David Taber
DO NOT MEASURE: The number of collateral pieces mailed, ad impressions, emails sent; the total number of leads; the cost per lead (all are misleading, if not just meaningless). (Location 2654)
Generally speaking, you should keep the number of fields to the absolute minimum. Resist the temptation to add lots of nice-to-have fields because every one of them has to be entered and interpreted by someone. If a field is going to be empty 25% of the time and wrong another 25% of the time, leave it out: (Location 3200)
Keep the number of required fields to the absolute minimum, as they irritate users. I can’t remember the last time I saw a page requiring more than five items to be filled in, and even that was a debatable decision. Keep all the required fields “above the fold” on the page layout, so you don’t have off-screen fields that block the save button from working. (Location 3211)
SFDC’s internal data comes almost entirely from human data entry, which is the most costly and error-prone source. (Location 3221)
However, the split-brain model has a side effect: sales will not be able to easily see all of the interactions of a large account because some of the action will be taken by leads and some by names. This can cause a bit of a blind spot. (Location 3304)
Adding the marketing names database will add another integration point, but it will also allow for more sophisticated marketing operations over time. (Location 3314)
The Web site registration pages should whittle the number of fields down to what’s really essential and reduce user typing as much as possible. Use pick lists (“pull-downs”) for job title, state, and country. Use JavaScript to validate the format of phone numbers and postal codes. Use mail-response loops to validate that the email address is valid and active. The Web site data feed should use deduping code from either your own developers or from products such as RingLead or DemandTools. (Location 3333)
The spreadsheet imports should be done through products such as RingLead and DemandTools with the goal of stopping duplicate records at the source. (Location 3344)
Removing impurities from data is similar to other industrial processes: it’s asymptotically expensive. The first standard deviation (68%) of errors is cheap to remove, the next standard deviation (17%) costs about twice as much (even though you’re only fixing one-fourth the total number of errors), the next standard deviation (4%) costs about four times as much to eliminate (Location 3619)
Country codes: Country names should be transformed into ISO-standard two-character4 country codes. Yes, do all 239 of them—you won’t save any time by leaving out country names. (Location 3791)
State codes: State names (at least for the United States and Canada, plus Brazil, Germany, France, Russia, India, and China if you do business there) should be transformed into ISO-standard two-character state codes. For other countries, leave the state fields as they are—they won’t do any harm and you may decide to transform them into state codes later. (Location 3800)
We recommend that records of people who have opted out have their email addresses corrupted (e.g., joe.blow@abc.com.nospam) so that the addresses will be automatically (Location 3824)
Ownership: In SFDC, every record needs to have an owner—this is the core of its security model. Ownership of every single record needs to be assigned to a current user5 in the system. (Location 3843)
For example, with leads, the one part of the record that can be validated as correct is the user’s email address. Everything else in the record may be bogus or have typos, but with the right systems in place,18 at least the email address will be correct. Using a reverse lookup, enrichment vendors can provide such information as the person’s name, company name, title, phone number, address, and information about the company they work for. SFDC’s data.com service (previously known as Jigsaw) (Location 4125)
Because CRM credibility depends on the volume and value of the data in SFDC more than any other factor, data quality is the lifeblood of ongoing SFDC operations. There are three levels of data maintenance—architectural, manipulative, and administrative—and they each need to be staffed as ongoing processes. (Location 4160)
Creating a Cost Model for Clean Data (Location 4219)
If the lead has come back to your Web site or taken some other follow-up action, all of those details should be recorded in your marketing automation and SFA system so you can do some behavioral targeting and lead scoring. (Location 7760)
Typically, a qualified lead should be converted to a contact in a matter of hours after a follow-up call by sales personnel. If the sales conversation doesn’t go well, the qualified lead should be disqualified as bogus. (Location 7765)
Rejected lead: A lead that has been rejected by sales as being unqualified, or a contact that has been identified as uninterested or incompetent to participate in a sales cycle. Rejected leads should still be given the best treatment by marketing, but they will be ignored by sales until they have done something new to prove their worthiness of human attention. (Location 7767)
At conversion time (and we recommend that this step also be handled by the inside sales group for consistency), best practices are to create a new opportunity (typically, for $0 at 0% probability, unless the contact is being attached to an opportunity already in progress) and to attach a contact role and a campaign to it (to support sales and marketing effectiveness analyses). (Location 7798)
What if the contact turns out to be bogus or falsely qualified? Never, ever, ever8 delete the contact or opportunity. Instead, set its status flag as “rejected by sales.” (Location 7807)
Figure 8-2 shows the lead life cycle described in the earlier narrative. Due to the space constraints of this page, the figure shows just the promotion/qualification/demotion part of the narrative. Check out www.SFDC-secrets.com to get more complete example diagrams from various business process analyses. (Location 7828)
Create a “before versus after” set of diagrams that highlight the steps that need to be upgraded. Get these business process changes approved by your champions before you start to reengineer them. (Location 8020)
Almost certainly, focus on the revenue pipeline first. (Location 8027)
Things tend to fall apart when there is disagreement about the metrics, responsibilities, workflow, and semantics of the sales model. If you can’t agree on what a qualified lead is or what triggers creation of an opportunity, how can you optimize and streamline anything about revenue production? (Location 8077)
Look for the number of untouched leads, the time to first touch, and the conversion ratio percentages; put in workflows and alerts so that leads don’t go cold. (Location 8084)
Focus the marketing effort on the things that start sales cycles and close deals—such as customer referencability and testimonial quotes—and pay less attention to arbitrary statistics that are easily gamed. (Location 8089)
Look for workflows and alerts that ensure key players know the state of every deal, and set up serious pipeline metrics and sales-rep scorecards. There should be no mystery about how each territory will make its quarterly number. (Location 8095)
As the lead progresses through the funnel, you should be using SFDC’s free chatter system at every stage of the prospecting, selling, and renewal/upsell cycle. When used purely internally, chatter helps your team collaborate better, particularly if they work in remote offices. (Location 8151)
Unlike email, with chatter you can see the narrative and the opportunity data at the same time. (Location 8157)
Job One: Define and Document the Sales Model (Location 8170)
Start with a simplifying assumption: marketing should own names (leads that aren’t good enough even for nurturing by sales development),7 marketing and sales development should jointly own leads; inside and outside sales should own contacts, accounts, and opportunities; and customer service should own cases. (Location 8182)
Leads should be automatically routed to and managed in queues unless the company’s sales team is very small. Queues serve as a holding tank for leads that have not been claimed or worked by someone in the queue’s sales region. (Location 8339)
Typically, a queue is seen by all the SDRs in the queue’s territory, and any lead in a queue can be handled by anyone on the team. As soon as one of the SDRs wants to work on a lead in the queue, that individual needs to take ownership of the lead by clicking on SFDC’s change owner link to reassign it to themselves. Leads should never go from individual ownership back into the territory’s queue; (Location 8342)
Use SFDC’s auto-response rules or MAS drip campaigns to send an email to the lead the instant that the potential customer registers. Best practice is to make the first phone attempt—at least leaving a voice message—on the same day that the lead contacted you. (Location 8356)
Put documents that are useful to the SDR people within easy reach: right in SFDC itself. Store the scripts in the content section13 and create custom links on the lead page so the reps can jump right to them during the call. (Location 8368)
One of the key elements of the service level agreement between the SDRs and marketing is, “How do leads get refused or rejected by inside sales?” There should be clear criteria for this decision, and whenever an SDR rejects a lead, that SDR needs to set the rejection reason pull-down for that record.17 Once the lead is rejected by the SDR, the expectation should be that the prospect will continue to receive newsletters and other electronic marketing indefinitely—forever, unless the prospect explicitly opts out of this process. (Location 8464)
include: bad data, no interest, lost interest, no budget, no power, no vision, and no competitive advantage. (Location 8472)
For example, the pick list could include the following items: new, contact attempted, contact made, working, hold, qualified, rejected, and bad data. It is common practice to add a few extra fields to the lead record (to capture the specifics of product interest, a promotional special, or other characteristics), but keep this to a minimum. A lead record should be fairly brief: long lead pages are almost never filled in and just frustrate everybody. The most interesting part of a lead record isn’t the lead detail information in the body of the page; it’s in chatter at the top and the related lists underneath.18 The evolution of a lead’s interest and potential shows up as entries in activity history, campaign history, and custom objects such as download history. (Location 8475)
The idea is that every automated outbound touch should show up as a campaign entry, and every response (whether opening of an email, an RSVP, an attendance, a download, or a registration) should show up as either a campaign response or a completed activity. (Location 8486)
Use the page layout tool to install links to Google Search and Google News (for general information about a prospect company), and to Hoover’s, Dunn and Bradstreet, or other service (for financial and business information). For information about the individual lead, add links for LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, or your favorite lead database service. (Location 8497)
Names for the overall sales region (at least North America, EMEA, APAC, and ROW) and specific territory (e.g., Western United States) that may be used in custom pick lists in lead, opportunity, account, and contact records to facilitate reporting and analysis. (Location 9584)
That said, marketing must be very actively involved in the design, usage, and analytics of SFDC. The core of many marketing functions will live in SFDC records. Marketing must own leads and campaigns and should have control over several policy areas in the system. (Location 10016)
Before you can apply any of the recommendations in this chapter, you need to develop a model of how the company’s revenue generation process works and how sales and marketing need to interact. (Location 10032)
Almost always, marketing wants to collect a lot of information about the customers’ demographics and the competitive products they are considering. Sales typically wants to collect the customer’s title, purchase timeframe, and other qualification questions. These are all valid requests, but it’s not wise to collect all these data at initial registration time, for three reasons: (Location 10108)
Typically, having more than five fields causes a significant reduction in the number of leads and an equal increase in bogus responses (such as emails of asdf@asdf.com). (Location 10114)
Many target audiences get really irritated by nosy questions about purchase intent or budget. In market segments where prospects hate sales calls, asking these questions can dramatically lower the quantity of leads. (Location 10116)
You’ll probably get to ask the registrant for only five items up front, so make sure they’re the best five. The answers should provide the minimum information needed to route/process the next step for the inquiry. The rest of the information that people would love to have should be collected during the subsequent steps of the qualification and lead-nurturing process. (Location 10121)
The first step to lead quality is to distinguish leads from “names”: • A name is merely the contact information for a person believed to be part of the target audience. Names are typically purchased from lists or are obtained from outside but have not explicitly indicated they want to know more about the company, its products, or its services. Names are the lowest-quality leads and should almost always be relegated to mailing-list status and excluded from the telesales call-down list. Read the discussion of this topic in the “Example Business Process Analysis” section of Chapter 8. • A true lead, who is a respondent to marketing efforts, has explicitly requested more information about the company or its products. These leads should immediately be scored (a topic discussed later in this chapter) and put on the telesales call-down list in order of “hotness.” Check out the discussion on this topic in Chapter 9. (Location 10131)
Almost always, a few custom fields (such as a calculated field for the sales region) need to be added to the lead object, and pick-list fields for status, industry, and rating should be replaced by custom ones. Field history tracking should be turned on to provide an audit trail for the 20 most interesting fields in the lead object (including, in particular, owner). (Location 10140)
Don’t use a lead source, but instead populate the relevant campaign for the action the user has taken (more on this topic later in this chapter). (Location 10149)
Even if your company doesn’t use email for marketing, it is imperative that your Web page forms collect the user’s email address and validate it. Email addresses are essentially the only universal identifier that exists on the Web (and even they aren’t completely reliable), so collect this information and validate it as early as you can. The strong form of validation is to send the user an email at the address the user provided, with the mail containing a unique URL4 that must be clicked for the user to get access to the desired information, download items, or other goodies. (Location 10154)
Lead Scoring and Aging By default in SFDC, leads can hold a rating of A/B/C or hot/medium/cold. (Location 10779)
The bottom line: getting high-precision scoring (say, 0 to 100) to work credibly requires a surprising amount of work, so do calculate scores, but present to sales only a hot/medium/cold rating that is derived from bands of scores (say, less than 60 is cold, more than 80 is hot, and in the middle is warm). The hot/medium/cold rating should be used to sort and filter leads and contacts in views, reports, and dashboards. (Location 10785)
There are three important things to look for in a lead scoring system: • Profile scoring (or explicit scoring): (Location 10791)
Of course, any contact who is a customer receives an instant and permanent score of 100. (Location 10802)
Behavioral scoring (or implicit scoring): This score yields a dynamic number that results from “what they’ve done”: the individual’s choices, behaviors, and patterns in interacting with the company. (Location 10807)
Decay scoring (or time-based scoring): This score yields a dynamic number that results from “when did they do it”: (Location 10815)
The ultimate in decay scoring is moving unresponsive leads to the “marketing queue” where the MAS system will use the lowest-cost efforts possible to revive and nurture them. (Location 10819)
A number of free, simple, lead scoring tools are available from the AppExchange. (Location 10822)
In addition to sliding-scale scoring, several helpful tools do filtering to immediately eliminate garbage leads from view. (Location 10836)
A best practice is to not allow users to delete SFDC records, because allowing deletion will merely mask a process problem. Instead of deletion, the record should be marked to reflect its problem for further investigation in the fullness of time. Whenever a record is marked as bad data, somebody needs to do some data forensics to understand which process, system, or individual is causing the bogus records. (Location 10840)
For example, a record that holds bad data and a contact that will never go anywhere should be removed from the marketing and telesales lists. The mechanisms for hiding records are ownership values of the lead or contact, in conjunction with the roles and sharing settings. By setting a lead’s owner to a queue named “Remarket” or “Newsletter,” the lead will disappear from view except for the marketing department users. (Location 10868)
Leads that are far too old can be archived (into a CSV or MDB file—Excel can’t handle large data sets as well as other tools can). Note that your MAS will probably have its own mechanisms for archiving ancient leads—make sure to look at their help system for guidance on how to do this. (Location 10892)
To protect against this possibility, create a workflow for the lead and contact records that automatically corrupts email addresses of opt-outs. These addresses are guaranteed to bounce, yet still preserve the original email information. (Location 10910)
Lead Enrichment In many cases, the only thing you know for certain about a lead is an email address, which you can (should!) validate through an email-response cycle. (Location 10917)
On the lead page, make it easy for the SDRs to get supplemental information. Smart reps will want to do a little research before they call a new lead. Use the page layout tool to put links to Google Search and Google News for general information about the company and to Hoover’s, Dunn and Bradstreet, or some other service for financial and business information. For information about the individual lead, put in links to LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, or your favorite lead database service. (Location 10957)
Marketing isn’t directly involved with the lead qualification and conversion process. Nevertheless, it should be involved with setting the criteria and the process steps involved, because these elements are the materialization of the target market description, value proposition, and messaging that are the results of marketing work. (Location 10974)
What marketing can do is screen and score leads, and pass only high-scoring leads to the inside sales team. (Location 10981)
Once the qualification criteria and scripts are stable, they should be built into the SFDC lead screens. SFDC offers a free AppExchange plugin to facilitate call scripting, (Location 10990)
To build this pool of customer information, several processes need to be tapped to collect the highest-quality reference information: (Location 11088)
Delete and merge buttons should be hidden from all standard users, including most marketing folks. • API and import-wizard access should be turned off for all standard users except for those marketing individuals who handle leads. • Report creation should be turned off for all standard users (but not managers). (Location 11368)
The next order of business is to clean out the “unfiled public reports” that come with the system and put them in folders meaningful to you. If a particular report doesn’t seem especially meaningful, create a report folder called “Ignore Me” and put it there. I do not recommend deleting reports from the system: you never know when one will provide a good idea for solving a future reporting problem. (Location 11379)
Strive for closed-loop marketing, where you can track a single customer’s interactions through every “touch” by your company. (Location 11430)
Use campaigns for every single lead. Period. • Insist that contact roles be attached to every opportunity. Period. • Use chatter— (Location 11434)
Use workflows and alerts to support management by exception. SFDC can streamline the majority of marketing processes while giving you better data for more solid decisions. (Location 11446)
Professor James Oldroyd of MIT 41 indicate that lead response rates drop dramatically within minutes of a Web registration. Providing a professional response to a lead in near real time really sets companies apart. Statistics show that a prospect’s attention moves on to other things very soon, and the vast majority of Web site visitors will have no recollection of a company within 48 hours of visiting its site. Make sure that leads get into SFDC very fast and that an automated drip marketing sequence starts the same day. (Location 11459)
unresponsive or uninteresting should be moved from the active working list into the “remarket” list within 30 to 45 days. (Location 11472)
So the only times you should give up on a lead is when all of the contact information is no longer valid or the lead has explicitly asked you to go away and die. (Location 11475)
The match of your marketing message to the target audience is much more important than the inherent power or uniqueness of that message. (Location 11481)
Customer reference information is the highest-value data the SFDC system can possibly hold. Marketing should spearhead the collection, updating, and management of customer references so that the company gets the highest marketing impact from them and the references are not burned out from overuse. (Location 11496)
Here are example metrics that can be quite meaningful (and hard to achieve): (Location 11546)
The “jewel in the crown” of marketing is strategic analysis. Naturally, you’ll want to team up with executives in sales, engineering, customer support/services, and finance to look at the big picture and answer questions such as these: (Location 11570)
The whole promise of chatter is that it’s not a general-purpose IM or social media platform. Its use case is focused on collaboration within a defined, self-selected community. And its user personas are in departments all over the enterprise (Location 13147)
The model behind chatter is to thread the conversations within structured data, so when you’re looking at either the database record or the conversation, you have a more complete picture. (Location 13166)
One of the metrics of success for chatter deployments is “How much internal email can be eliminated?” (Location 13169)
Chatter is on by default in SFDC. If you turn it off, you lose access to some nifty features (particularly in document storage and search). (Location 13172)
The rule of thumb for customer-oriented data must be, “If it’s not visible in SFDC, it doesn’t exist,” because that is the reality from an end user’s perspective. (Location 13284)
Unique external keys are fundamental for any hope of record matching and data quality when SFDC is integrated with external systems. The best candidates for universal keys are the email address, (Location 13297)
Certain SFDC features cannot be turned off once they are activated, and some records and objects cannot be deleted once they are created. (Location 13305)
So it’s almost always a better idea to avoid the following three choices unless there is absolutely no alternative: master/detail records, standard state and country fields,11 and person-accounts. (Location 13354)
Although duplicates and noisy data are annoying, best practices call for disabling the delete and merge record functions for all standard users. (Location 13382)
Setting a policy for the user alias in SFDC is surprisingly important, particularly if you want to develop reports that automatically filter for an individual’s perspective (Location 13395)
The number of administrators should be kept to the bare minimum (to avoid data corruption and system misconfiguration problems) while satisfying the needs of users. (Location 13406)
Prune the number of reports and report folders. The initial set of reports that comes with the SFDC system is overwhelming. (Location 13550)
Even before the SFDC implementation team creates user reports and dashboards, its members should create data quality reports, dashboards, and monthly metrics. In addition to using SFDC’s data quality dashboards, create reports that can measure the following items: (Location 13714)