @Saleemaf.

Look out for upcoming blogs in this series to go behind the scenes for an in-depth look at our marketing team's process and initiatives. Subscribe to receive updates directly in your inbox.

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Behind the Scenes: How To Build & Optimize Lead Scoring Programs

Bel Gu — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 17:47:37 +0000

This month, we are showcasing how lead scoring has improved our sales and marketing efforts. We'll also provide tactical steps to launch and optimize lead scoring in your organization.

Bluewolf’s lead scoring program has increased sales productivity by bringing the hottest leads to the forefront, and has increased marketing ROI in the campaigns that matter most. This program is updated regularly to align with our focus.

Here are four steps to build and optimize lead scoring.

Step 1: Align Sales and Marketing.

We know Sales and Marketing alignment is a persistent challenge for many organizations, but it's absolutely critical — without achieving this, all of your efforts could go to waste. Sales and Marketing stakeholders must meet and define the objectives of the project. Sales follow-up should align with the scoring process. Address the following questions:

Who is your buyer?
How will the Sales team’s day-to-day efforts be affected by lead scoring?
How will we track activities and handle accountability for these activities?
Who will communicate these changes to the teams involved?
How can we incorporate feedback into the model?

Step 2: Understand your buyer.

To effectively flag your hottest leads, you must first understand who is buying your product or service. It is important to dig into the data before making any assumptions.

Your buyer can be defined by two types of data points: profile data (contact and company attributes) and engagement data (contact and company actions). To understand your buyer’s profile data, run reports to find out who is buying your product: What is their role at their company? Are there commonalities — industry, number of employees, geographical location — in the companies you are selling to?

To understand your buyer’s engagement data, find out if these they are attending your events, visiting specific pages on your website, responding to certain types of campaigns, or submitting specific forms.

Once you’ve defined your buyer profile, you can build out your model. If your company has multiple buyers or products, consider building a scoring model for each.

Step 3: Assign weighting based on buyer profile.

Now that you have a firm grasp of your buyer’s profile data and engagement actions, you can define your scoring model. Start with two to four profile fields and engagement types. The more rules you put in place, the more complicated it is to understand your results and make updates. The chart below gives guidance on assigning weighting to your criteria:

In this example, the most common target buyer is a C-level, VP, or Director at a company with at least 3000 employees in the Transportation, Manufacturing, or Construction industries. Common activities include submitting a contact form on the website, attending your events, clicking through your emails and visiting pages you have deemed important on your website.

Now that your lead scoring program has been defined and built, it’s time to turn it on and put it to use!

Step 4: Read your results and iterate.

It’s important to regularly evaluate and update your lead scoring program to ensure you’re getting maximum value from it. Your sales organizer should provide qualitative feedback, which you should welcome, as they are the ones following up on your efforts! Glean quantitative data by watching your leads travel through the funnel. Establish a cadence for revisiting your scoring criteria on — any change in focus for the company should be reflected in your model.

We hope this blog has provided you with some great tips on how to build or optimize your lead scoring program. Catch up on all the blogs in the series, and subscribe to receive new installments directly in your inbox!

How is lead scoring impacting your sales and marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @Bluewolf.

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Behind the Scenes: Three Campaign Tips for Content Marketers

Bel Gu — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:05:35 +0000

Our marketing team is bringing you a new series to shed light upon our behind the scenes activities and processes. We’re committed to fostering engagement and knowledge sharing the marketing community — each month, we’ll be spotlighting a tool, program, or tactic we’re loving at Bluewolf Marketing HQ. In this first episode, we’re bringing you a sneak peek into how we optimized our marquee asset through content management.

Recently, our marketing team started using a content management tool called Kapost to manage the production of our content and campaigns through a centralized process — from ideation, to production, to reporting. Integrating with other platforms such as Salesforce, LinkedIn, Drupal, Readytalk and more, Kapost has overhauled our entire campaign process. Now everything can live under one roof — giving the entire team visibility into activity in all campaigns, as it happens.

We used Kapost to produce our largest campaign of the year: The State of Salesforce. Now in its third year, this marquee campaign was a bigger effort with more deliverables than ever before. We used three key functionalities in Kapost to optimize the production of this report:

Nest all content under a central campaign.

Within Kapost, you can track your campaigns every step along the way —we were able to label various content pieces under a single campaign. From the main campaign page — in our case, the State of Salesforce — you could click into social tweets, ongoing design for ads, microsite copy, or one-off emails. Under the State of Salesforce campaign, we had 31 content pieces alone! This way, we could not only see the campaign on a larger level, but also every element of the campaign on a granular scale.

The result? We streamlined our core messaging, making it easier to realize the flow of the campaign across different channels.
Organize task ownership and deadline management with optimized system filters.

One of the greatest advantages of using this platform is timeline management. On each specific content piece, we were able to easily assign tasks and deadlines to various owners. Every person on the team could see who was up next to finish their task, allowing them to track the progress of each assignment. Reminder triggers can be sent straight from the platform and dashboards maintain every team member’s task queue. This visibility into daily production tasks allowed us to raise red flags if needed when deadlines were approaching.

The result? There was stricter adherence to deadlines, ultimately putting us ahead of schedule for our launch date.
Customize built-in workflow steps.

Finally, the most unique advantage of this platform is the fully optimizable capabilities of workflow and approval processes. While building out the platform, I was able to optimize workflows to pre-populate based on the content type. Whether we were working on building an email or a datasheet, a workflow would automatically trigger with built in ownership tasks. Therefore, when someone created a social ask for the State of Salesforce, our social coordinator, Bel Gu, was alerted of her upcoming tasks. Likewise, when a product manager requested an email drip campaign, Elizabeth McBain, our database manager, had an email campaign flow automatically appear.

The result? We created a smoother production process, eliminating the need for hand-off emails.

Since we launched the State of Salesforce this year, we’ve already seen greater success than previous years. And this was owed in large part to the way we were able to manage our content. While Kapost was a big part of optimizing our process, it took many iterations of this initial template to get to where we are today. Copy or download then customize it for your own campaign needs.

Look out for upcoming blogs in this series to look behind the scenes at our marketing team's process and initiatives. Subscribe to receive updates directly in your inbox! How does your team manage campaigns? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @Bluewolf.

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