Key Insights from this session:
- The importance of campaign naming conventions and member status values and why they matter
- Campaign planning in Pardot and Salesforce with influence reporting in mind
- Campaign influence models in Salesforce: What they are, how they work
- Demonstrate the Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities report type in Salesforce
- Demonstrate how the data can be used in a Salesforce dashboard to illustrate influence on open and closed opportunities
Some of the things that we’re going to be talking through today are campaign naming conventions in Salesforce, member statuses, campaign influence, building reports in Salesforce to be able to demonstrate that campaign influence, and also some cool features that come from the campaigns. While this is largely going to be about the more traditional ways of measuring campaign influence using the campaign object and campaign member statuses, there will be some information around the kind of the campaigns.
Naming Conventions
The first item to touch on is the concept of naming conventions on Salesforce. That’s something that sometimes will get overlooked, like in several Salesforce instances where there’s not really a lot of emphasis put on how things are named in the campaign object. They will say “email campaign” or “video campaign from 2020” something very nonspecific, but to be able to do a campaign influence in a way that makes sense, you should have a campaign naming convention methodology. When you’re building reports later, you’re going to want to be able to leverage those naming conventions to build reports.
Depending on how long your campaign is, and how many stages there are, such as with a multiple drip campaign, you could have a really long accordion style campaign, a hierarchy, or your core could be more compact. It really depends on how granular you need to be with your data and your reporting and what your leadership prefers. Naming conventions are very important for being able to build reports and to be able to key off of and identify specific campaigns for your reporting.
Campaign Asset Planning
That flows into the next topic: when you are doing campaign planning, think about your campaign asset planning. In terms of Pardot, think about your campaign asset planning in terms of the things that people are going to take action on.
Think about what you want to be able to record as a campaign member in Salesforce, and how you would do that using completion actions in Pardot. You can do things through the current email process, where you can trigger a campaign, and add to the campaign if someone opens an email or clicks an email. If you have custom redirects, you want to be able to plan this out as much as possible because by planning your campaign out here, you also will then be able to plan the larger hierarchy in Salesforce.
As you build out your, for example, your four stage drip campaign with four emails, two PDFs, four forms, two unique landing pages and four custom redirects. If you want to measure off of those and be able to include those in your campaign reporting, then you’re going to need to map that out in Pardot and then also be able to then map that out in Salesforce. Then you can connect those dots for reporting later, because when you go to the landing page or the PDF and add to the campaign, you have to have that campaign available in Salesforce to be able to add that campaign to that asset.
Absolute planning has to happen across both platforms here. Ultimately, it’s about what it is that you would consider an influential activity. If clicking a custom redirect doesn’t really move the needle for you as an organization around engagement, then you may decide that that’s not what you want to measure. Recording that as a campaign activity doesn’t really matter that much and that’s fine. You need to decide what is and is not considered influential.
Campaign Member Status
The next side of this is when you are doing your campaign planning, you have your campaign blade out in Pardot, and you’ve got the corresponding in Salesforce. Campaign member status values become incredibly important, because they illustrate the action that was taken, which says someone needs to be added to your campaign. An example of this would be if someone completed a contact form, downloaded white paper, registered for a webinar, completed a white paper form, clicked a link.
These are things that you’ll be able to then look at when you’re building reporting. They’re a member of your campaign, so that is an indicator for sales that they’re engaged with you. Later on, if this person becomes part of the opportunity, you’re then able to identify what the action was and what the campaign membership action was that pushed them into this campaign as they’re negotiating this opportunity.
Be consistent in your name and conventions. I’ve seen orgs where no one really kept a lock on how and who was creating member status values for the campaigns. As a result, they had 500 campaign member status values and they had 10 different ways of saying completing. That becomes problematic for you if you are trying to do a kind of a wider view of your reporting, and you have to then think of every variation of a completed contact form that someone could have thought of.
Let’s say you joined a company a year ago, but you need to identify in your report everyone who has filled out a form over the last two years. You know what you’ve been putting in there for one year, but the year prior, there could have been four to five different people in there. Now you have to consider every variation of that completed contact form so that nothing falls through the cracks when you’re doing larger reporting. There is an object that lets you view all the different member status values in Salesforce. It is possible to see all the different statuses that people have created over time, and it can sometimes be a little eye opening and a little scary.
Within Salesforce, a “responded” is everything, it implies an action. You create all these custom member status values based on it. But if you don’t, you could also say that they equally responded. Then Salesforce doesn’t see it as being an action that they need to keep and that they need to configure influence to be able to determine if it’s either responded or not. If it’s not responded, then Salesforce doesn’t see it as being a true action that someone took.
Convention Models
Now that we’ve gotten through all the campaigns, mini conventions are important too. Here is the actual influence side of this. If you have Pardot, you have the ability to enable more influenced models versus the standard. There are four influenced models that are available out of the box. The last three are where you have some opportunity to toggle.
- Primary campaign source model, which puts 100% of the influence, gives 100% of the influence, and 100% of the revenue share to whatever is listed to the primary campaign.
- Even distribution model, what this will do is for example, if you have four different campaigns that have a contact role. There’s a contact role in the opportunity and this person is a part of four different campaigns. Even distribution will say, okay, John Smith is a part of these four different campaigns he’s also a contact role in this opportunity for $100,000. It is going to evenly distribute the $100,000 amongst those four different campaigns. Everybody gets the same amount of influence, everybody gets their, everyone gets equal ranking.
- Last touch model gives 100% of the influence and revenue to the last campaign that the prospect touches before a deal closes. It doesn’t matter if that person converted on a campaign a year ago and then they came through. Whatever that last thing was, that they did before it closes gets 100% of the attribution, 100% of the influence, 100% of the revenue.
- The first touch model is kind of the inverse. This person could come through, which is known as the first touch, but then they also do twenty other things. Those other things are not going to matter once they have closed, it’s going to be whatever that first campaign was that they were a part of that is going to get all the influence and all of the revenue.
To learn more about Salesforce campaigns and see some visual examples, watch the video above.
