We’ve worked through each step in the lead generation system, and just like most things….we saved the best for last.

You learned about the lead funnel, you figured out how to qualify leads, we found where they hide, and how to snag them in your net, and you know who to give them to. Whew. It’s been a journey. So your job is done right? Ehhhhhhhhht! Nope. If you’re stopping short of understanding what happened to your precious little leads on their great big adventure, you’re missing the most valuable part of this process.

The challenging part about finding out what happened to the leads you signed, sealed, and delivered is that to analyze outcome data you had to do quite a few un-sexy infrastructure things at the beginning of your campaign. We’re going to take a few steps back to show you what you need to do before your first communications ever get sent out. Follow this process to make sure you’re tracking the essential data you’ll need to evaluate campaign success at the end. Before we dig in let’s cover the 2 tools we need to make all this key performance indicator (KPI) magic happen.

The Foundation of Your Brick House: Your CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms

Full disclosure, we nerd out on CRMs and marketing automation platforms at Red Brick. Our favorite combination is SalesForce.com for CRM combined with the HubSpot Marketing Hub for marketing automation so that’s the combo we’re going to talk about here. The concepts we’re discussing can be adapted to suit other software platforms so if you’re using something else don’t sweat it.

• CRM: This is the tool where we like to gather our business intelligence (we’re talking reporting). This is also the tool that the sales team uses. Our goal is to make data easy for sales to access, and accurate for us to track performance.

• Marketing Automation: No, we’re not just talking about a tool that sends email. Sure, marketing automation tools send mass email, but they also let you make landing pages, host forms, track objects to campaigns, perform data updates, pass data to your CRM, deploy pop ups, trigger engagement campaigns based on behavior, integrate with social media advertising campaigns, personalize customer and prospect experienced, deploy text messages…need us to go on…? We could….but you’re busy so we’ll just leave it there. Sales people do NOT work in marketing automation tools. They just go into the CRM to get the output of your hard work, it feels like magic to them…and well…marketing automation is pretty awesome.

Starting with the End in Mind

Here’s the checklist of goodies you’ll want to take care of BEFORE your campaign launches to make sure you’ve got the data you need at the end to ya know…make data-driven decisions. Impress your boss. Maybe become the boss…:)

Here’s how you do it with SalesForce for CRM + the HubSpot Marketing Hub for automation:

• Create a campaign in SalesForce.com for each distribution channel you’ll use for your messages. For example if you’re sending your campaign out through house email, organic social, paid social, and media partner a, media partner b, and media partner c, you’ll want to make a campaign for each. Nest them under a parent campaign to make it easier to see your comprehensive campaign performance later.

• Create member statuses in your SalesForce.com campaign so you can qualify the campaign members. For example, if someone submits a form, did they request a demo along with their submission or did they just fill out a form to get a free asset? Do you have an internal team who will work leads in the campaign and need to differentiate leads of different stages in the prospecting process? Member statuses are very useful for campaigns with a finite start and end date where sales will be actively working the members through some kind of qualification process.

• In HubSpot, create a form…or many. If we’re deploying a campaign that will be distributed through multiple media channels or advertising partners we make a form for each channel. These should align with the same SalesForce campaigns. you made in the previous step. This allows us to see how many submissions happened from each effort, and eventually, this is the key to finding out which marketing tactics resulted in the most sales. On the form use hidden fields to perform any relevant data updates. For example, if your marketing campaign is only aimed at small animal veterinarians and you have a data field for that—update it via a hidden field. You know what they say…garbage in, garbage out. Take the time to do these things, future you will thank past you for the extra 2 minutes spent. Set up form notifications on the form level to notify sales they’ve got something to work if you have a small organization with just a few people who will need to be notified. If you have a complex notification system…skip this step, we’ll talk about another way to do notifications later.

• In HubSpot create a landing page for each form, make sure you name them in a way you can tell which landing page was made for which use. For example, you may have a paid social landing page and form, an organic social media landing page and form, an in-house email landing page and form, you get the idea. These should match with the forms and SalesForce campaigns you already made.

• In HubSpot create a workflow for each distribution channel, this is how your data gets passed from HubSpot into SalesForce. Use the form submission as the enrollment trigger, set the contact as marketing contacts if you need to email them or are enrolling them in nurturing emails as part of your sequence, perform any data updates or lead ownership assignments, then assign the SalesForce.com campaign and member status they should have (this is the most critical piece). If you have SalesForce lead assignment rules in place, especially ones that are dependent upon data fields like two cap states (everyone’s white whale…), make sure your data is in order so it maps correctly. Nobody like sync errors. Nobody.

• Dealers choice on this one—you can set up sales rep notifications either on the form submission level, in the HubSpot workflow, or on SalesForce side so that sales knows they have a hot lead. Your internal workflow will dictate where you do it….just make sure…you do it somewhere, and you test it.

• Create a dashboard in SalesForce that visualizes your campaign members, opportunity pipeline, and closed won deals. This is what you’ll show to management and how you can check in on your campaign regularly.

• I promised in the last post we’d talk about hounding sales people, this is the point where that begins. For all this magic to work we need group participation. Sales team members must convert leads into opportunities and your SalesForce campaign has to be listed as the primary campaign source on the opportunity record. Without this…no ROI tracking, full stop. They also need to make sure they add products to the deal (with a dollar amount), and they need to keep the opportunity stage accurate (most importantly we need to know when things are closed won and closed lost)

Now you can look at your dashboard and see how many people have engaged with your campaign, how many are deals, and how many sold. Ta-Da!!! Because you tracked it on a tactic level you can also see which tactics were most successful. You can look at the conversion rate of demo requests to opportunities, and the conversion rate of opportunities to sales.

Once you’ve done this for a few campaigns you’ll be able to benchmark internally and project campaign results before you’ve deployed a single tactic.

Need an Expert? We’ve Got You

We know, it’s a lot. Lead generation is a symphony of strategy and incredibly detailed tactics. Maybe it’s your jam—maybe it’s not. If it’s not, or you need a partner in the process, great news, that’s what we do :).