Tracking Sales Follow-Up on New Leads and/or Existing Contacts from Marketing Campaigns

[Anonymous]

Our goal is to see what course of action (by our Sales team) has been taken against new leads and/or existing contacts who have been part of a Marketing campaign. Currently Sales is being asked to log a task and specify the “Follow-Up Status” (custom field – choices include meeting, demo, email sent, call made, etc). We can then pull a SFDC report against the Activities, however nothing through Marketo, as the custom SFDC fields on the Activity do not pull through. This is beyond the SFDC Campaign Status as we’re looking for more follow-up results.
 
Looking to see how others are managing follow-up and/or suggestions you might have!

[Anonymous]

Hey Andrea,

This is an interesting discussion, as it's the exact issue we had at my previous organization before I left. We were experimenting with the following idea:

1. Set up a Marketo program and link it to a Salesforce Campaign code.
2. Build triggers that move the members through appropriate progression statuses.
3. Then, on the salesforce end, your reps see the list of leads who responded to the campaign (attended the webinar, downloaded the resource, etc).
4. When the rep calls their leads and log activities it is possible for them to associate that activity with a specific campaign code.
5. You can then run an activity history report of all activities logged against a given campaign to see follow up activity. (in SFDC)

Since you're running activity history reports against a campaign code that IS linked to Marketo via progression statuses, you should be able to paint a pretty clear picture of campaign performance vs sales follow up.

A couple caveats:

• Your sales reps have to actually log this stuff and associate it properly to the campaign codes for it to work. A phrase I've heard often is "if it's not in Salesforce, it didn't happen". Yet at our organization, we could never get our reps to record data consistently, so this strategy didn't end up working out for us. If your sales team is more disciplined, you'll have more luck I'm sure 🙂

• I seem to recall a technical limitation of the activity logging in Salesforce at the time (mind you, about 6 months ago) was that you could only associate an activity with a campaign code if the activity was logged against a contact. That is, you can't tie activity logs on leads to campaigns. It could have just been a configuration issue with our instance, or an actual feature limitation, but it was an issue at the time (I'm not currently using SFDC so I can't verify for you today).

Hope this info helps!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your response, Jeff. This has definitely sparked some new thoughts and I'll do some testing in our system. I still think there has to be an easier way to track Sales follow-up. It seems like something every Marketer would want to know.

Unfortunately, our sales team probably has the same "disipline" level!

Best,
Andrea