Report of the Day: Campaign Performance Summary Part II

In a previous post, Report of the Day: Campaign Performance Summary, I showed you how to create a basic report to answer the question, “How are my campaigns performing?” Today, I want to show you how you can take that report and put it on steroids to look at campaign performance in different ways.

One way I like to look at campaign performance is by Campaign Type. I use Campaign Type as a logical grouping of different campaign tactics. You might have Campaign Type values of Contact Us, Direct Mail, Email, Inbound Inquiry, Online Advertising, Public Relations, Trade Show, Webinar, Web Site. You can think of these Campaign Types as relating directly to the Marketing lead source values that you’re using.
[Read more…]

Report of the Day: Campaign Performance Summary

One of the most basic questions most marketers have is: “How are my campaigns performing?” If you’re a Salesforce.com (SFDC) user, it’s really easy to create this report. The challenge for many organizations comes from not truly understanding campaign responses. In an earlier post, Leads vs. Responses 101, I discussed how to ensure that you are capturing all of your campaign responses in SFDC. Now that you feel confident that all of your campaign responses are recorded in SFDC, let’s turn to the report.
[Read more…]

5 Biggest Lead Management Blunders

One of the nice things about consulting is that you get to help people. It’s very satisfying to spend a day checking out someone’s Salesforce.com implementation and give them a set of recommendations for how they can build/fix/improve their processes and use of technology to give them the data they need to make better marketing decisions.

I’ve been working on a couple of lead management projects that caused me to wonder — how did they get here? By here, I mean to this state where they’re bringing in a consultant to help them figure this out. Not that I’m complaining as I’m the one who gets to help, but how does an organization end up needing lead management consulting? Are there any lessons to be learned by the rest of us on how not to end up in that place?
[Read more…]

The Importance of Building the Right Marketing Infrastructure

I know you’ve heard it before, but in order to be a successful marketer, you must have the right marketing infrastructure in place. What is it about the infrastructure that can make you or break you as a marketer? It really boils down to your ability to understand what is going on in your sales and marketing funnel. Let me paint you a picture of two disparate infrastructures to illustrate the point.
[Read more…]

It’s a New Year: Time to Get Your Pardot Implementation in Shape

It’s a new year and everyone is busy making resolutions. If you’ve been putting off addressing the growing pains in your Pardot system, now’s the time to take action.

If you’ve been a long-time Pardot user, you may find yourself with hundreds of email templates, landing pages, forms, lists, drip programs, custom re-directs and automation rules. It can be overwhelming slogging through pages of content to find the list or automation rule you’re looking for. [Read more…]

Thoughts on Pardot Content at the ExactTarget Connections Conference

The ExactTarget Connections conference is wrapping up today, and kudos to the ET team for putting on a first-rate conference experience. No branding detail was missed from the orange ET messages on the stair risers in the convention center to the ET conference staff in their bright orange t-shirts to the orange soap and orange gerber daisies in the ladies restrooms at the JW Marriott. Did I mention there was a lot of orange at the conference?

But I didn’t attend the conference for an “orange” experience, I was looking for training on the Pardot product, networking, and a product roadmap. Although ExactTarget acquired Pardot last October, and then Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget in June of this year, the conference did not present a clear vision of how and where Pardot fits into the picture.
[Read more…]

Pardot Training at ExactTarget Connections 2013

Next week Pardot hosts its user conference. It will be significantly different this year as they are being rolled into ExactTarget’s user conference, Connections 2013, in Indianapolis.

I attended two previous Pardot Elevate conferences and found them to be chock full of useful sessions, knowledgeable experts and access to Pardot employees and partners. It was held in Atlanta – a location much easier to get to than Indianapolis – and with a registration fee that included 2 nights of hotel plus meals, it was excellent value.
[Read more…]

Leads vs. Responses 101

In my work with clients, I’ll find marketers who are not familiar with the definition of a campaign response. A response is anyone who has responded to a campaign or accepted a call-to-action.

Examples include, someone who fills out a form on your web site, someone who visited your booth at a trade show, someone who registered for a webinar that you hosted with a third party vendor, someone who clicked on an ad and completed the registration form to access the content. A response is not someone who was sent an email or who opened an email, or someone who attended a conference, but did not visit your booth.
[Read more…]

Salesforce Tip of the Day: Mapping Custom Lead Fields

One of the things that I’d like to do on the blog is to share tips and tricks on how to use Salesforce.com more effectively as a Marketing person. For those of you who use Salesforce, you know that it wasn’t well-designed for marketers. We’ve done a pretty good job of coming up with clever workarounds and building some functionality into the product to help us do what we need to do.

Our first Salesforce Tip of the Day comes from a question that I received twice this week — once from a former colleague who is now at a start-up company and another off of the Austin Salesforce user group board.

The question is this — how do you take a custom lead field and have the field and value appear in the contact once it’s been converted?

In Salesforce-speak, this is called Mapping Custom Lead Fields. You can search on this topic in Salesforce Help & Training, or you can follow the directions below:

  • Create custom fields with the same names in Leads and Contacts
  • Go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | Leads | Fields
  • On the bottom of the page in the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section, click on the button Map Lead Fields
  • Select the custom lead field on the left, and map it to the custom Contact field you created. It should appear in the drop down list on the right side of the page.

And, voila! You’ve mapped your custom lead field. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

The Next Marketing Frontier: Real-Time Lead Nurturing

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week about middle of the funnel marketing challenges. As technology marketers, we’ve learned the lessons about how to get found on the internet, convert web site visitors and analyze the results.

We’ve spent time and money on implementing marketing automation systems to help us score, prioritize and nurture the leads we generate. And, we’ve discovered that the fuel to feed this marketing engine is content. Free, compelling, content. And lots of it.

So, what’s the problem?
[Read more…]