Why Sales Needs To Use Contact Roles

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Hi All!

After getting new and exciting report ideas from Marketo Summit​, I ran back into a little issue that comes up for almost every marketing team. I needed more information in salesforce in order to make these new reports mean something! One of those salesforce things I needed was contact roles. I have stressed the importance of this information to sales, but it didn't stick for long. So, I created this slide deck, attached, and shared on a call. This can be used for stressing a specific field, or just to stress the importance of filling out all fields with care in salesforce. Obviously, I'm preaching to the choir on this outlet, but I thought maybe some of you are going through the same thing and could use these high level slides to remind sales to use contact roles. Enjoy!

[Anonymous]

Thank you! This is one of my struggles right now and had an internal webinar with Sales about it. Still fight each step of the way to get this on their to do lists when working a lead!!

[Anonymous]

Thanks this is very helpful!

[Anonymous]

Awesome - and I love the images with it! Nearly every client I've had has not used contact roles, and it means you're missing out on important analytics on both sides! I have figured out ways in SFDC to make the field mandatory, which does help adoption, and also create adoption reports to show who is keeping in line.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Amanda,

Thx, this is useful.

FYI, this is an issue that we face on almost all of the projects. You may also want to point out that the absence of contacts roles reveals a sales management weakness and a compliance issue:

• If a sales person quits, how do we know how we should talk to and there role on the ongoing opportunity?
• In a business review, one of the key questions that is being asked is : who are you talking to? Are these persons able to make a decision? ... So if this is asked, why not just putting it in the system so thta we remember next week?

Also, in SFDC, there is no way you can control this easily by default. But adding some controls on this is not that a hard task:

• Start to remove the "new opportunity" button from the account layout sub lists. Sales will then have to go to the opportunity tab to create an oppy or to the contact, in which case you will have at least 1 contact in the contact roles
• You also can create some SFDC triggers or process builders to compute the number of contact roles in an oppy and, once this is done, you can set validation rules on the oppy to check minimum number of contacts are appended to the oppy. Usually, you check this in combination with the stage of the oppy. It is acceptable that an oppy has no contact role at the very beginning of the sales cycle, but not when getting close to closing.

-Greg

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Great additions! Thanks, Gregoire Michel! I really like the validation rules idea. I think I might set one up where they can't mark it closed won without having at least a primary contact.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

By the way, I never know how to tag you, Greg! lol There seems to be a plethora of profiles to choose from.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

The only real one is the one marked (primary) and my photo as an avatar . Other are from my customer's instances.

An easy way to tag someone without error is to copy the link (right click -> copy link address) of the author of a post or an answer.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Amanda,

The validation rule is the easy piece You will need a field to count the number of contacts roles to apply the validation rule. The tricky part is to compute the value of this field, as you cannot use a rollup summary field. This will take a trigger.

-Greg

[Adam_Benitez1]

While at Summit, I heard about this SFDC free app that requires Opportunities to have identified Contact Role or Primary Contact Assigned at a certain stage in the Opportunity Selling Process. An easily customizable validation rule to fit your specific selling methodology.

The app is called

Opportunity Contact Roles Validation

and can be found here: Opportunity Contact Roles Validation - Pactera Technology International, Ltd. - AppExchange

I'm looking to test it out with our company as well.