Uncover Connected Data

Salesforce is a powerful marketing and CRM tool through which B2B marketers can collect data about their marketing campaigns and customers. The data generated tracks the customer's journey from their first touchpoint with your organization.

But, there is a key factor necessary to get this data to work for you is being able to attribute it.

What does this mean?

Attribution, the gold standard for ROI

Attribution gives marketers visibility into what campaigns are generating the desired outcome, whether a subscription to a newsletter or a purchase from the business. Essentially, when done right, attribution is the gold standard of understanding where your customer is.

But attribution cannot be over complicated. When done incorrectly, it is a buzzword used by marketers to sound knowledgeable. Yet, in reality, nothing gets done.

Reasons the value of attribution is stalled:

1: Expensive – attribution requires a team of technical people to get it right, and a team of experts takes a healthy budget.

2: Time consuming – attribution takes a great deal of time to master and then practice regularly. While there are tools to assist with this, it is still a time investment.

3: Lack of direction – all attribution can do is give you more in-depth data. If you do not have a course of action for the data, the process of gathering it will not be helpful. Having a purpose for the data and a direction you are considering going with your marketing plan in mind will be immensely beneficial. But you must also respond to the insights and adapt your strategy to what the insights show.

If you struggle with attribution, you are not alone. According to a Demand Gen report, 39% of marketers say they still need to improve on marketing attribution.

But there is hope!

You can do several things to improve your ability to set yourself up for success. By creating a game plan, determining the team you can assemble within your budget, and deciding how much time you want to invest in the process. The time and team you invest in need to be in line with the ROI you can expect from your data.

Build a foundation for your attribution future

If you get the below right, the chances are that you are doing better than 75% of most marketers.

To start: adopting Salesforce as a CRM will get you on a great path to managing and mastering attribution as well as organizing the fundamental building blocks into place.

Salesforce is our CRM of choice because of the vast array of capabilities built into Salesforce, as well as the various third-party apps you can incorporate into the system to bolster your information. 

With Salesforce, you can provide reports on demand showing whether your marketing is working or not as well as how well your marketing efforts are performing.

Salesforce's life cycle focus also allows for all teams to see and interact with the same data enabling your sales, finance, marketing, and stakeholders to all be on the same page, at any time.

Secondly: Ensure your data is connected in Salesforce by testing out the conversion flow. You can do this by clicking on the "add to the form submission" through your marketing automation and CRM systems. After connecting your data, Salesforce will allow you to view specific data, navigate the gathered information, and draw reports.

With this information, you will be able to see what is working and what isn't, as well as any hidden information that can help or hurt your marketing efforts.

Once you better understand the flow and process, you'll be more confident with reporting outside of Salesforce.

Third: A critical building block to successful attribution is generating, reading, and understanding lead source data. Lead source data is essential to attribution because it allows you to have a "First/Last Touch" model for your opportunities. This will enable you to ideate what logic should be in place for an acceptable attribution model.

Understanding Lead Source in Salesforce boosts your sales and marketing pipeline performance—and allows you to take full advantage of the customer relationship management platform.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Track where your leads come from
2. Uncover the most effective lead generation channel
3. Determine the ROI of your marketing campaigns
4. Close deals faster by improving your sales funnel
5. Improve your sales and marketing strategies

But to achieve these goals, your lead source data must include five crucial aspects. Again, lead source data is a key to attribution. Without this building block, attribution will be data from which it is very hard to gather insights.

Ideally, a full lead source data set should include five aspects:

1. How your audience members are requesting contact from your sales team
2. Those selling points that get you results
3. The exact keywords that offer the best lead generation
4. The marketing channels that are reaching your target audience most effectively
5. The marketing efforts that turn an audience member into a sales lead

Finally: Communicating with stakeholders and your teams is a fantastic habit to develop. By keeping them informed, handing them the tools to see the results in real-time (Salesforce), and editing your marketing plan around the insights you gather, you are far more likely to receive buy-in on new ideas and more positive responses when requesting larger marketing budgets.

Also, by communicating openly and keeping all teams on the same path, your marketing plans will benefit from varied perspectives.

For instance, your sales team may see or understand something that the marketing team may not – by having the sales team involved, you can benefit from the valuable perspective they share with you.

Of course, you have heard the phrase, "Teamwork makes the dream work." It may sound cliché, but when it comes to an understanding of the insights your marketing data can provide, it is very true. 

Make it a priority to communicate and have open lines between teams. Together, marketing plans will only achieve more and lead to a fuller sales funnel, higher conversion rates, and provide much better ROIs.

Salesforce reporting for marketers made simple

Attribution is a buzzword many marketers like to speak about, but few are successfully doing. It's easy to get lost in your B2B marketing reporting arena with so many data points and channels to analyze. To be successful, the quality of the data needs to be top-notch, and the tech products you use need to be quality as well.

Effective reporting is unattainable without prioritizing data quality issues and finding a way to demonstrate a clear line to value.

Kudoz is a native Salesforce solution that allows you to resolve opportunities without a lead source and easily group lead sources into sales and marketing so you can:

• Simplify your reporting and prove your value
• Always know where a lead is coming from
• Reduce the scramble to deliver your monthly reports on-time. 

With Kudoz's insights, your data can provide marketing, sales, and other teams with information that can help them achieve greater success. See how we simplify reporting for our executives. 

Monitor Your Data

Data quality is not a one-time activity that you do and forget all about; it involves constant monitoring of your data to maintain and improve its quality. Poor quality data is generally due to disjointed data collection processes, poor data management practices, and heavy reliance on manual processes.

Since most people dislike data cleaning, implementing solutions that simplify the process ensures that your business powers its ROI with data-driven decisions throughout all its departments.

• Integrate your Salesforce CRM with Kudoz to help with regular monitoring to check for incomplete and duplicate data.
• Create regular reports to monitor data quality
• Monitor your sales process closely
• Monitor your data regularly to eliminate decayed data such as contact information

Kudoz simplifies your data-related activities when using Salesforce CRM by identifying missing contacts and missing lead sources so that you can start your analysis with clean data.

Kudoz, the Opportunity Analyzer App:

• Fixes data quality issues quickly
• Accelerates monthly and quarterly reporting
• Enables marketers to prove their success with revenue and pipeline reporting features
• Allows your team to claim missing Salesforce credit

The Kudoz Salesforce App allows marketers to deal with missing values in data as soon as they occur and generate reliable monthly and quarterly reports that you can use to demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts.

  Check out Kudoz, the Opportunity Analyzer App, on the AppExchange, and connect with me on the Trailblazer Community.