Speaker 0: Hello, For those of us for for excuse me. It’s been a long week. For those of you joining us for the first time today, welcome. We’re so excited for you to be joining in on ParDreamin’. My name is Kate Godley, and I work with Sercante. I’m here to introduce you to Eric Moll while he discusses opportunities in Salesforce and why you may be doing it wrong. Welcome, Eric.

Speaker 1: Hey. Thank you so much, Kate, and, uh, welcome, everyone. Um, this, uh, you know, ParDreamin’ is the second time in ParDreamin’. It’s a really exciting time to be here. It looks like everyone’s been having a really good time in the other presentations. Uh, I know we’re towards the finish line of ParDreamin’ now, so we’ll try to have some fun with this presentation. For those that are aware, uh, my name’s Eric. Uh, the last year, we did Leads in Salesforce and why you may be doing it wrong. So this kind of became a series since everybody enjoyed it, and we did Opportunities in Salesforce and, uh, why you may be doing it wrong. So, um, just really quick, going through, uh, quick discussion, uh, as as we were talking about it. My name’s Eric. Uh, I’ve recently stumbled upon parenting, and I have a 16 old daughter, uh, a very jealous dog, and a lot of overdue chores as you can see while I’m trying to do some work. Um, I have been Salesforcing away since, uh, about 2010, uh, doing independent consulting since 2013. I’ve managed to acquire a couple of certifications, uh, during that time and, um, done tons of implementations not only on Salesforce. I’ve done a couple of Pardot implementations, lots of Community Cloud. I’ve been around the block a couple of times. Um, I’m putting QR codes because I think it’s easier nowadays if everyone’s just put their their phone to the link. There will be goodies. Uh, you will actually have some goodies that you can, uh, cash in on, uh, towards the end of this presentation if you stick around. Uh, so, you know, uh, we’ll go from it. But this link will take you to LinkedIn, um, where I’ve started a project called Ohana Elite. You can find out more about it, uh, where we’re looking to build a network of freelancers and, um, independent consultants, uh, not all in the entire Salesforce ecosystem, including Pardot, and we wanna build some, uh, some Pardot representation as well. Um, this is a quick screenshot of last time around during the leads, uh, presentation. So if any of you are joining in, you know, from because of last, uh, year’s presentation, welcome back. So quickly jumping in and talking about it. This is a very simple presentation. There are not a lot of slides into it. Um, we are gonna go over, hopefully, some entertaining stories of what are not opportunities. Uh, I did run a survey in LinkedIn a couple of weeks back, and I feel like we almost broke the Internet, uh, with with all the discussion. Um, we did put the survey. I believe Kate set up the survey, and we do have the survey, uh, for you to fill in. And it’s the same one that everyone else filled out. I’ll share the results. I’m curious to see what you think, uh, before we start. So make sure to, you know, put some comments in there, put some questions, uh, fill in your polls. Uh, I want this to be as interactive as possible and try to have some time left over for us to have some conversations before we wrap it up, and you guys can go check out the awesome keynote, uh, that follows. So we’ll do some opportunity, uh, review. We’re gonna talk a little bit about what, uh, opportunities actually are and how to best use them. We’ll talk about some best practices on field mappings. This is all gonna tie in with regards to Pardot. You are going to by the time you’re done here, you’re gonna learn how to accurately track your opportunities, not only in Salesforce but in Pardot. Uh, hopefully, we can learn through some of the others’ mistakes, uh, that I’ve encountered throughout my years in consulting. And we’re gonna talk about MQLs and SQLs and how all of that plays an important role, not only in Salesforce but in Pardot. And like I mentioned, you know, if you’d like if you have your phones ready and you can get the QR codes, you’ll be able to get the unmanaged packages that will make your life super, super sweet. So, um, Kate, if we can, uh, bring the presentation down. Um, basically, I wanna talk to you guys. I wanna share one of the first stories about opportunities. And, uh, this was a company at the time that was struggling with their Salesforce implementation. They had Pardot, and, uh, they just their technical team or their executive team couldn’t really come together and, um, and agree on what they, uh, how to properly use opportunities. And one of the interesting things was that they were, uh, creating, uh, opportunities, uh, as placeholders for companies that they wanted to engage. They were like, look. Here are some of the companies in the, you know, Fortune 500 that we wanna reach out, and we want to be able to, uh, you know, have our we wanna be able to track all of our activities with them. And what they were doing is that they were creating all of these opportunities. This was before, uh, I found out because once they reached out to me, they were basically saying, listen. You know, when there are problems that are reporting sucks. As soon as I saw that, I was like, oh my god. You have all of these opportunities. Like, your your your opportunity pipeline is ridiculous. Your close rates are completely out of this world. You have opportunities that are open for three, four years because you never got your foot in the door. Right? People were just creating opportunities for the sake of basically, uh, just not forgetting that these were the opportunities that they wanted to follow-up with. And this was creating so much confusion and chaos because, you know, they were not understanding why their sales cycle were years longer than their average sales cycle. They couldn’t do any reporting on that. Their their pipelines were inflated because people were saying, yeah. If we lock in this deal, that will we never spoke with this company. It would be worth, you know, $5,000,000. And they would put the $5,000,000 in the opportunity amount, and everything would just, you know, inflate your pipeline if you’re trying to run those, um, those opportunities. And they were just really having a hard time and struggling. So it was really, really interesting because, you know, like, they were it took us a while before we got them into understanding a process to say, listen. You know, an opportunity is not a placeholder for you to say, I just because I wanna do business with them. Right? They meet the criteria. There’s someone we wanna do business with. That’s more of a marketing qualified lead, which is perfectly fine, but there’s a place to track all of that information. You don’t necessarily have, uh, a sales qualified lead yet because they haven’t shown interest in it. And so that was one of the interesting stories, and it took us a little while to to go through it. But it it it was a very polarizing subject because one of the things that we had to figure out was, you know, when should you create an opportunity? There was a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion, and that was what the survey was about is, you know, if you want to be able to track companies you want to, uh, to address, then, um, you know, what do you do? And the survey and I’m curious to see what the results will be. Um, but the survey that we ran on LinkedIn, we had a 160 people on my network that vote, um, on my LinkedIn network that voted, and I think we had about a 160 comments too because it generated a lot of conversation. But 84% of the people that voted in basically stated that, no, you should never create an opportunity, uh, for someone who has not yet shown interest in what your services are. So it was really, really interesting one and, um, you know, kind of lead me to my to my second story for a second here, which is, um, you know, a lot of companies that were, uh, basically, um, there was another company that we got involved in and and we’re trying to work with. And one of the big challenges that they had was that, again, the reporting and opportunities was all coming in, um, you know, uh, irrelevant. Let’s just say, they just couldn’t trust their data, which is something that happens commonly. And one of the big things that we were looking at was that this was a company that offered a lot of different packages to, uh, prospects. Prospects could literally pick and choose different packages, and it was very common that they would offer five or diff uh, five or six different options in packages in what could be done. And the way the companies, uh, this company was managing that in Salesforce or sales and account executives were managing this in Salesforce was that they were creating different opportunities for these packages. But the reality of it is if they had a, you know, $10,000 opportunity, they were creating five opportunities of, you know, $1,012,000 here, 8,000 there, 10,000 there. So the pipeline looked like it was $50,000 because you had all of these opportunities, and then they would close all of the other ones that didn’t go through. So, um, you know, it was, uh, something that was that that was really interesting. We had to work a lot with them to say, listen. There are functionalities and opportunities like quotes. And we won’t have time today to talk about quotes, but the fact is that an opportunity is one opportunity that you should be tracking. So we’ll talk a little bit now about opportunities. Um, and before we, uh, go, uh, I’ll share back my screen so that way we can go in. And funny enough, uh, I don’t have a way to present the, uh, the results, but it was very close. Out of everyone that voted here, 80.4%, uh, so, you know, 80%, rounding down, said no, uh, just like the survey did, and 17% said yes. So, uh, I’m not sure how oh, no. 19.6%. Sorry. So 20% said, uh, yes. So you can see the numbers are are are very close, and there is some conversation on that. But if you look at it and, you know, go coming back to the slides, anyone that saw last year’s presentation is very familiar with this slide. Um, you know, talking a little bit about, you know, last year’s presentation, we’re talking about leads and marketing qualified leads. The definition of a marketing qualified lead in a very simple format is basically saying, do I know whether it’s tomorrow or ten years from now that I want to do business with this company? From the second that I I know I wanna do business with them. Right? Short of me changing what my business offering, uh, is entirely, this person is qualified because they’re in the right industry, they’re in the right region, they have the right number of they’re the right company size, uh, whatever the case may be. You know, I wanna do business with them. I know that now. You know? So whether they’re interested tomorrow, ten years from now, we’re ready. And that’s your marketing qualified lead. If we’re talking about Pardot, that’s really where your Pardot grade comes in because that’s information that you can try to find either by publicly available data or, uh, or or paid databases to try to gather information and and grade your Pardot prospects and, you know, your, um, both in Salesforce and and Pardot to be able to understand, hey. We wanna do something with them. But the idea of a sales qualified lead, right, um, should only be when they have shown interest back in you. And it’s a really interesting conversation and maybe can lead on to, uh, to to different presentations in the future. But in almost every single use case that I’ve come across, you, um, you should not have an opportunity before you have uh, some sort of interest or active conversation going on with them. It’s just something that it’s it’s a really big, um, uh, challenge that companies come across because they have a lot of issues with reporting. And if we’re talking about, um, you know, a sales qualified lead and tracking your opportunities, one of the biggest challenges that you have in the database, if you look at it on here, is that in Salesforce under under where, you know, you have, you know, a lead that becomes an account where type equals prospect, and then you have an opportunity. And the whole time in Pardot, it’s you’re talking about a prospect. And one of the big challenges with that is that both databases, Pardot and Salesforce, were fundamentally built differently because one is looking at a contact versus the other that is looking at the at a company, at the account level. So everyone here or I would assume most here would know that some of the big challenges that you have are basically being able to tie, right, these, uh, opportunities that are naturally tied to accounts. How do you tie them to Pardot? And the the the answer, for those who know, is contact roles. In Salesforce, you have the contact roles related list, which is probably by far one of the least utilized functionalities in Salesforce. And you almost can’t fault, uh, the salespeople because one, salespeople have a really hard time with adoption. Two, it doesn’t make a difference for them for from their end. So why are or why are they gonna do it? And three, not only to to fault user adoption and some of the end users, but a lot of times, executives have a hard time explaining the value of contact roles and why that should be there. And even if they could and the salesperson agrees that they should use contact roles, you know, one of the big challenges with what happens is that there’s no requirement to it. And it’s it’s out of the box. You can’t just write a validation rule to say, hey. Make contact roles required, um, because it’s it’s a it’s a related object. It’s outside of the opportunities. And, um, if everyone’s interested or if everyone’s curious, right, by this point, we’re talking about making sure that we have opportunities at the right time. Right? Not tracking opportunities that don’t exist and put them in as placeholders. We talked about not duplicating your opportunities because there’s multiple items. And now we’re talking about contact roles. And why that’s important from a Pardot perspective is because of items like your life cycle report. You want to be able to, uh, accurately track your, um, the your pipeline. Right? You have items like your your life cycle here, um, and be able to properly track, right, how much sales qualified. And you can even see nothing that I’m saying. I can’t take credit for this, guys. I’m not I’m I have not invented MQL SQL. This is not something that I’ve you know, I’m just going with the flow here. But you can see that the sales qualified lead are all the opportunities that you’ve generated. Right? You see here new opportunities, sales qualified leads, and you can track that accurately by, uh, on your life cycle reports by being able to have your contact rules. So it may not come as something new to say, hey. Track your contact roles. But how do we do that? Now, you know, you see the QR code. You see the link at the bottom. One of the big things that we’ve done, uh, to be able to help some customers, and we offer it to everyone here at ParDreamin’ today, is an unmanaged package that essentially constitutes of, um, a Flow and some validation rules for, uh, that essentially has a count of contact roles at the opportunity level. So as you add in contact roles, it starts adding in. There’s there’s a breakdown. If you follow the link, if you if you use your phone to take a photo of the the screen that you’re watching this in, you can follow you can follow along. But the the the idea the goal behind what we’re doing with this is to be able to offer you, uh, a good ability to, uh, not require right away, but require it at a certain point. And because it’s an unmanaged package, you have the ability to just make simple tweaks to the to the validation rule. And right now, it’s based on the probability. So you can, uh, I think the default value is 10%. So in the opportunity, many of you may be aware that you have the the, uh, opportunity stages, and every opportunity stage has a probability. All we did was that we put a rule to say, hey. If this opportunity is not brand new, we’re not gonna create an error if it’s brand new. We’ll give you the ability to, you know, play around with it before forcing you to edit. And once you go past a certain stage, great. We understand you’re moving along. By this time, we need at least one contact in there to establish that relationship and connect once and for all your opportunity to the the Pardot, um, you know, database. That way, you guys can all benefit. Right? Whether it’s, you know, just something that someone innocently forgot and they’re just getting a reminder right then and there, or if it’s something that, you know, they generally, you know, just don’t wanna do and we’re saying, hey. This is for the greater good here. We all gotta get in in line with this, um, while not being terribly intrusive. Right? Not saying, like, you know, hey. From the get go, you cannot create an opportunity without a contact role and so forth. So there are some instructions. This it’s a blog post, and in there, you’ll find the links to install it both in production and in sandbox, uh, along with the YouTube video walk through of setting it up. The the video, I think, is less than five minutes long. So, uh, hopefully, you guys enjoy that, and hopefully, you guys can can make some good benefit on it. Um, you know, but coming back to it and talking about, you know, some of the some of the different, uh, concepts here. Right? Uh, I’m I’m gonna talk we talked about opportunities in the beginning, right, and what’s not opportunities and when it shouldn’t be an opportunity. But one of the things that it was really interesting, and this leads me to my final story, um, is the last opport uh, you know, when should opportunities be closed? And it sounds almost obvious, but it’s not always the case. Um, and one of the big things that one of the funny stories that I came across during my time in consulting was an organization that was tracking their opportunities. And once the opportunity was what we all consider closed, won, they got the customer. The opportunity wasn’t done there, and they had a variety of stages. And I can’t obviously, I can’t share a screenshot of this. Uh, I should almost create it in a in a dev org just to share. But they had, um, multiple stages like closed won. Like, I’m just gonna say closed won step one, closed won step two, closed won step three. And I’m not talking about this as, like, oh, this is just, you know, some paperwork steps that we have to do to make sure we finalize everything. This is, like, customers that are active customers and have been with them for five plus years, and they are still managing all of their information in the opportunity. And this was really interesting because it started creating a lot of issues from a Pardot perspective. Yes, that, uh, you get your you know, if you get your contact roles in, you get everything in, and it it shows on the report to some extent. But the problem is, you know, if you wanna upsell, if you wanna sell something else to them, um, they were they were managing it all under the same opportunity and not creating a new one. So their pipeline was looking off by time periods because if they sold something today to that customer from five years ago, the close date was either five years ago. So the opportunity amount from an opportunity five years ago was going up, and that’s messing up all of your numbers back there. Or they were just updating the close date to today, and then suddenly, like, a $50,000 upsell on a million dollar project would just be a million and $50,000 all out of the sudden. But the reality of it, it was just it’s a $50,000 upsell, and that was as simple as that. But a lot of people tend to want to continue to use opportunities because it’s simpler. It stays all on the same tab. Everything’s there. So there are a lot of, uh, interesting practices out there that we can talk about it in a different presentation. But the bottom line is that if your, uh, once you have a contract signed, right, your your job and the opportunity is done. Right? Anything else that comes after that, right, um, is, you know, is a new opportunity. At the same time that if an opportunity is closed lost, if if, uh, even if they say, hey, you know, we don’t have the budget for it right now. Like, our budget got cut. You know? Like, we’ll circle back around in the new fiscal year, which is three months away. Um, okay. Great. That’s a closed lost opportunity that should not be considered an ongoing opportunity still because the opportunity age counter keeps counting, and it affects your reports on how long it takes you to close because in reality is that there’s nothing to do for that opportunity for three months. So you close it. You put a close reason saying, hey. No budget or whatever the case may be, and you can create a new opportunity for now three months ahead to be able to better track your opportunity, understand your average values way better, understand your ages way better, and be able to tie back to Pardot and understand what is really making a difference with regards to your your prospect’s score, uh, which is all based on the types of activities that they’re doing and give you a better visibility that way. So that is basically the overview with the with the time that we have. I wanted to leave some time up for, uh, for questions and answers. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Um, I really have a lot of fun at ParDreamin’. I think they do an awesome, uh, job here. Um, but, uh, all said and done, uh, thank you to everyone. Thank you to our sponsors. And, uh, and then we, you know, Kate, I’ll I think I’ll pass it back to you to to try to go over some, uh, some questions here.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric. That was an amazing session. A lot of the comments here are talking about how helpful this session has been, how gratifying it is to hear this information, and kind of confirm that the way you are talking about opportunities is in line with the way people have been thinking they need to manage their opportunities overall. I do have a question here from Brian McFarland who asks, how do you convince an organization to use contact roles if they are reluctant?

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so, one, it depends on the audience. Right? I think the if you’re talking to an executive is that the the easiest argument is, you know, you really have to know, uh, where where your money is going and and where your opportunities are going well. So for if you’re not talking about product, you know, just the ability to understand who are you talking to. Are we talking often to decision makers versus versus, you know, just the random, you know, like, um, people that are not adding value to it? Can we track those items? That you know, if you can start running reports on it and see close ratios by how often decision makers have been engaged, that’s a big plus. From a Pardot perspective, once you have the contact roles, one, you have the benefit of syncing everything. So, you know, if you’re the CEO, just think about your marketing person not busting your, you know, your your boss for for, um, for not having numbers from the sales side. Um, but, uh, for one, you’re connecting the databases there. And then, two, you’re you’re enabling the marketing team to have a better idea of what’s working or not working for them to be able to adjust their marketing activities accordingly. So from an executive side, that’s the big piece. From from a end user side, you know, it it’s tough to be able to sell them because it it may not influence them directly. Um, You know, the the big piece here is that you have to be able to under like, at most, you have to say, look. This is something you’re doing for the team. We’re trying to make this unintrusive. The unmanaged package that we include there in the QR code will hopefully make it as easy as possible for them to transition. But the long term view of it is that if the company can really apply themselves to understanding what’s working versus not working by the use of contact rules, then you could technically even gauge the, uh, the the success rate. And, uh, a very simple thing that I’ll just put here kinda, like, put that seed in everybody’s head is that you could very easily, uh, just do an Einstein Prediction Builder, you which should get one free, uh, in Salesforce on the opportunity, and try to make predictions based on the number of contact roles involved, which is the field in our unmanaged package. And then, you know, Salesforce will start calculating all of your closed won and closed lost and be able to give them description saying, hey. You know, your opportunity may in possibility of of closure if you, um, if you add someone, if you if the contact role goes from zero to one or from one to two, whatever the case may be.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I think that’s a conversation that we’ve had a lot, uh, in the background at Circante is how do you convince salespeople to do things that are gonna help the marketing team. And I think the the general consensus has always been try and find a way to prove that it is going to help their sales dollars in the long run. Um, but Yeah. That is

Speaker 1: go ahead. I’ll add one piece to that. Um, there’s I think there’s a book called The Challenger Customer, and they talk a lot about you know, this is a very sales tactic y, but, uh, it can apply on the consulting side as well is that, you know, ultimately getting sales users to use contact roles, you need someone from within to be that stakeholder. Right? A consultant’s only there for the length of a project. So the second if anyone here is listening as a consultant, the second you’re done with your project, you’re going away. So just because you told the salesperson that’s what they need to do, it’s a they’re not gonna stick around unless there is a key champion. Right? Uh, and this won’t be a CEO because the CEO is not gonna be looking at whether you add a contact role or not. It has to be someone that takes ownership of the Salesforce org and environment and and is constantly reviewing and and, you know, promoting best practices in the in the database.

Speaker 0: Yep. Alright. So that concludes our session for today. Thank you all again for joining us, and a special shout out to our sponsors. We really thank them for their support. Without them, ParDreamin’ would not be possible. I know we’re at the tail end of ParDreamin’ already, but if you haven’t had a chance to, go ahead and stop by those sponsor booths. Make sure you understand what they do. Show them some love, and get some points to win some cool prizes. I hope you all have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you at the keynote in a couple minutes.

Speaker 1: Go check out that keynote, guys. Have a good one, everyone.

Speaker 0: Bye.

Speaker 1: Alright.