Measuring Marketing’s Impact on Sales Pipeline

• Pardot
• Salesforce

Multi-Touch Attribution using Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns

Your prospects don’t just come to your website and click buy. The modern customer journey involves a lot of research before the first contact, multiple marketing touches and several interactions with sales. This is even more true for complex products which have longer buying cycles and usually involve multiple decision makers.  

Which campaign will receive credit when multiple marketing campaigns touch the same prospect resulting in an opportunity creation?   You want to measure how your marketing initiatives are tied to business results. However this is not a straightforward process. There are more ways to credit marketing activities which impact sales and there are a couple methodologies which you can use.  

Marketing is not just money down the drain. Marketers have a real impact on the organization’s bottom line. You just need to use these attribution models to prove it. You also need a marketing automation platform like Pardot automation solution to track everything. This blog post will walk you through those examples and how you can use Salesforce to measure that.  

1. Definitions
2. Salesforce Campaigns
3. Pardot
4. Example
5. Campaign View
6. Opportunity Stage History
7. Opportunity Campaign Influence
8. First- Touch (FT) Attribution
9. Pipeline Credit
10. Revenue Credit
11. Multi-Touch (MT) Attribution
12. Multi-Touch Pipeline Credit
13. Multi-Touch Revenue Credit
14. Summary Comparison

Data-driven marketers should continue to ask the following questions:  

• In which marketing campaigns should I continue to invest?
• Which marketing campaigns should I abandon or what should I change?
• Which campaign helped you acquire new prospects?
• What is the cost per new name for each type of campaign?
• Which campaigns influenced the most Opportunities, pipeline and revenue?
• How much pipeline credit is last quarter’s webinar getting?

 

Definitions

Understand the following concepts is crucial when measuring marketing’s impact on sales.  

• Pipeline Credit - When sales opens an Opportunity in Salesforce
• Revenue Credit - When sales successfully closes an Opportunity in Salesforce
• Attribution - Method of crediting Opportunity value to one or many marketing activities

 

Salesforce Campaigns

are essential in tracking all your marketing activities and touch points. They can have both Leads and Contacts as members. You can categorize your marketing activities, measure the success of each activity and tie them into Opportunities.

 

Pardot

In Salesforce Pardot you can use Pardot Completion Actions for emails and forms to change the Salesforce Campaign member status of your Leads and Contact prospects. This will indicate they successfully performed your call to action in your marketing campaign.

 

Example

Date	Department	Activity	Campaign	Cost
January 2016	Marketing	Prospects Registers for Webinar Campaign	WBN 2016 Learn About Us	$3000
February 2016	Marketing	Prospect Performs the Call to Action in Email Blast	EB 2016 Infographic	$1000
March 2016	Sales	Opportunity is Created for $100,000	-	-
April 2016	Marketing	Prospects Downloads Whitepaper from the Website	WC 2016 Advance Tech Specs	$5000
May 2016	Sales	Opportunity is Closed Won for $80,000	-	-

    In Salesforce it will look something like this:

Campaign View

 

Opportunity Stage History

 

Opportunity Campaign Influence

 

First- Touch (FT) Attribution

Simply means giving credit to the campaign that acquires a prospect.

 

Pipeline Credit

Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit for that opportunity? The initial campaign will receive 100% Pipeline Credit for that Opportunity, simply because the opportunity was created.  

Campaign	Cost	Pipeline Credit
WBN 2016 Learn About Us	$3000	$100,000

 

Revenue Credit

Which campaign should receive Revenue Credit for that opportunity? The campaign that acquired the prospect gets 100% of the Revenue Credit if that opportunity closes.  

Campaign	Cost	Revenue Credit
WBN 2016 Learn About Us	$3000	$80,000

  Your Pardot Campaign Report is a good place to monitor FT attributions:

 

Multi-Touch (MT) Attribution

Simply means giving credit across all campaigns evenly when a prospects achieves success in multiple campaigns. The prospect must achieve a successful responded campaign status for all the marketing activities they participated in.

 

Pipeline Credit

Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit when multiple campaigns touch the same prospects resulting in an opportunity? Only the January Webinar and February Email Blast will split the credit because they occurred before the opportunity was created. The Web Content campaign does not receive any credit because it happened after the opportunity was opened.  

Campaign	Cost	Pipeline Credit
WBN 2016 Learn About Us	$3000	$50,000
EB 2016 Infographic	$1000	$50,000

 

Revenue Credit

Which campaigns should receive Revenue Credit when multiple campaigns touch the same prospects resulting in an opportunity? The revenue credit is split among the January Webinar, February Email Blast and April Whitepaper Download.  

Campaign	Cost	Revenue Credit
WBN 2016 Learn About Us	$3000	$33,333
EB 2016 Infographic	$1000	$33,333
WC 2016 Advance Tech Specs	$5000	$33,333

 

Summary Comparison

You shouldn’t have to decide on which method to use. You can’t always use one or the other. Both methodologies are very beneficial and you must be comfortable with the differences between them so you can make sound decisions when allocating your marketing dollars.  

First-Touch (FT)	Multi-Touch (MT)
Pardot Campaign or the initial Salesforce Campaign determines marketing influence.	Responded Status in multiple Salesforce Campaigns determines marketing influence
Salesforce Campaign Responded status is not required	Salesforce Campaign Responded status is required

What are some of the ways you measure your marketing return on investment (ROI) using Salesforce? I love bringing together both marketing and sales executive to discuss measuring marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Let me know what you think in the comments below or email me at CRMexpert@Macromator.com if you are looking for advance marketing tracking in Salesforce.