Multi Touch attribution With*OUT* contact roles possible?

[Eric_Lew1]

Hi there!

Setting up contact roles in Salesforce is a pain that I'd rather not force on my sales team unless absolutely necessary. Is it possible to do multi-touch attribution without it? Searching on these forums I've found lots of complaints about getting sales to update contact roles (and this is my experience as well), so I have to believe we are not the first company to try to do this.

So far the options I've come up with are:

1 - Upgrade to SFDC enterprise and get a developer to write some custom APEX code to assign ALL contacts to ALL opportunities on their account. In some ways this defeats the purpose of contact roles, but at least it makes seeing a single list of all campaigns that influenced an opportunity easier.

2 - Each time an opp is closed, run a report that shows all campaigns any contact in the account is a member of. Manually track this data in a spreadsheet and aggregate for statistics.

Is there any other way I'm not thinking about? Are people really enforcing contact roles requirements on large active sales teams? This sounds like a nightmare to me. This thread discusses the challenges of getting contact roles: Why Sales Needs To Use Contact Roles

Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Eric,

There a few other things you can do:

• Make sure that all opportunities are create from a contact. At least you will have a minimum of 1 contact for each oppy. For this, you will have to remove the "create" opportunity button from the account page layouts (easy) and also remove the "new" button from the opportunity tab screen (harder, requires some VF) or at least make sure that this button on the opp tab screen is inactive and replaced by a message indicating to the sales tey should go through a contact.
• Add some apex code that count the number of contact roles in the oppy and create a validation rule so that no opportunity is set to "won" without at least 1 contact role.
• Add some field directly into the opportunity (lookup fields to contacts), one for each primary role (decision marker, sponsor, technical) and have some apex that feed the contact role with these contacts. As these lookup fields will be part of the opportunity object, you will be able to set complex validation rules so that, depending on oppy type or status, the various contact roles are provided.

Greg

[Eric_Lew1]

Thanks for the quick reply Grégoire Michel​! All of these suggestions are great but I forgot to mention we are on professional edition.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I had gotten that, based on your statement that you would upgrade to the EE

The point 1 can be at least partially implemented in PE

As upgrading is considered, I added all the possibilities...

-Greg

[Jessica_Kao3]

Assuming you have RCE, go to the RCE settings, set it to implicit and that will take care of it.  Basically if Company A has an opportunity.  Any program that has a member from Company A that reached a success step will be given credit.  This setting is ideal for addressing situations such as sales folks not being consistent about adding contact roles on to opportunities.  The other two settings is explicit and hybrid. 

[Eric_Lew1]

Thanks Jessica Kao ! We don't have RCE, but this sounds like a solution.

[Morgan_Corbett]

Jessica Kao​ - what do the other two options do? Do you now if you can revert back to original reporting after you make the setting's change? I want to try it out, but I saw Marketo's caution note: Marketo strongly recommends using Explicit mode. Using Implicit may create false positives, people with credit for an opportunity despite having no real influence in the opportunity. Use with caution.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Also, Eric Lew​, we're exploring "Magic robot" as an option for Salesforce, so that we can keep the data between Marketo and Salesforce consistent.