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]

Just getting started with Marketo and this is PERFECT for me to help communicate to our sales people why they need to add the Contact Roles. And as a bonus, the slides are very funny as well. I always like to use humor to talk people into doing something they may not want to do.

[Anonymous]

Thanks amanda, very nice!

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much!

This is marvelous. Love your humor and your insight.

Best regards,

Lynn Ray

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Aw. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Nice job Amanda Thomas​

[Anonymous]

This is great, Amanda, thanks for the resource!

[Chris_Willis1]

Amanda Thomas​ This deck is really great.  Have you seen a good response from your Sales reps since presenting this deck? 

What type of sales profile are most of these folks?  I have conducted the same type of presentations (less the cool memes), and because our reps are mainly outside reps we get varying levels of compliance.  I've found that most of these trainings tend to get institutionalized more quickly with inside reps or SDR types. 

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Hey Chris Willis​! Great questions! We're a start up comprised of 3 outside reps one in WA, one in CO, and one in GA. That definitely makes it a little harder to implement things, but luckily, as a small group we work closely with the CEO.

The CEO has a weekly sales review with them every Monday, where they go through pipeline and projections. I put together all the reporting, graphs, and the slide deck he uses for the Monday call on Friday. So on Friday we review the presentation, and I present him with one salesforce idea. (What needs to be better, what's new, etc.) This way he learns why we're doing what we're doing and how it benefits the company. Then he touches on the topic Monday, and I present on the topic Tuesday during our sales ops call. It seems a little redundant, but having the CEO telling the reps the need for something, gives my call to action precedence and more credibility.

As for enforcing, I just presented this on Tuesday. Next Tuesday, as part of the sales ops call, I will pull an opportunities with contact roles report to share. That way all of us can see progress made!

[Anonymous]

Great presentation. I'd mostly given up on it ever happening so we switched to the hybrid model in RCE. It's not perfect but better than getting no roles on opportunities. Our sales leadership won't let us make Contact Role required. "Nags" to complete it are built in, but the percent completion is still atrocious. I may try your approach and see if it helps. Thanks again.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Hey Mike Turner. I hear ya. It's a battle to make something required, but it's so much easier to get the contact role down then to back track it. I've had to go from opportunities to account to all contacts, to all activity, manually, to pull information. There is so much time wasted in that method and lots of room for human error. I haven't checked out the "hybrid model in RCE". Something I'll look into.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for putting this together. We see this all the time too. Getting Sales to adhere to process is a big challenge for everyone. Its great that you took the step to educate the team.

[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.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Awesome! Thank You Adam Benitez​!

[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.

[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

[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

[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.

[Anonymous]

Thanks this is very helpful!