ROI and Connected Campaigns: Your Source for Attribution Reporting in Salesforce Pardot

Hello, and welcome to an another X Force presentation. This one's by, Jennifer from Cheshire Impact, Jennifer Schneider. And she's, gonna talk to us about Pardot, and she said it's a it's a good introductory presentation about Pardot, which is great. And, hopefully, I'll be able to ask her a few questions as we go along. But here's Jennifer.

Absolutely. Thank you. Hey, guys. Glad to be able to talk to you guys virtually.

And I'm sure I'll see many more of you on the road as we finally can start to travel again, hopefully, sometime soon. But today, we're gonna talk a little bit about ROI in Connected Campaigns. Now for most of you, you've probably heard of this feature, and you've probably been forced into Connected Campaigns by now. But there is some definite strategy behind this, and it's absolutely crucial to your ROI.

So whether you're a beginner trying to figure out the strategy, or perhaps you've already implemented it, and you're looking to how to connect that with your opportunities, this is a really great roadmap that you can take home and take to your org and implement today. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. So moving on to that agenda and understanding the flow, we're actually going to look at the slide multiple times today, continuing to come back to that particular roadmap because order of operations is extremely important. We're gonna talk about how do you decide to structure your campaign hierarchy, something that I think a lot of companies overlook when they enable connected campaigns.

We're also going to talk about what should be amended, how to enable that campaign influence, the Pardot Lightning app, where to build those Salesforce dashboards first, and again, how that b to b m a marketing comes into play at the end.

Alright. So let's talk a little bit about this. It's really important to be strategic. I have a lot of people ask me, well, where do I start? Am I just connecting a one to one relationship between Pardot and Salesforce?

Now, if you are legacy and you haven't used connected campaigns, I'm gonna give you an overview of what it means in a second here. Basically, you in the past had the ability to have a Pardot campaign that was attached to your marketing, and you had a Salesforce campaign. And they were two separate things. No longer. Salesforce is the only place now that you create your campaigns. And all of your assets, your engagement under a particular initiative, let's say a webcast or an event, all belong to that one Salesforce campaign.

You can also then tile, of course, sales activities, opportunities, and items within your Salesforce org to that campaign as well. So think of the campaign object as your glue. That is what is going to bring that information from marketing to sales and on your Sales Cloud platform.

Great. Now we understand what they are, where do I even start with this? The first thing I like to have you ask yourself is what is it that you report on? What are you being asked to report on? Now as a marketer, you may have a selection of reports that are important to you. And as a salesperson, you'll have a different set of reports.

Your minute managerial plea places may have different pieces of things they wanna report on, and your c suite might have a whole different view on the company. So this isn't just about you. It's really important to get a representation from the entire company, your ops, your sales, definitely your Salesforce admin, your c suite, and marketing together and say, as a company, what are the things that we want to measure? Because if you don't get your campaign hierarchy right, you'll be doing a lot of rework in the years to come.

So think about what can be bucketed. So when I say bucketed, once we've determined those things that we wanna report on, is it product?

Is it our webinars versus our events? Do we have particular content that we're actually purchasing? And we wanna be able to compare pieces of content against each other to understand if we're gonna spend five thousand for a white paper, what are we bringing in the door? What kind of opportunities are coming in the door that we've influenced through that specific piece of content? So those are the type of questions that you wanna ask and you wanna start to create your buckets.

Now, other people also bucket things by maybe division or sector or business unit, region or product, my EMEA versus my US or my product A versus my product B.

ABM, great big buzzword. Spend that way for a few years now, but maybe we have an ABM focus. You've got twenty five top accounts that we really feel are important. We wanna track both marketing and sales activities.

That then would become one of your buckets as well.

Again, content focus, we touched on that and type of communication. So that's where we would talk about things like webinars versus events. If we really wanna focus in on all of the virtual events that we're doing, and I think now is a really timely event for that. It's really we really need to understand how we're reaching out virtually. You may wanna create a separate bucket for those webcasts or those webinars to understand the traction that you're getting on a virtual basis.

The other thing that you have to think about is, is it repeatable? We wanna create a hierarchy that's scalable. So once we create those parent buckets, you're not recreating those every year or every quarter. Our parents stay consistent and the children, which are our children campaigns, which are initiatives, those change from year to year and we date those accordingly.

And the last thing that this type of piece does for you is it allows for this great year over year comparison.

If you have everything rolling up to a parent campaign and you create a dashboard, you can say, alright, let's look at my statistics from last year. Let's look at my statistics from this year, all in the same dashboard just using dashboard filters inside of Salesforce. So we have a lot to talk about, but those are definitely the things to consider. You can see on the screen, I have kind of a makeshift hierarchy of things to think about. Again, those parent folders are those buckets. We don't have any assets associated with them. Children that roll up to them, however, have all of the assets specific to that initiative attached to that child campaign.

So Jennifer, what kind of granularity would you consider for a parent bucket? Is it all conference outreach this year or is it a specific conference? Like, you you go to Dreamforce every year? What do you recommend for that?

That's a great question. So most of the time, I would recommend a parent events or conferences bucket that again is gonna last you for years to come. Dreamforce two thousand twenty is a child campaign. Dreamforce two thousand twenty one is an additional child campaign.

You can have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of campaigns under that parent. And we're gonna filter by start and end date to only look at the results that are relevant to us at a period of time. So, yes, your Dreamforce twenty twenty would be a campaign. All the emails, landing pages, customer redirects, everything that you're doing for that particular event belongs to one campaign so that we can not only repeat what we did the year before, but measure apples to apples.

Great.

Great question.

Alright. So we're gonna bring this down a little bit again and break this down. I've given a lot to you on that first slide. So just keep it simple.

Keep it to twenty or less. I think it's really important to understand that you're not gonna hit this out of the ballpark the very first time. You're gonna have an idea of what you want. You're going to be struggling to grasp this new concept, which is a new way that many marketers are having to think.

So again, bucket, keep it to twenty or less.

Now we're also gonna talk about the relationship between your Salesforce hierarchy and your Pardot folder structure.

Now many people just utilize the uncategorized folders, all landing pages go in one folder, emails go on one. And while that can work for some companies, I think it's even more effective to mirror your campaign hierarchy to your Pardot folder structure. And this does a few things. One, it gives that end user the ability to kind of mindfully say, if these assets are in my Dreamforce two thousand twenty folder, they should all be associated to my Dreamforce two thousand twenty campaign. If your asset is not associated with a consistent campaign or a group of assets, there goes all your reporting.

Everything ties to the campaign, unless you wanna look at each email individually and spend eight hours creating a spreadsheet, which is what we're trying to avoid. So let's figure out how we create that structure. So think about your master folder in Pardot, and that's equal to your parent campaign in Salesforce. And so again, it's those buckets. My ABM top accounts is my master folder. I double click in there and I maybe see each one of my accounts or I see my two thousand and twenty initiative.

That twenty twenty initiative is going to be equal to the child campaign. Again, if we're looking at the spreadsheet, we can see here that events as a parent, it's tied to my master folder in Pardot. The actual initiative, one of my events is a child campaign and it's child tied to a project folder, which houses all of my assets in one place.

Everything rolls up to the master. So think about your those reporting categories. When I create a dashboard with a filter of the parent event, you get a line item of every event that you executed, and then you get to see things like how many emails were delivered in an aggregate view, how many form fills, how many form views. Your attribution and ROI is specific to an event of the engagement of the assets tied to that event. The only thing that makes that possible is that campaign hierarchy and that structure.

Again, by utilizing a very structured and organized folder structure, you're able to empower those end users to understand the process. I think adoption is probably the biggest place where we fall flat. We have to make sure that we create a process that is is something that our end users can can do easily and understand and be organized.

I think that's a very important piece that we miss.

So this is going to then take it down to the next level. I wanna take take a look at what this might look like inside of Salesforce, which is on the right in Salesforce Lightning. And on the left, we have our Pardot folder structure. So if I were to look at all of my campaigns, I see that I have my top content.

Just kidding.

There we go. I have my top content, my ABM accounts, events, products. Notice that my naming convention inside of Salesforce for these parent campaigns is exactly the same as the naming convention in my Pardot folders. Again, it doesn't do anything that we're doing it this way other than make sure that our process, our training, and our end users understand what belongs to what.

Alright. Now we're gonna take it down one more level. We're gonna talk about our project folders, our child campaigns, that actual event. So again, I have some examples here of Southeast dreaming or our product, our world tour in New York. Each of these is an individual event.

Each of these have their own folder that's going to be nested under that parent folder. So before we looked at the parent events folder, I double click in Pardot and I will have a project folder for every event that I'm going to execute this year.

And how that relates to Salesforce is that on the Salesforce side, you're going to see those as child campaigns that roll up to the parent.

Let's take a look and see what that looks like inside of Salesforce. So again, we see our children on the left hand side. They're rolling up to our parents event campaign.

And in Pardot, you can see that we've represented again the same naming convention within our folder structure and the child campaign. So if I were to double click on that Southeast streaming folder, I would see my Southeast streaming campaign, all my emails, my landing pages, and any assets that I would create.

Project folders equal child campaigns. A child campaign for every project. So we're keeping it a little high level today and saying yes, one campaign per project.

Are there situations where you're going to wanna nest some things under there? You've got different groups participating? Absolutely. But that is a little bit more of an advanced conversation and it's something that you'd wanna do one on one and keep unique to your organization.

All right, so let's kind of look at the asset level. So as you can see, we have a theme here. We're taking things down level by level. The first level, what are our buckets?

Parent events. The second level, what are the events that we're executing?

World tour, Southeast streaming. And the third level is your asset level. So if I double click in my project folder, here's what I see inside of Pardot.

Notice my naming convention, consistent across the board with the asset name at the end. Notice the use of tags, Southeast Streaming. So if I wanna use b to b m a later and I wanna say, I want to know all the assets that I utilized in regards to Southeast streaming and how they performed, I can utilize that tag.

On the right, you can see its correlation to the structure.

Here we have the child project folder and all of the assets for the entire event living in one folder. This allows me as an end user to say, okay, here's my campaign. I need to make sure that each and every one of these emails, forms, and everything are associated to this same campaign.

If you had your landing pages in one and your emails in another folder, it's up to your memory to make sure to go back in there and associate those to the correct campaign.

Let's go back to our roadmap.

Now at this point in time, we've created our campaign hierarchy. One thing I haven't touched on is people often struggle with how far do I go back? If I'm a legacy org and I've got campaigns, Pardot campaigns going back five, six years, where do I start? Pick a date.

Is it this year? Is it the last twelve months? The last nine months? Pick a date, set it and move forward.

We've decided and had the initial conversation of what do we report on as an organization, not as a marketing team, as an organization. Otherwise, you'll be redoing your entire hierarchy in six months when you start talking about attribution.

Then the next steps, you're going to be amending or institute that folder naming convention. Mirror your folders inside of Pardot to mimic your campaign hierarchy and create a naming convention that everyone in the company uses.

Now, I have got a lot of clients that use brackets and acronyms like ET for email template, F for form, FH for form handler. This helps shorten that naming convention.

I've also had clients create Excel docs where they can input information and it spits out a naming convention for their team. Make sure that it's consistent, it's going to be extremely important. Remember, Hardot isn't a standalone tool, it's part of Salesforce. So your admin is going to need to be with you, you're going to need to have access to that campaign object, and just make sure that you're aligning things across the board.

The fourth piece is creating that Salesforce campaign hierarchy.

Once you've determined what campaigns in Salesforce you want to keep, you're going to create that Salesforce hierarchy.

You're gonna amend those Pardot campaigns to make sure that they mimic each other, and then you're going to map them. Once you map them, you're gonna close the loop. Moving forward, you only create campaigns in Salesforce.

Let's talk a little bit more about the following processes.

Once all of those items are done, you now have some pretty cool features that you can take advantage of.

One of those features is called campaign engagement history. If this is not what your campaign object looks like today, it should be. There's actually been a lot of advances in the last six months, more than what I'm going to show you today, but I'm just going to give you some high level quick wins of what's happening.

So now that your list emails, your forms, your form handlers, all of your good stuff are actually objects inside Salesforce, you have the ability to report on them in Salesforce. So the very first thing that you're seeing here is your engagement cards. You can see your email open rate, click through rate, all of the things that you would have had to go to the asset prior to determine.

There's also this cool little feature called include child campaigns. If you look to the right, you can see this little toggle. Once you toggle that, all of the children, again, those events we talked about and the assets associated with them, those statistics are gonna roll up to the parent. So you can see a total overall engagement of your entire efforts underneath that particular parent. That's why choosing those buckets is so very important.

All right, I'm gonna ask, might be a dumb question, but No. You know, companies change marketing strategies a lot. So what happens if, you know, you've got your top level bucket and then you have a few things under that bucket and they said, no, we want to report on these things over here.

Say decided that a webinar isn't a conference. At one point, they decided it a conference or whatever.

How hard is it to go back two years and just move everything over? Is it even possible?

Yeah. Campaign hierarchy is not retroactive in Salesforce. So what in that case, would recommend starting a new hierarchy of your bucket. You can absolutely re nest those campaigns physically, but the data that's associated is not retroactive and won't roll up to the new parent.

So for instance, if you had a parent of, let's say, conferences and events, and you wanted to also roll in webcast into that and you had two separate hierarchies, you could definitely re nest the children to that newly named parent. But when you clicked on the include child campaigns, that engagement would not roll up. Only future engagement would roll up. So as long as you understand that, I think you'll be fine.

As far as your dashboard reporting, because your dashboard reporting is going to be specific to the filters that you put in place, like campaign end and start date. Anything that's legacy, you're probably not looking at today anyway.

Right.

So you'd still have the most relevant information in your dashboards. Wouldn't need to change other than if you had to change the filter of what parent campaign you were utilizing.

K.

Great question though.

Another new feature if you're not using it is engagement history. This is actually a lightning component. So again, all of this has to be in lightning. You really should be on part of lightning if you're not already.

And this is a engagement history piece. So remember that pretty ugly of visual force nugget we used to have on the leading contact that would bring over the prospect activities?

No more. We now have a lightning component, and we can put this on our leading and contact page layouts. And this is bringing in over all of our email opens, track links, things like that. And remember, the golden rule is if it's in blue, it means you can drill down.

So now again, that these assets are part of or excuse me, Salesforce objects, you can simply click on that email. And as long as you have the right permissions, you can view that email, see that link that was tracked, and and get that right from the lead and contact page layout. So for sales teams, this is really beneficial for inside sales or ops or even for marketing teams to understand the history. They can go into any leader contact object in Salesforce, click on the engagement history and any particular asset and review that asset.

Alright, let's talk about some custom report types. So along with engagement history, you actually can create five different custom report types. And this is what's gonna bring that engagement data from your landing pages, from your emails, your automated emails into Salesforce to allow you to create Salesforce dashboards, which is what I always recommend to do first before even playing with b to b m a.

And this will give in your asset metrics, you'll understand who's viewed. Of course, only known users are going to be able to show up as far as a list, but it's really, really great to be able to bring that reporting in Salesforce. You have such more power inside the Salesforce Lightning platform than you ever did in pi. Pardot dot com.

Back to that roadmap. We've done our prep, we've amended, we've connected.

We started to look at some of the features that come with connected campaigns like engagement history. We've enabled those those pieces. Maybe we've even started to play a little bit with some dashboards. But what we really came here for today was ROI and attribution.

It's a pretty big topic. There's a lot of things that go into it. We're going to run across a few things that we talk about as far as campaign influence. But I think it's also really important to understand the power of what's called the contact role.

So on your opportunity object, you have a contact role related list, and that is the connection between an opportunity and a campaign. I'm pretty sure you've all heard of it for now. There's a couple apps out there that recently been created.

There's some pretty cool things happening with Pardot Einstein and some beta new attribution models that are coming out. But it's very important to bring sales and marketing together and understand how that works. And so I'm gonna quickly explain that, and we're also then gonna take a look at campaign influence. So on the opportunity, if John Jones is part of your event and they've engaged in some way, and John Jones also happens to be a part of an opportunity as maybe an influencer on a contact role, and that opportunity is one.

A portion of that revenue based on your attribution model is then given to the multiple campaigns that John has engaged in over a set period of time and a set period of criteria which you can set. That is the only way that you're going to get true attribution. If you're not utilizing that contact role, there's definitely some ways to make it mandatory. There's other solutions out there, but that is the best case.

You want to use Salesforce as declarative as possible. The more custom you get, the more apex you add, the harder you will have of enjoying all of the new features that are now coming out every three months. So as these things get bigger and bigger, you're going to be missing out on a ton of features when you're developing a very custom.

Use those Salesforce default objects as declarative as possible.

Let's take a little look into campaign influence and some of the new things that are happening with your Pardot Lightning app.

We'll get into what campaign influence looks like and how to enable it in just a second, but I wanna show you what Pardot looks like today. So if you are legacy and still playing around on pi. Pardot dot com, you need to get off the train and get inside of Salesforce. You have been missing out on features for over a year.

So Pardot is now a lightning app inside of Salesforce, and this is what it looks like. Looks pretty much like any other app, doesn't it? It allows you to customize it in any way that you want. So as you can see, I've got mine down here on the bottom.

I brought in my reports, my leads, my contacts, accounts. We also use Engage, so I have Engage reports in there. We use Analytics in Einstein, so I have my Einstein tab. And we also use TaskRay for our project management. So you can really customize your layout. Every time you log in as a marketer or sales op or Martech person, you can actually access all of your Sales Cloud objects and any type of particular additions that you use on a daily basis.

All right. Think of campaigns as your workspace. I actually stole this from the Pardot product team.

They introduced that to us as kind of a a new way of thinking, and I absolutely love it. So I stole it, and I'm sharing it with you guys.

Think of campaigns as your workspace. So the way that things are moving and the way that we're moving towards in a software way is that all of your campaigns, your landing pages, now that they're objects again inside Salesforce, you work within the campaign object as a marketer. That's where you create your assets, edit your assets. That's where you look at all your statistics. Now there's engagement history dashboard that are included right in your campaign object.

All of those things you're living and breathing in your workspace and your new workspace is called the campaign.

So I just wanted to show you hierarchy again, that nesting feature we talked about. I just have a training campaign here, but let's say this is your division or your business unit or your marketing department. And then here are your parent campaigns, and you've decided that webinars, top content, product, events, and ABM are the items for you. Those are your initial buckets. You can see with the arrows on the left hand side that if you click on them, that's when all of your nested children are going to appear.

So again, Pardot is not a standalone tool. It's really important that you mimic the activities that you're doing inside of Pardot with what you're doing inside of your campaign object.

Back to that roadmap. I think what we're gonna do next is fall into looking at some dashboards and looking at campaign influence. And then I'd love to have a little conversation with you, Leonard, on any questions that you might have in regards to business use case. So if somebody, you know, wants to do this or how does this work? Because I think that's when we we really learn and I can share some case examples too as well.

Alright. So let's take a little look at B2BMA. People really get confused about this. They say, well, B2BMA, you just turn that on and we're good to go. I don't have to do anything. It's out of the box and here's all my dashboards.

B2BMA is only going to be as good as your structure and your campaign hierarchy.

For example, you can always do a one to one relationship in your B2BMA out of the box dashboard, which is great. You have the ability to choose one particular campaign and you can see all of your assets, your click through rates, all of that. But if you were to to to choose your parent campaign, you would then get the roll up of all of your assets.

So this methodology that we've created not only works amazing inside of Salesforce reporting, but it completely supports BWMA. Now, I don't know if you guys were on a webinar a couple weeks back, there's a new tool called BWMA plus coming soon.

All of these new features that are coming out, the Pardot Einstein pieces, all of this is is beautiful layers on top of this great cake. But if your foundation of a campaign hierarchy in your organization inside of Pardot is not functioning well, none of these things are going to function for you in a way that's beneficial to your company. You're gonna continue to struggle. You're gonna continue to ask people to create custom dashboards.

You're gonna pay developers to go into b to b May and parcel things together because your process is broken. Your business process is broken and your structure is broken. And that will never change. So I really I really you know, I I want you to really think about how can I dial this back and make sure that I have a foundation that I don't ever have to redo these things in the future?

But what we're looking at right now is one of, I think, six now that are available in B2BMA. It's our engagement dashboard. It's one of my favorite. I like to look at this as my presentation dashboard.

So when I'm in a meeting on Friday and I'm being asked what I've done, I can pick my my webcast parents and say, well, we did two webcasts. Here's the assets. Here's the auto responders. Here's who responded.

And then the conversation shifts to, how about that event we did last month? Not a problem. I'm gonna go ahead and shift to my parent events campaign, showcase what I've done this quarter.

So this really gives you the flexibility to choose those bucketed parents and and be able to talk live in a presentation and showcase your successes as a marketer and sales team to your leaders.

Alright. So another piece of this just kind of taking a look closer at this engagement dashboard. Again, had said earlier, it's definitely my interactive presenter dashboard. It looks pretty, it looks cool.

I can click on click through rate and opens and it moves right in front of me. It it it instills a quick learning for somebody who's not in the weeds. Again, your manager, your director, and your c suite folks may not be in the weeds, may not know how to use Salesforce and Pardot. Right?

But they wanna see the information. So this kind of dashboard easily translates your successes across to them.

Is this standard Pardot functionality or is this an add on?

This is so depending on the addition of Pardot that you have, you advanced or above includes b to b m a. B to b m a is actually an analytics studio product. It's not it but it is exclusive that it pulls the datasets from Pardot and also pulls datasets from Salesforce. So it's not a Pardot product per se because it lives in the analytics studio, but it's definitely sold with Pardot advanced editions or above. Otherwise, it used to be an add on for any edition that was below.

Here is another one that I think people find really valuable, and this is your marketing manager out of the box dashboard. This is gonna give you those quick insights that are going to aggregate to you so you don't have to do that work.

What is your highest campaign that's bringing in the most revenue? Again, that campaign hierarchy is being really specific. If you have a campaign for every email you're sending, those statistics will not be able to give you what you need for forecasting.

We need to make sure that we have appropriate buckets. We have to understand maybe one event over another, right, which is why we we exclude and we we put all of our things into one campaign. It's also gonna show you your top performing landing pages, top performing forms, your overall email engagement. And there are some filters and things that you can put in place to be able to look within a particular time frame.

You can also see we're starting to see a little bit of a pipeline piece in here.

This is a standard. A lot of times people may become frustrated because an SQL to what comes standard isn't how your company defines what an SQL is, or maybe it's not your language.

In that case, that's why I always start with your Salesforce reports first. I create a dashboard for every parent bucket that you have. And that's where we can put in specific filters, custom fields, things that determine what is what is an MQL to you. Because I'll tell you what, if I have seven companies next to me, every single company is gonna give me a different definition with for what an MQL is. So start in Salesforce first, build your parent dashboards using parent the parent name as a filter so your children continuously roll up.

Once you've exhausted Salesforce dashboarding to its nth degree, then pop over here into B2BMA to look at some aggregated high level items. Once that's exhausted, then you start to get into custom.

I think it's really important for people to distinguish when is it appropriate for me to create a B2B custom developed dashboard versus a Salesforce dashboard. Your B2B MA custom dashboards, think of those as you maybe only want to make two changes a year. The interface isn't going to allow you to simply click at, Oh, I added a new field on my account object and now I want to filter by that. In Salesforce, that's really easy. Add the field to the report, put it in a filter, you're done.

In B2BMA, if you didn't include that field in your original dataset, you now have to go back and rebuild that entire dataset and build a new item from scratch up. So think about B2BMA as those marketing statistics, something custom that would be maybe focused on things like subject line or opt outs or hard bounces or things of that nature where we wanna look at these same statistics. They're probably not gonna change much over time unless you have a developer on-site or you do wanna pay someone continuously to update them. But I think the the name of the game is really to make you scalable as a as an employee for you to be able to make those changes on the fly. And so your Salesforce dashboards, I think, are so overlooked. We've gotta get those built out, get really good at being able to pivot to those as your business needs change, and save your b to b m a for custom development that that you only change maybe two times a year.

Alright. So we've taken a look at some of those items. Again, think about that road map, think about that order of operations.

We have not talked about business units today. That's a whole another conversation, but it does change things slightly. Anyone new to Pardot knows that you have business units right out of the gate.

When the biggest thing when it comes to, I ROI and business units is that you're going to want a campaign record type for each business unit so that you would have parent dashboards and a parent hierarchy that are separate. Business unit A, business unit B, we have our parents, they all roll up. You could have them roll up to each other and then them roll up as a as an entire marketing inside of Salesforce, but just know you'll need separate campaign record types for each business unit to develop your hierarchy for each.

Alright, so I am gonna go back into Salesforce now and show you these are Salesforce dashboards. These are the ones that we're gonna be able to get in and dig in and edit on a daily basis and pivot as fast as we need to.

If you've noticed, I keep talking about how these dashboards are scalable.

Right here we're doing a marketing life cycle pipeline.

And so what we're going ahead and doing is we're pulling in particular parent or we're pulling in a particular campaign record type and we're taking a look inside Salesforce at what we're doing. We have the ability with different add ons like lead forensics to be able to look a little bit into who are unknown visitors or known visitors are by account, company. And you also have the ability with the filters on top to look within a specific period of time. So I think that's really important. Think, again, we underestimate those Salesforce dashboards.

Alright, and our next piece here, we're talking a little bit about the handy MQL SQL. While it's usually most important to do for sales, we are now looking at the fact that marketing is more a part of these KPIs because it's the marketer that's handing that lead off. Marketers have to know how many marketing qualified leads have I prepared and handed off to sales, and what has sales done with them? Again, inside Lightning dashboards, you're able to pull things like those MQLs, your opportunities, and you can combine that with things like landing page views.

Right? Different components on that dashboard allow you to see sales statistics and marketing statistics all in one dashboard for a group view on a particular effort. So I could put these six components on the bottom of dashboard where the top was looking at how many emails were opened and closed, how many leads versus contacts, my my attribution ROI, and then how many MQLs and SQLs I'm creating for my sales team. All in one dashboard, all inside Salesforce.

Okay. So we didn't get too much into campaign influence, but I do wanna let you guys know it is super important. Some of those out of the box dashboards that we took a look at aren't going to be available to you until you enable your campaign influence. So if you guys have any questions, you guys know where to find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, but definitely reach out especially during this time. Wanna make sure that we can give you guys some pointers and get you in the right direction so that you can empower your team.

Oh, got you on mute. Sorry. No, good.

If it's interesting. I just wanna mention to people that have have listened to this whole presentation that you're kind of the meta part to the other Pardot presentation we have by Karen Tracy where she goes through all the the the meat and potatoes of AB marketing with emails. She's down at the she's down at another level below, so they're very complimentary, presentations.

Absolutely.

People might wanna look at both of those.

We had another, we had one of our customers, presenting on attribution.

And you you touched on it briefly. What do what do you do you think are the and and he had a his organization had a real hard time with attribution. Lot of a lot of justification on the mark from the marketing people for all the attributions that they would bring out, had to bring a lot of data to the table. Do you have some basic, ideas or thoughts on best practices for making sure your Pardot instance and your Salesforce are set up to correctly attribute to when when a when a opportunity becomes closed closed one to be able to report back on what were all the factors that caused that closed one account.

Yeah. Absolutely. And and I do have some some generic examples too of some dashboards that represent looking at opportunities that are open, by what stage, and what campaign that they're being attributed to, as well as close. So again, going back to my earlier piece, it's all about the contact role.

So if you are not using the contact role related list on the opportunity, you will not have attribution. And the more that you try to custom create that, you won't be able to take advantage of all the new features that are coming.

So make sure that you're utilizing contact roles. There's a tons of ways to do it. You can use process builder to make it mandatory.

Circante's got a great app that you can use. If you're not familiar with Circante, they're another consultant company. Fantastic. They've got an app as well that allows you to manually or automatically associate specific people from an account to the opportunity contact role. Again, process builder, you can do that. Couple of my clients are using process builder and a contact status as the trigger.

So once someone becomes a sales qualified contact and an opportunity is created, they want multiple people within that account to be associated to that opportunity because we have like an influencer procurement, something like that. Right? We're trying to develop who are the decision makers. And by changing that status on the contact record, they are automatically putting them on that contact role. So we're not we're taking that away from sales as an extra step.

The other piece as well is making sure that all of your leads and contacts are inside Salesforce. People that people like, what are you talking about? So Pardot in the past has allowed you to have prospects that aren't in Salesforce. They're just prospects. They haven't been assigned. So they are not associated with the leader contact inside of Salesforce.

That whole concept is really kind of moving away. And it's really important to have all of your prospects as a lead or a contact. I talk a lot about that on my podcast, Pardot Life Hacks. And I kind of walk you through things using things like cues.

So I've got a prospect, I don't know much about them. Sales does not need to know about them. They'll be mad at me if they do. So I'm gonna put them in this marketing nurture queue until I hit a particular criteria.

So it's the same concept of I'm gonna keep them in Pardot and then put them into Salesforce. Now I'm gonna keep them in a Salesforce queue until they're ready to be assigned to sales. And what that allows me to do is it allows me to report on, you know, if I have a webinar and I had five hundred attendees, but only a hundred and fifty of them are in Salesforce, my reporting is gonna say I had a hundred and fifty attendees.

Right.

So making sure that you have your leads and contacts are are really important because once you associate a contact to an opportunity or you convert a lead into a contact and create an opportunity at the same time, you're gonna miss those statistics if they haven't had that campaign history membership, which is really important. I mean, we really just touched the surface today. There's so many things related lists of, like, campaign history, campaign influence, completely two different things.

Influenced opportunities. There's a lot of different related lists that are now available. So those would be some of the biggest features.

The other piece is understand your campaign influence, your attribution model.

So when you enable connected campaigns, you have the ability to have a first touch, a last touch, and an even touch distribution. As a company, you have to decide what your default is. And you have to educate everybody on what that means. And and based on that default selection, the related lists on your records are gonna showcase that particular distribution model.

However, with those engagement history reports, you now have the ability to choose in the back end. So you could technically create a dash dashboard that says even touch and a dashboard that says first touch, and kind of look at the difference. You also have the ability in B2BMA to toggle between all three attribution models. So understanding what attribution model is and what it means is important because I think some companies get really hung up on why is why is this counting for attribution?

I don't understand. So we haven't had training on what it means. We don't really understand, and we haven't utilized what's called auto association settings. So now I'm starting to talk a little bit of the admin geek language, but auto association settings in short basically allow you to exclude or include particular campaigns to be chosen for attribution.

A really good example is like responded status. And I'm not talking about the word responded, but if I have a custom status that registered, not registered, attended, watched on demand. As a marketer, watched on demand and attended are probably my my two responded statuses. That shows engagement.

Just because someone's in a campaign as a list member that I sent an email to, that campaign probably shouldn't get attribution to an opportunity because they didn't really engage in it. We just sent the email. Right. So once you get past the initial setup, you really have to take a look at your auto association settings, bring sales and marketing together in a room and say, what should count towards attribution and how does it work?

How many days are we going back?

Auto association also allows you to say from the date of opportunity open, how many days am I gonna go back in time and say if I'm using even distribution?

If I'm gonna go back three hundred and sixty days, that means every campaign that John was involved in over the last year will have even attribution of revenue based on that campaign one. Well, maybe that's too long or maybe that's too short Or maybe today you have it thirty days, but you have an eighteenth month eighteen month sales cycle. So that's where I see so many companies disconnecting, because their auto association settings were created by marketing without taking into effect any of the sales process.

And you can see where that would falter.

Right. Yeah. The sales people are gonna be upset because marketing did, from their perspective, very, very little. Yeah. And it gets some attribution.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, can't say it isn't complicated, but Yeah.

And I mean like, it's just the icing on the cake today. Today is kind of just a a like welcome to the world, but there's definitely more things that we can dive into, but it's hard to fill it all into one hour.

Well, we're trying. Thank you so much, Jennifer. It's clear that you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Pardot, and Cheshire Impact customers are lucky to have you advising them.

Appreciate your time and thank you for participating.

Yeah. It's been a blast. Thanks to guys so much for having me and take care out there. I appreciate it.

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