In the complex world of Salesforce marketing, revenue attribution is a critical process for demonstrating marketing's impact on the bottom line. However, it's filled with potential points of failure that can skew your data and mislead your decision-making. Understanding these points of failure is essential for maintaining the integrity of your marketing data.
Here are three common mistakes to watch out for:
One significant error that can occur is when marketing teams fail to implement completion actions or automation rules for all marketing activities. These functions are essential for attributing revenue to specific marketing efforts. Without them, even the most successful campaigns might not be recognized in revenue attribution models built into Salesforce.
Solution: Ensure that every marketing activity, whether it's an email campaign, a webinar, or a download of a white paper, has a completion action or an automation rule set up. This setup should include UTM parameters and precise Salesforce Campaigns that help in identifying which campaigns directly influence leads and conversions. Regular audits of Marketing Cloud/Pardot automation setups can prevent this oversight and dial in the accuracy of your attribution reports.
Completion actions and automation rules need to specifically add prospects to “CRM/Salesforce campaigns” and make sure not to rely on the default settings or the campaign required when building an asset, those are not going to get you attribution reporting, only engagement.
If you have an MQL process that does not send prospects to Salesforce until they reach a certain threshold, keep in mind that these Salesforce attribution steps might not include those campaign influences before being sent to Salesforce.
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A common bottleneck in accurate revenue attribution is the failure of sales teams to properly use the Contact Roles object in Salesforce. This feature is crucial for linking contacts to specific opportunities, which, in turn, helps in tracing revenue back to the correct marketing activities.
Solution: Training and continuous reinforcement of best practices, and automations. Encourage the sales team to consistently attach contacts to opportunities using Contact Roles. This practice not only aids in attribution but also provides a more comprehensive view of customer interactions and relationships, which can lead to more informed sales strategies.
Once those steps are taken care of, create reports to trust, but verify that those actions are happening, the “Opportunities with Contact Roles” report is a good place to start. You can also leverage, contract roles as a required field through a look-up field, and/or a Flow to automatically add contacts to Opportunities based on time windows. There are a couple of moving steps at this stage that require sales/marketing/IT to all work hand in hand to ensure accuracy. This step is critical and included in SalesLabX subscriptions of Professional and higher.
Sales teams not converting leads but rather creating duplicate contacts is a significant hurdle. This duplication can lead to inaccurate reporting and misrepresentation of marketing's influence on generated revenue.
Solution: Implement well-defined processes and training for handling leads, while building automations, and reporting. Ensure that the sales team is equipped with the tools and knowledge to convert leads instead of creating new contacts. Utilizing Salesforce's built-in duplicate management features can help stop some of these issues by alerting users when there's a potential duplicate during the lead conversion process.
If duplicates are a global issue apart from attribution, consider blocking off the ability to create duplicates, after you clearly define what a duplicate is. SalesLabX can assist with both defining and deployment of this if needed.
Building a Culture Around Data Integrity
Just as crucial as the technical solutions are the cultural practices within your organization. Building a culture that values data integrity and understands the nuances of Salesforce can greatly speed up your revenue attribution efforts. Regular training sessions, combined with clear documentation and a shared understanding of the importance of these processes, can align both marketing and sales teams toward common goals. After your culture is aligned, you can also build reports, and automations to ensure that these are followed programmatically.
Conclusion
By addressing these three potential points of failure, organizations can greatly improve the accuracy of their Salesforce marketing revenue attribution. This improvement is not just about better numbers but about gaining genuine insights into how marketing strategies are driving business growth. Remember, the right tools are only as effective as the people who use them; so, continuous education and process refinement are key to gaining end to end visibility of your marketing efforts. Consider a SalesLabX subscription, which covers both the technical aspects of revenue attribution and training.
