A Flow for your Contact Role Woes – Mardreamin Preview

We are so excited to share that two of Cloudtegic’s fabulous Pardot consultants, Teresa Suan and Max Bradley, will share their knowledge and skills at the upcoming Mardreamin. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect from their session on achieving accurate marketing attribution Salesforce reporting by optimizing the use of Contact Roles with Flow. You can catch their full presentation, “Tips & Tricks: A Flow for your Contact Role Woes”, virtually on November 3rd. Salesforce Reporting – Demonstrating Marketing and Sales Success In Salesforce, the object known as “Opportunity Contact Role” is the link between Contacts (the people we market to) and Opportunities (where the revenue data is stored). It’s how we get to marketing attribution reporting and the key to Campaign Influence.

• Marketing attribution – Marketing attribution evaluates the marketing touchpoints a consumer encounters on their purchase path and is essential in demonstrating marketing ROI. With Contact Roles, everything is tracked to see marketing attribution from the beginning stages of marketing interaction with a customer. In short, this is how marketing gets recognition for their efforts.
• Campaign Influence – Campaign Influence is arguably one of the most underutilized features of Salesforce. When leveraged effectively, it helps marketing demonstrate ROI and show exactly which campaigns are influencing the pipeline. Campaign Influence reporting gives marketers the tools to demonstrate how their efforts contribute to revenue. But often, when marketers and admins go through the process of enabling Campaign Influence, they find that they don’t have the data they need to fuel these reports. Campaign Influence works by linking Contacts to Campaigns (via Campaign Member records) and Contacts to Opportunities (via Contact Roles).

How Contact Roles work:

• Pardot prospects are closely connected with their associated Salesforce Contact record
• Contact records do not have a direct relationship with Opportunities
• To get around this, Salesforce developed an object called “Contact Role”, which creates a link between Contacts and their role in an Opportunity
• Contact Roles are “the bridge” that connects Opportunity records to Contact records

Without Contact Roles, marketing attribution is completely disregarded in the sales process, and marketing’s contribution to revenue eventually becomes forgotten. The Contact Role is critical to demonstrating how marketing efforts contribute to revenue and designating one (or more) is a strongly encouraged best practice. We know what you’re thinking… How do we make sure Contact Roles are used for proper marketing attribution? We’ve heard all the push-back on using Contact Roles. Change is hard, and enforcing new behaviors among an already slammed sales team is even harder! We propose using a simple solution, combining a Validation Rule and a Salesforce Flow to make the Contact Role required on the Opportunity object. The Solution: Build a Flow and a Validation Rule that requires a Contact Role upon saving an Opportunity record. Register for Mardreamin to catch Max and Teresa’s presentation and see the full demonstration.