Smart Lists with Complex Triggers and Filters tied to SFDC Opportunities, Program Status Changes, Dates, and ROI

[Anonymous]

I've got what may be a complex challenge that involves Marketo program status success and Salesforce opportunities. I'm trying to enable some more advanced tagging of opportunities in Salesforce for reporting purposes, similar to the Primary Campaign Source and Campaign Influence functionality. In SFDC, influence and source credit is rather unwieldy, not super friendly or easy to tweak. And while Marketo has done some good work improving upon their revenue cycle analytics, I still prefer to report on campaign impact out of SFDC, where the rest of my organization is managing everythign else.

Here's what I'd like to do. I need a smart campaign that is triggered when a lead is added to an opportunity, where... 

1. Opportunity Type is not Renewal
2. Program Status for any program was changed and Success is True up to 180 days BEFORE the Opportunity SFDC Created Date

For all leads that are processed by this, I would then want to update a custom opportunity field called Campaign Source as TRUE. Essentially, I'm trying to mark all opportunities with contact roles for people who responded prior to the creation of the deal within a recent timeframe, calling these sourced by marketing. Like I mentioned before, Primary Campaign Source kind of does it, but it only works when the opportunity is created from a lead conversion, or direct from a contact. If contacts are added later on with responses in the "prior to" window, those responses don't get credit. And I can't trust my sales team to always create opportunities from the right contact or lead at the right time.

Here's a screenshot of my initial brainstorm for the smart list, which definitely won't work. I think I would need the ability to enter a token for the opportunity field SFDC Created Date in the Date of Activity filter.



I fear there is no solution to this, and Marketo can't actually connect and process all of these data points. But I'm curious if anyone has some ideas of how this could work. Thanks!

[Brigid_Greenwa2]

Hi Harrison-
Since this is a trigger, why would you put a date on the trigger itself - it should fire automatically upon creation without it?

I hear your pain though - know it well!
 

[Anonymous]

Yeah, don't really need to put that date constraint on the trigger, but added it because it was the only way I could find the SFDC Created Date field for display so I could screenshot all of the elements I'm trying to incorporate. One of those struggles where you know the system is storing all the pieces to the puzzle, but they don't want to fit together!

[Anonymous]

I'm assuming your sales reps are adding contact roles to opportunities as the deal progresses and not just when it's created, correct? You're implying that here, just want to make sure that's the case.

[Anonymous]

Exactly. Sales don't always add people initially, or more contacts are discovered as the deal progresses. Those contacts may have interacted with campaigns previously, which certainly affect the opportunity. Sometimes multiple contacts source the deal, but you can only create the op from one at a time, so if they pick one that wasn't tied to a deal PCS is missed. This is how I view marketing impact in a perfect world:



The R circles represent responses of success, and they could be coming from many different contacts who have roles on the same opportunity. R2, R3, and R4 would all get reported in SFDC as campaign influence, and R3 should get Primary Campaign Source. I feel strongly that Influence is the metric that teams should focus on, but we all know that CEOs want to know source value as well, despite it not painting the full picture of the value marketing brings.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, that's tough then. You'd need some kind of formula to calculate the delta of the contact role addition to the opportunity and the success status on the program. I can't think of a way to do that in either Marketo or SFDC. I've done some similar reporting in the past, but it's always been one-off and done in Excel.

On the bright side, at least you have more than one contact role on your opportunities.

[Josh_Hill13]

I'd take a strong look at using Full Circle CRM or constructing your own out of Campaign Member Status and running these triggers in SFDC, not Marketo. Apex code is what you need here.

[Anonymous]

I took a demo with Full Circle a couple of months back. It is awesome, and solves for this problem as well as many others. However, the price point is high, and I've been able to hack together enough of my own system with Marketo and Salesforce to get me close enough. It is too bad Marketo can't go deep enough to cheat this process, like it can in many other ways. But if someone was looking to solve it without re-inventing the wheel or banging their head on a desk for too long, Full Circle is the way to go.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Harrison Yeager,

One of the things you could do here is to prevent sales from creating opportunities from nowhere in SFDC :

• Remove the "create opportunity" button from the account screen layouts (5 minutes per layout...)
• Create a small VisualForce screen that just prompts a message "to create an opporunity, please select a contact and create the opportunity from there" and replace the "new" button in the opportunity tab with this page. (about 1 hour work).

It will not solve everything, but at least, you will stop having opportunities without contacts.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

I've usually trusted the reps to create from the right contact initially 60% of the time, and done weekly audits with the help of Excel to manually mark PCS. Tedious, but then reporting works. Always looking for a way to automate this more, and I thought Marketo might have some trickery.

I'm not an Apex coder, and don't have the budget to have someone work on this, but I use visual work flows and work flow triggers pretty regularly. I'm going to play around with that and try and think of something. The challenge lies with how "Campaign Influence" is built in SFDC. It is one of those weird bridge relationships that can't be referenced in Apex to my knowledge. Thanks for the suggestions everyone, and glad to know the challenge I'm trying to solve at least makes sense and isn't too crazy!