Speaker 0:
This Salesforce reporting session with Sarah Hernandez and Marcus Duran of Sercante. So I’m just gonna let these two dynamos jump right in. We do plan to have time at the end for Q and A, so go ahead and post your questions in the Q and A tab, and we’ll address them later. Thank you. Over to you, Marcus.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. I’m getting ready to share my screen, everybody, so let’s just give it a couple seconds here. Hopefully, it picks up. Good morning, everyone. You are in the session called Salesforce Reporting for Marketing Admins and How to Get Started. That is still showing black for me. Let’s see. There you go. Okay, perfect.
Today, I am joined by Sarah Hernandez, Director of Delivery at Sercante, and I am a Marketing Manager over at Sercante too. Thank you so much for being here. Sarah, is there anything that you wanna tell our audience about you?

Speaker 2:
Sure. I will start with this: if there is ever a hill that I will die on, it’s that reporting and analytics should be at the basis and the foundation of any kind of marketing strategic go-forward decisions you make. So I’m really excited to share this presentation with you guys.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. Alright. Here are socials for both Sarah and myself. Please, please, please add us. And if you have any additional questions, please use the chat and the Q and A. Afterwards, during the presentation, we’ll also toss in the Genius Bar link just in case you haven’t had a chance to sign up for one of those, and then you can always follow up with us on social as well.
Alright. We wanna obviously thank our wonderful sponsors for helping us put this event together. Make sure you check out the sponsors and resources tab after this session.
Alright. Our goal today is simple. Sarah really put it in perfect words, but let’s go ahead and add a little bit more meat to that. In this session, what we’re gonna do is walk you through some quick reporting basics to make sure, as a marketer, you’re able to communicate with your admins and what you’re seeing. Right? It is very crucial. Long gone are the days where you just signed in to Pardot or Marketing Cloud or, you know, have used HubSpot with Salesforce—whatever.
You really need to level up your skill set to make sure that you’re communicating effectively so you can have a seat at the table, like our panelists at the Ask Me Anything MOPs Edition panel earlier.
Today, we’re gonna cover reports and dashboards from a Salesforce perspective, and we’ll try to sprinkle in how you can use that in Salesforce for Pardot things that you may need to report on. Additionally, we’ll give you a quick tutorial on list views, which I think is one of those secret weapons that, as marketers, we don’t tend to use a whole lot because we always see it as more of a sales tool, but it can totally help in the communication between sales and marketing.
Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and kick off with this agenda. Sarah went ahead and provided the humor and the memes, so she’s the funny one. I’m just here to walk us through the slides. But “the strong in you, the Salesforce is.”
So today, what we’re gonna talk about is Salesforce data and relationships between all those objects. Just a brief overview in terms of reporting and dashboards, list views, and towards the end, we’ll have some resources that we think can really help you if you’ve never been in Salesforce and never tried your hand at reporting. And then, hopefully, we’ll have tons of time at the end for some demos and lots of questions. So please keep that populated on the right side of your screen.
Alright. I’m gonna jump into data and relationships.
So you can tell Sarah put together this slide, but it’s a data model. So a data model—the way your data is stored either in a database or in a table. The easiest way to remember this is: think Excel.
So what we have here is a table with some very basic information. We have country, the salesperson—in Salesforce, this would be lead, contact owner, or account owner—the order date, the idea of that particular purchase, and then how many units they purchased.
This could look very different for you from a nonprofit perspective. Maybe you’re working with students or constituents. Maybe you’re working B2C and it’s more like this, or maybe you’re working B2B.
So what we wanna do is briefly break this table up into how do I take it from Excel—and, you know, some sales teams may still be using Excel to manage their pipeline. We’re gonna table that discussion for a different meeting—but, hopefully, this is gonna help us find common language so we can build better strategy and communicate more effectively with those teams since we don’t live and breathe in that world.
So the object. The object is the Lead—who are we talking to?
We have records: each row in this table is a record.
We have fields: each of the columns is a field.
And then we have values: the value in that particular record.
So the field could be Country, and then the value is “United States.”
Can everybody give me a thumbs up in the chat? Easy to follow? So far so good, I think.
Alright. We’re gonna take it further. Thank you so much, Rachel.
So now we’re taking it into Salesforce. How does this look in Salesforce?
So we have “long gone but not forgotten” Adam Blitzer as the Lead.
We have their name. When you log in to Salesforce, this may look a little bit different for you. That means your awesome admin put in a lot of work to make it more digestible for your team. But for many of us, this is the standard of what we see when we first log in.
We have our Lead on the top—Adam Blitzer—and that’s our object. Salesforce tells you the object wherever you go.
Now we have the actual record—Adam Blitzer.
Then we have the field—email, phone number.
And then the specific value in that field.
Hopefully, so far so good. Thank you all for the thumbs up.
This is our business model. Earlier, you may have joined me and Erin Duncan, our Product Director at Sercante. We went over the connector between Salesforce and Account Engagement. So I won’t spend too much time on this slide, but this would be a good screenshot. You can also find it in Salesforce documentation, and you’ll have the slides provided later this week.
Essentially, we have Prospects—that’s on the Pardot side. Leads and Contacts—they’re connected via IDs. This is the field, and the value is the unique ID. Everything in Salesforce has an ID. That’s how we find things.
We have Campaigns that marketing is putting together, and they can interact with both Leads and Contacts.
We have Accounts and Opportunities—who we’re working with and if there are deals on the table. Those interact specifically with Contacts.
Once the Contact syncs over into Pardot, we are able to see most of the information on the Account and Opportunity level—assuming we have a Contact Role. If you are interested in Contact Roles, feel free to go to ParDreamin.com and download videos from last year.
Now bringing it back—now that we know the infrastructure and the data model—we have the long tale that you always hear: garbage in, garbage out.
If your data is no good or there are major silos or it hasn’t been cleaned in years (or ever), it’s not gonna be great. So we have here “NatCOBRA: clean your data.” And the consequences? Your reporting is gonna be faulty.
Alright. So we’re gonna go over a couple of tips. Focus on the number in the purple circle, and I’ll explain.

1. Align on what matters to your leadership.
   If you’re trying to do MQLs but sales doesn’t care about MQLs, they care about pipeline stages—and you don’t align—there’s going to be miscommunication, frustration, fires, etc. Talk to them first. Align on what they want, come to compromises, and segment data the way they need it.

2. Decide on the minimum required information.
   Some marketers want 20 fields on forms and nobody fills them out. Sometimes sales just wants a phone number and they’ll figure it out. Decide on the minimum and stick to it. Use appropriate forms for appropriate levels of information.

3. Make it easy on users and on prospects.
   If I’m a sales rep filling out info, or a prospect filling out a form—use picklists, consistent dropdowns, normalized fields. Make sure integrated systems handle the data well.

4. Enforce your requirements.
   You spent time aligning and building forms—then people don’t follow the process. Build a center of excellence. Document. Train. Demo. Build validation rules. Make it clear: “You’re not moving forward unless you do X, Y, Z.”

5. Ingest, process, and refine your data consistently.
   Make sure form data stays consistent. Clean lists before importing. Use validation tools. Avoid adding obviously bad data. Set up periodic cleanup cycles.
   Sercante has a tool called Prospect Updater that can help automate spam cleaning and field updates.

Alright. I wanna take a quick poll before switching to Sarah. We had one open: Have you built Salesforce reports before?
We see lots have, some need admin help, and some haven’t touched it. Hopefully this overview helps.
I’m gonna go ahead and pass it over to Sarah so she can take us through an overview of reports and dashboards.

Speaker 2:
Alright. So let’s get back to the basics. I know most of us have built reports before, but even so, we’ll go through a couple of notes here.
The two callouts I wanna make are the report format and the report type.
Your report type is important because it defines what fields, objects, and data you have access to in your report. If you’re reporting on campaign and form performance, you’ll want a “Campaign with Forms” report type, for example.
Then your report format is going to define how your data is aggregated, sliced, diced, and visible—both in the report and in the dashboard.
There are four report formats. In Classic, you used to choose them more directly. In Lightning, Salesforce picks the best format for you, but it’s still good to know what they are.

Tabular
Like a spreadsheet. Good for simple lists.

Summary
Allows grouping by a column or row. Good for comparing X to Y.

Matrix
Adds another layer—group by up to two rows and two columns. Similar to Excel pivot tables.

Joined
Shows two unrelated reports together in one view.

Some reporting examples:
New leads generated today.
Campaign performance.
Lead conversion.
Engaged leads and contacts.
User adoption—are sales working what marketing sends?

Dashboard examples:
Executive summary.
Benchmark tracking (quarter over quarter, year over year).
ROI dashboards.

Planning: Why do we even build reports?
We love strategic decisions. Gut feelings and anecdotes are good, but data needs to back us up. You may think your audience is on Facebook, but maybe they’re really on TikTok.
Reports help us see what’s working, customize views for different stakeholders, and visualize data in digestible ways.

Here are key reports every marketing team should have—“leads” meaning “not yet converted customers” if you use Contacts instead:

New leads by source.
Qualified and unqualified leads by source.
Why unqualified? Because if all unqualified leads are coming from Facebook and you’re paying for ads there—you want to know and reallocate budget.
Campaign influence (not the focus of this session, but critical).
Engagement history for marketing assets.

Speaker 1:
I want to take a second to outline a few of the reports on the screen.
For the first two, we’re focusing on source. Many marketers say Pardot doesn’t show source for many records. Pardot tries to get referrer info, and there’s a help article about what it can identify, but as we move into a cookieless world, less of that will be automatically captured.
You can still use UTMs, form tagging, and other tools.
On campaign influence: everyone with Salesforce has access to it. With Pardot, you unlock more features. It takes configuration in Salesforce + setup in Pardot.
Engagement History requires Connected Campaigns and being on Lightning.
Account Engagement dashboards are limited, so having this in Salesforce is huge.
But prerequisites matter—Connected Campaigns, completion actions, automation rules, Engagement Studio, campaign member sync.
So before you use these reports, there are setup steps.
We’ll move on. Sorry for hijacking the conversation—just wanted to clarify since many attendees are probably thinking “well, I don’t have that.”

Speaker 2:
Absolutely. I was responding to a question in the chat: top 3–4 key metrics that matter to most CMOs. I added these:
Cost per acquisition.
Conversion rate.
Return on investment by campaign.
These reports will help get you there.
I want to skip through the next few slides—examples of reports and filter suggestions.
Talking about source: if you’re not using Source, enter the specific field you are using.
Oh—

Speaker 1:
I don’t know what happened there.

Speaker 2:
We’re on to Salesforce then.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Shout out to them.

Speaker 2:
Shout out to Salesforce for that screenshot.
I wanted to talk through using data to cut through the noise. Data is everywhere. So before building dashboards, ask questions that make your data concise and ensure it tells the story you intend. Not shaping the story to make numbers look good—if they’re bad, we need to know.
Strategic decisions require truth. Execs need digestible and accurate data to support decisions moving forward.

Speaker 1:
This is an excellent slide to screenshot. We’ll include the deck, but this isn’t the infinite list—just a starting point. Sarah put together good action items here.

Speaker 2:
When you’re thinking about sharing these reports—and Marcus, you may want to add on—remember that access inside Salesforce matters.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. If you haven’t used reports or dashboards, you may only be on the receiving end. Behind the scenes, there’s more happening.
When building a dashboard, depending on access, you can build:

As the builder sees it.
As a specific user sees it (like the sales manager).
Or dynamic visibility—viewed as the viewer.

What often happens: we build a dashboard for someone, they share it, and someone else sees no data or broken components—because they lack the same permissions.
You can tweak this so it’s usable by everyone, but access matters.
Another thing—if your boss can’t see the report, it’s probably in your private folder. Move it to a public folder or a shared folder.
Alright. That’s all I have. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
Alright. Let’s build a dashboard.
If we’re building one for executive leadership, we know they love numbers and don’t have time for a deep dive. We wanna give them only what they need.
Example: leads generated in the last 90 days. What’s coming into the lead funnel?
Which source is producing the most leads?
What’s our ROI?
When we put all that together:
8 leads in the last 90 days (in red—because that would be awful).
Top lead gen sources: Social Media and a big blank. The blank is a sign to investigate—bad data, missing source field, broken form?
Then ROI—campaign influence and revenue impact.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. Let’s jump back into list views—not only for sales, but for anyone who needs them.
Marketing generates leads and sales “doesn’t follow up.” We give sales a bad rep, but we should reflect on why. Usually:

Lack of awareness.
They don’t trust the leads.
Qualification gaps.

List views: in every Salesforce object, you can create a table-like view with up to ~10 columns, sortable.
This is often what sales sees first.
If a lead was created two years ago but fills out a form today, it won’t appear if the list view filters only recent records.
Contacts won’t show in Lead list views.
One reason sales requests a new lead every time someone fills out a form is so they appear in this view.
Fix visibility issues with better list views, reports, dashboards, and communication.
List views are an easy win and can often be built without report-building permissions.

Here is another example: you can search, filter, add to campaigns, send emails, delete, update.
Good for updating lead status, for example.

Key takeaways:
Data is king. Keep it clean.
Be realistic—the reports will reflect your data quality.
Start small and grow.
Use reports as standalone assets or dashboard foundations.
Dashboards must tell a story.
Give everyone correct access.
Marketing, IT, and sales should collaborate to build trust in data and shared processes.
The better the data, the better the decisions.

Here are key resources—highly recommend the Reporting Superbadges on Trailhead. Even with years of experience, I still learned things.

We have demos and Q and A. Thank you. We have a couple minutes left.
Sarah, anything in the chat you want to answer?

Speaker 2:
Pam, have you caught anything? I’m checking to see if there’s anything we haven’t responded to yet.

Speaker 0:
We had a question asking to go back to the links page. And a reminder that we will be posting the deck afterward.

Speaker 1:
Shameless plug—we have units for appointments. If you’re stuck on any reporting questions, here’s how you can meet with Sarah or with myself to discuss. Click the link at the bottom.
Feel free to also join Sarah, Pam, and me on social.
Any other questions before we head out?

Speaker 0:
No. No new questions were posted.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Speaker 0:
Thank you everybody for joining us. Just a reminder, we’ll have the recording and deck available afterward. We’ve got the Genius Bar sessions. The next session in this track is on Marketing ROI—should be interesting.

Speaker 2:
And have a—

Speaker 0:
Good rest of your day.

Speaker 1:
Alright. Thank you so much, Pam. Thanks, everybody.