It really was a long time coming. We've been working on this for what feels like forever! We finally were able to prove to our CMO that we could get better reporting and show him examples of the types of reports in Salesforce. He took those to our Sales EVP to show what is possible. That got us the OK to go ahead and roll out the new procedure to our sales reps.
Getting our sales reps to actually do it has been the nightmare, but since we have our sales EVP's approval, we get to send nasty emails each week for any opportunities that have been created without a contact associated. We trained our reps on the new procedure without anything else. We used the basic what's in it for me and explained that by adding contacts to opportunities, it would fill out the campaign influence section of the opportunity. Then our analysts could use that to see which campaigns are working and make recommendations to our product marketing managers. Basically, the reps were told by doing this, we could see what works and by knowing what works, we could get them better leads that should lead to more sales. I really think all they heard was more sales and were onboard. The training for the reps took a whole 15 minutes since it really is a simple new workflow.
One thing to note is that our reps are already used to adding products when they create an opportunity. Since adding a contact is a similar procedure, we don't have quite as hard a time as others do. Their new workflow is create the opportunity and then immediately add a product and add the contact roles associated with the opportunity.
To monitor, we have a simple short report in SFDC that shows any new opportunities that are created and do not include any contact roles. This goes to our sales managers and our marketing analyst. The reps are notified by their managers and they have learned that the same agency better never show up on that report more than once! We do have a few reps that are notorious for forgetting to add the roles, but we catch them every Monday and that's the first thing they do each week.
It's not perfect, but at least it's getting the job done and I have contacts on my opportunities now! It would be nice if SFDC had native capabilities that you couldn't save the record without adding a product or contact, but we made do with what we have.
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