Name: Guide To Lead Attribution For Salesforce Marketers
Uploaded: 2026-04-29T16:30:24.272Z
Duration: 51 min 32 s
Description: Guide To Lead Attribution For Salesforce Marketers

Transcript for "Guide To Lead Attribution For Salesforce Marketers": Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Salesforce Ben webinar, and thank you for joining. Let us know in the chat where you're joining from. We'll just give a few minutes for people to jump on. Yeah, let us know where you're based, where you work for, anything that you're looking forward to hearing about today. This is actually our third webinar that's designed for marketers. Most of our webinars are aimed at Salesforce users, so they're a little bit more technical. This one is actually for marketers. The goal is to help you guys be better your job with the help of some really knowledgeable speakers, who I'm really excited to speak with today. We actually went a little bit back and forth on the webinar title today because it was really difficult to convey in a really succinct clear way what we wanted to talk about today. But the background for the conversation is basically that I was on a call with Jen Smith from Salesforce, who is actually one of our speakers today. We were going through the performance of her campaigns with us as Salesforce spend, whether it was a webinar or an advert. She shared this really cool spreadsheet where next to each line item, she had details on the activity that we had run together, but then she had dollar signs actually to outline how much revenue each activity was driving, if something was performing well, if something wasn't. I thought this is really cool. It's really amazing to get this level of insight into the impact that any marketing activity can have. It got me thinking, how many marketers in our network are actually doing this? And kinda more broadly, how should marketers in the Salesforce ecosystem and more generally, measure the impact, of their work, on pipeline and revenue? So that's that's why we're kinda having this conversation today. I'll share a little bit more on our agenda. So, yeah, first of all, we'll talk about why lead attribution matters and why it's important for our speakers today at their organizations. We'll then go into a bit of a practical guide. So we'll actually approach, you know, how you go about doing this in a practical way, what challenges you might encounter, and how you can address them. And then finally, we'll talk about the impact and the key benefits that you're likely to see, and the insights that you can uncover if you get this right. At the end, we'll have a q and a. So if you have any questions for us, please let us know and pop them in the q and a chat. We'll get to to them at the end so you can ask either me or our speakers. In the next few days, you'll also receive the recording of the session in your inbox as well. And then we'll follow-up with some lead attribution and marketing measurement tips that hopefully you can implement at your company as well. Great. Without further ado, I wanna introduce our speaker, Jen Smith, field marketing lead at Salesforce, as well as Ben Aspaja, CEO and cofounder at PipeLawn. Welcome, guys. Thanks. Good to be here. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really grateful for your time today. Before we kick off, I would like to open an audience poll. We're really keen to find out your perspective on on the topics that we're gonna be talking about today. So I would like to know from everyone on the call today, how confident are you in your current lead attribution approach? And while we give people some time, to answer the poll, I would like to have a bit of an intro with our speaker. So, Jen, do you wanna start and let us know a little bit about your background? Sure thing. Hi, everyone. I'm Jen Smith, field marketing lead at Salesforce. I've been in marketing for over thirteen years now, which is crazy. Joined Salesforce back in February as part of the own acquisition. I'm currently a field marketer on the platform field marketing team. So I'm really focused on driving marketing programs that support pipeline growth and customer engagement for Salesforce's Agent Force three sixty platform. So working really closely with sales and cross functional teams to develop and execute integrated solution first programs like digital campaigns, webinars, workshops. On a personal note, I'm based in San Diego, California, and I'm also juggling my side hustle of planning for my wedding later this fall. That is so exciting. I'm sorry. All of that is really is really interesting, but all I can hear is wedding. I'm also getting married this year, so I I know how you feel. Don't worry. It's, we're we're getting there. Brilliant. Thanks, Jen. And, again, thank you so much for joining. Ben, do you wanna give us a quick intro to yourself too? Absolutely. Thank you so much, Claudia, for having me today. My name is Ben. I'm one of the founders at Pipe Launch. As a founder, I obviously wear wear many hats, one of them being marketing and and being a big focus process of business to grow the the business itself. My background is in sales, so I used an account executive at Salesforce. Previous to that, I used to work for for some of the Salesforce partners as well, including Conga and, Nintex and Rollup. So I've been in the ecosystem for the last fourteen years. And for the last five years I've been building on pipelines, which is a Salesforce ISV. It helps companies with a number of different use cases, primarily with data enrichment and also a few use cases around staffing and recruitment. Yeah. Looking forward to joining the webinar with you and with Jen. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ben. Yeah. Really excited to get stuck in. Have the results of the poll. Yeah. There's a few people who are somewhat confident, some people who are not very confident. I'm not getting a ton of confidence, but also no one said we don't really have one, which is encouraging. It means everyone knows that this is this is a priority. So, yeah, our first section is gonna be all about why this is important. So, Jen, I wanna hear first from you. Why is lead attribution and measuring the impact of marketing on pipeline and revenue important in your in your organization? And, yeah, how how do you think about that, from your perspective? Yeah. So, obviously, it's foundational, right, to demonstrate the success of the programs that marketing is running. So for us to keep investing in programs, especially demand generation and field marketing, the team has to really tie activity back to business outcomes, altogether. So that means looking beyond just the engagement metrics and understanding. how a program really contributes to pipeline, ACV, and ideally closed revenue. So this is really important because enterprise journeys take time. So the team really needs to have a standardized approach to look back and understand how a campaign really helped influence an opportunity an opportunity throughout their buyer's journey, to creation and then later to revenue close. So a strong point to really hone in here is that the early metrics like clicks and engagement still obviously matter as those are our bread and butter leading indicators for how a program is really resonating, but they're not enough on their own to really make that effective decision for further program investment. So the real question is whether these activities eventually contribute to opportunities and revenue. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That makes perfect sense. And so for marketers who are mainly looking at lead volume, for example, when they're running lead generation campaigns, what is a metric that you think they might be overlooking that is actually more important or equally important? So for us, it's really all about marketing driven pipeline and influenced closed revenue. Those are much more meaningful to us than just the raw response numbers like webinar registrations or content downloads. Yeah. 100%. And I think we'll we'll dig deeper into that throughout our conversation. Ben, I wanna hear from you. Why is this so important, a pipe launch? So as a as a a fast moving startup, if you can't measure something, you can't improve it. So we we're always looking at marginal gains and ways of improving the results that we had yesterday, for example. Right? And it's not about, doubling the the the output of marketing, but more to understand where the leads coming from, what what is the quality of those leads. I think the worst thing that can happen for us as a small business is to generate thousands of leads with a with a very low conversion rate because it then requires our team members as well to go through every single lead before we can start converting them. So it's really trying to understand where's the the the revenue coming from, what leads have generated that revenue, and focusing less on the volume of the leads but more on the quality. So a small, webinar with 10 people might generate more revenue than an ebook with a thousand downloads, for example. So those are the numbers that we try to look at. Yeah. For sure. And I didn't that's why I was really keen to speak to you both on the session is because I wanted the perspective of someone with a you know, from a large organization where, Jen, I know you'll go into this later. You have, like, a wealth of data and different teams that are testing different things at all times, which is great. But then how does a leaner team go about this? Yeah. I really appreciate both of your inputs here. Then I remember that when we first chatted about this, you mentioned an example of a campaign where it had that same thing that you're saying, which is it's it's really great on paper, but actually, commercially, it doesn't have that big an impact. Do you mind unpacking that? Because I think a lot of the people in the audience will really relate with that. Yeah. Absolutely. So we we did a couple of, of initiatives, one of them being an ebook, and that was amazing for our branding. So it goes right into our ICP, which was, an ebook about Salesforce user adoption, which generated a lot of leads. But like you like you previously said as well, it's very difficult to then sometimes it's difficult to convert those leads. You might not have the leads ready to be contacted by a salesperson, Yeah. in the same way that we've done, you know, LinkedIn ads and we've generated loads and loads of of, interest, loads of meetings. But it just was now ICP and the leads were converting into potential MQLs way too early in the funnel, Mhmm. which meant that we had to contact these leads, but they didn't convert. But then on the other side, we've done events with partners, whether it's SI partners or other ISVs as well. And sometimes we have five people on a webinar and two of them end up buying our product because it's much, much more targeted than people that could join those kind of webinars and wanna invest time for those webinars. They're usually at a much later stage of their buying process, which then means that we generate a higher ROI with a much, much lower cost per lead. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Exactly. And I think I I like what you said about the ebook. It's still a really good awareness exercise, and it might pay off sort of down the line, but it always it always depends on on the goal. Right? So kinda what I'm hearing from you guys is that activity is not the same as impact and lead volume is great, but it's not the same as lead quality. So before we dig deeper into lead attribution, I wanna ask you guys and I'll start with you, Jen. How do you define a a marketing qualified lead, and how does nurture help take that lead from lead to pipeline? Yeah. So it's been mentioned. A qualified lead isn't just someone who filled out a form or clicked on an ad. It's someone who really has shown meaningful intent and has engaged with us multiple times to show that they really are interested in the product or solution that we've been promoting. So that usually means just a combination of the behavioral signals, like I just mentioned, as well as the firmographic fit. So the team is really looking at things like all the different touch points that the lead has had, the target persona alignment. So for my team, IT decision makers, security roles, developers, like, we have a variety of personas that we're really targeting. Account or segment fit, so, you know, the specific regions or the different sizes of the organizations that we're really looking to go after, as well as things like job role, industry, and propensity to buy. So at Salesforce, scoring is also not surprisingly supported by an AI driven model, built by our marketing ops team. So it's all in the back end kind of measuring all those different elements that I just mentioned. And then an interesting nuance to call out is that for a company of our size, field marketing doesn't always own every stage of that lead velocity or acceleration, but we always try to plug in where we can to help influence and accelerate the buyer's journey. So we make sure that programs are really bringing in that right audience and feeding the top of funnel, with quality leads to our programming. And then through retargeting and more relevant mid to lower funnel offers like webinars, in person workshops, demos, those harder CTAs. We really try to build those in to help again accelerate the buyer journey. Yeah. Yeah. No. That that makes sense as an approach. And I guess kinda what I'm hearing is, first of all, you wanna attract the right people, which which is key, and then you wanna give them the right next step. So how you nurture them is also really important. Yeah. All all sounds good. Ben, from your perspective, yeah, how do you guys know about go about the nurture side of things, and how long does it normally take for a lead to kind of be ready to hand over to sales? Mhmm. It's hard to say, but it can take a few months depending on the size of the account. If it's a smaller account, we usually are able to convert it within a few weeks. Yeah. But one thing that's probably very important to note is that the single touch is never enough. So we try to to apply multiple touch points whether it's a newsletter whether we we know that someone will be attending an event. It could be an outrage by PDR as well. The main goal is to build that trust over time, and you need to try to generate that that viral moment as well. When you especially when you're building a new product, you need to get known. Obviously, if you if you're Salesforce, you're the market leader, everyone knows you, so the challenges you'll have being Salesforce will be very different than than you would have as a smaller ISP. It's usually. more trying to get to trust the brand out there. That's why we did the ebook as well, for example. And the timing is also very important. You need to make sure that you contact that lead at the right time. And the way that we do it is we look at specific behaviors from a website visitor, how they interact with our newsletter, which links they click, and based on those buying signals, we will then approach them with different content based on that initial behavior. Yeah. Yeah. I like that you both called out the behavior side of things. Right? Because we are kinda lead dealing with people, and we we have to think about that. And, it sounds like both of you are kind of saying that, yes, single touch engagement is is really rare. Like, marketing lead to sales is is rare, and it it can take a little while of nurturing a lead in order to to get them ready to ready ready for sales. And I like also what you said, Ben, about influencing. Right? Not all of marketing can track immediately, you know, like interaction, sales conversation. It's about influencing them on that buying journey. Jen, I appreciate what you're saying as well. You might not own the whole journey, but obviously you can try and have as much of an impact as possible. Great. Thank you guys for that. Before we move on to the next section, I want to open the next poll. And I wanna hear from everyone what you know, which metrics does your marketing team, whether it's the whole marketing team at your company or whether it's a bigger company and so you are part of a, kind of smaller team within marketing, but what metric does your team rely on the most? And I know we talked about lead volume, engagement metrics, pipeline, whether influence or sourced, closed won revenue. Yeah. I wanna hear everyone's point of view of this one. Great. Cool. So while we give people the time to answer the poll, I wanna get into the practical section of our conversation today. Jen, how do you actually approach tracking and measuring marketing activity across the funnel? So I I wanna give people some tips and some, actual practical actions they can kinda go away with and try and implement to their company. Fun question. Yeah, I'd say the first starting point is really just accepting the fact that pipeline is a lagging metric. So everyone say that with me. It's a lagging metric. That is one of the most important points for this audience, I think, to take away. In an enterprise organization, you can launch a program now and really not see that meaningful pipeline impact until three to six months later. It may take upwards of six or more months for some of our programs before the full picture truly matures. So for us, that means the team really has to look at those early indicators as well as the later stage outcomes. So early indicators are things like click through rates, the response volume, the cost per responses. Those are really useful signals upfront, for our team specifically when we need to make more near term investment decisions for things like quarterly planning. It also helps give us insight and our product marketing team insight as to which messaging is actually resonating with the audiences that we're looking to target so we can use that insight to help massage our future programs. So because these initial signals are only part of that story, over time, we do have to look back at how those programs do end up contributing to pipeline development and then later that ACV. So a big practical point here is just operational rigor. So, you know, when setting up TMs, they really need to be set up consistently and accurately. Campaigns need to be structured in the CRM in a very standardized way. Data hygiene, that obviously is a huge component to ensure that we're looking at the correct slices of data, especially when we're comparing historical campaigns to current campaigns as well as campaigns across other teams for just compare contrast for benchmarks. So that's really what enables the true apples to apples comparison across our campaigns. Yeah. Sounds like there's a lot of, you know, technical setup behind that, and maybe that's a whole different workshop and webinar to kinda go into the detail of that. Because we're also, as sales rep, been getting to grips with things like UTMs and making sure that we have consistent data so we can compare performance of different activities. So, yeah, it's super important. And I'm seeing some of the poll responses come through. We have only a couple of people look at closed won revenue, but few people look at lead volume and engagement metrics. Not that many people on pipeline influence and sourced. But it's good to see that there's a good spread around and some awareness that closed won revenue is something that is important to look at as well. Jen, I know in our last chat, this is again going to my, like, really practical brain, especially whenever I chat with you or some of our sponsors, like, I kinda just wanna learn from you and know how you actually go about doing things. I know you mentioned that you essentially sit down and do recurring reviews to uncover this data. How does that actually work, or does that involve? So everyone's obviously very busy in their day to day. You just have to carve out time and have a standardized approach to looking back at the data. Otherwise, you're just never gonna be able to see that trail of how things are performing. So I have a standardized monthly KPI review that I set aside, you know, a couple hours each month to really look at quarter to date performance of all the programs that our team has launched. So every month, I really am just looking at the programs that have launched within the quarter, see what those programs have produced, as well as looking at the matured pipeline that maybe our q four, q three programs from last year have started producing. So it gives us more of that holistic picture. Another key thing to remember is I'm not just blindly, you know, updating numbers and then passing those numbers along to stakeholders. I'm also analyzing the why as to why something is performing well or why it's maybe not performing as we had hoped. So really being consistent about feeding those learnings back into our creative team, product marketing, our key marketing stakeholders in general, just really helps build our trust with those stakeholders. And with future campaign planning, it just helps that everyone has that ongoing context as to what's performing and why. I also perform a little bit more in-depth quarterly look backs, for a deeper analysis. So that just helps me prepare for, you know, QBRs, surfacing trends for those same stakeholders as well as our sales leadership team, and again, making those informed investment decisions as we start planning ahead for the rest of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That that all makes sense. And I really like what you said about the context. Like, I think data is helpful, yeah, my team is very familiar with whenever we send back a report. It's not just about, yeah, this is the number of clicks, this is a click period. It's like, well, why? What does that mean? What does that tell us? That makes a lot of sense. Then I am going to get to you. I just have one final point to raise with Jen. I really like what you said about early signals and that we actually have a conversation. We had a conversation about events in a different webinar where the speakers were talking about, yeah, you're going to take some time to nurture those leads and get to the pipeline or the revenue, but there has those early signals that you can pick up on to kinda try and forecast what the impact, is gonna be. How do you distinguish marketing source versus marketing influence lead, first touch, last touch, multi touch, all of these Right. So for an enterprise organization, very technical things. to attribute credit for a closed deal to, you know, a single marketing touch point is often just not reality. It's very misleading. There's so many different touch points someone engages with before they even reach the sales team. So we're really looking at all these interaction points across marketing, like events, digital campaigns. We We might have some partner activity, the SDR outreach. There's different executive programming happening. So we really lean into a marketing influence mentality versus just marketing sourced. Again, the main metric that our team really anchors around is marketing driven pipeline, which really captures the program that influence that pipeline generation before an opportunity actually reaches stage two. And then another important metric that we track is marketing matured ACV, which is what happens after that stage two opportunity, anything that occurs between then and actually closing that deal. So this is really valuable because it moves the conversation beyond just those top of funnel engagement metrics and shows where our team is really helping mature mature those revenue opportunities and relationships that are already in motion. Another point that I think is important to emphasize is that once again, marketing driven pipeline, lagging metric. So if stakeholders are expecting immediate pipeline results from, like, a campaign that just launched, that just becomes an expectation setting motion where we really have to explain to our stakeholders that we can't make a firm decision as to whether a campaign is, you know, successful or failed until a lot later. But it is important again to keep just those ongoing touch pin touch points with stakeholders as the campaign starts to mature. Yeah. I like what you said about expectation setting. We do a lot of that, and I'm I'm really glad that you're that you're kinda supporting that. And, Ben, I know that you kind of, you you raise a really similar point, earlier as well. Ben, I wanna come to you to kinda have a similar a similar practical conversation, with your kind of team, a slightly inner team. How do you guys go about kind of practically setting things up for lead attribution and measuring the impact of marketing? So, yeah, when we started the business, the first thing we did is we hired a Pardot expert. And we built this very complex dashboard that we were measuring, I think it was 20 different, sources, and that was the first quarter in the business. We made some noise. We got we got some leads in, but then we realized very quickly that we we just couldn't understand what it meant. Right? Because there were so many variables, there were so many touchpoints that we couldn't even influence. So after that first quarter, we decided to keep it very simple, and we were very deliberate at eliminating all the other channels that we felt were a distraction. And I think a lot of younger businesses, startups, they make the mistake of bringing in that enterprise structure when it comes to marketing, and that can very quickly derail you. And what really worked for us is just focusing on on on three channels. And then like Jen said, analyzing those channels and and looking at your pipeline. Right? Because when you're a a smaller business, the reality is you on the first year, you might close an average of three bills per month, then it goes to five, then 10, and potentially 20. But even if you have that number, it's worth taking that time to recap the success of your campaigns, looking at every single deal you closed, identifying where did this deal come from, what influenced this deal. Was it the meeting we had? Was it us meeting them at an event? Was it a partner webinar? And really digging deeper into it, especially at the at the smaller stage, you can afford to do it because you won't be looking at Salesforce probably close as a few thousand deals a week. Right? So you wouldn't be able to to to be that granular. But in the early stage, you can afford to do it. But I would definitely avoid going into that enterprise, motion as a smaller business because it will just distract you and add add too much complexity. Because these systems, they do work. Right? And that's why enterprise businesses and and Salesforce build a textbook for SaaS marketing. They need a lot of brands and a lot of of, people power behind it to be able to manage it and to to understand the analytics behind, those motions that you're running. I really like that point because we have some conversations with our sponsors where, you know, we we try and encourage them to add a couple of activities to their mix whether they're with us or not. By the way, just in general, just to build awareness because sometimes they say, oh, I'm seeing this brand is everywhere and no wonder they're getting so much traction is because they're everywhere. But you don't really know the quality of that traction. So I really like what you what you said about that. So you are you basically saying that, like, startups or marketers or startups are kind of juggling too many activities and it just gets, like, overwhelming to analyze. And you can actually get, like, useful data out of it. Absolutely. And I think you should focus on what what brings you the most, especially if you don't have 20 hands that can help you with it. Just. focus on that one or two activities, and and three is probably the limit. And do them well. Do them as well as you can do. And and like you rightly said, I see brands all the time. They are everywhere, but you don't know the background and you don't know, what what what the outcome is. Right? You have these startups. They receive 20,000,000 funding. The next thing you know, they're everywhere. You open LinkedIn, Facebook, Google. You see them everywhere. And then a few months later, they they no longer exist. Right? So. you need to focus on on your part, on what you think is right for your business. But, obviously, you need the numbers to back your decisions as well and make sure that you invest in the right partnerships, in the in the right, channels, in the right platforms when you when you try to generate leads. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it can be a valid strategy to be everywhere, but I think you you need to be set up to be able to analyze the impact of all of those channels. Otherwise, some of it might be maybe like wasted investment, basically. Or you can do what you guys did if you're a company of your size, which is pick your three strongest channels and just kind of go deep and, do a really good job of that, which is what you guys do. Yep. Excellent. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So so we had, I can give an example as well. We used to do a lot of events with, so it was a couple of years back with Salesforce, and the results were quite good. You know? There was events called ISBs where customers were invited. But there were so early in the funnel that if you don't have two or three BDRs plus two marketeers to nurture them for the next six months to a year, you just wasted those leads. Right? So and that's. how you have to analyze it and to make sure that you have the time as well to convert those leads because there's there are leads that convert immediately, and there are leads that they will take a year or two years to convert. But that requires power, right, to to maintain them and to nurture them. Yeah. I think sometimes it's just as simple as think about the next steps, which is I think is really important. I want to talk about challenges. I'm getting a lot of really interesting and insightful answers from you guys. But Jen, I want to hear from you. What do you think are the most prominent or the biggest practical challenge around lead attribution and marketing measurement, and how do you address that? Yeah. I'd say the unfortunate reality is that not everything is trackable. And, also, even things that are trackable, things go wrong, UTMs break, or things just don't go as you expect. But that is the reality that we live in, so we have to be able to manage that in the most effective way possible. So some campaigns sit outside of the ideal infrastructure, which makes precision attribution really difficult. And in those cases, teams sometimes have to rely on those directional signals and like best judgment. So one example that I have is we were running a webinar and it was sitting outside of the salesforce.com domain and so the tracking for us just wasn't available, but it was going to be a really impactful topic. So we still decided to work with a third party vendor to help advertise it. But knowing that we wouldn't be able to explicitly tie back any sort of response volume or revenue back to that particular investment, registration, obviously, provide that context when we did our end of quarter reporting. So it's not always easy, but it is important to still make those important decisions that will be best for the business even if you can't tie that attribution directly back to a specific program. And then another challenge is just not always having full visibility into every step of the buyer journey, especially when we're, you know, marketing to large enterprise organizations and their, you know, buyer journeys can be, you know, upwards of a year plus. So the solution for us is really just to improve what you can control, keep the structure consistent, use the best data available, like I mentioned with the webinar example, and just don't let any imperfect data stop you from sharing those learnings and leveraging the findings that you do have because there is still value in sharing those anecdotal insights. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, you have to work with what you have. And hopefully, you know, when you when you do an activity where you can tie it back in like a super detailed way where you're attributing the exact leads, you're still, like you said, seeing a correlation with a spike in engagement around that sort of time frame. I think that can be really helpful. At the last one of these webinars or maybe the previous one, one of the speakers actually mentioned the dark funnel, which again, it kinda goes back to what you were saying about you can't really see everything and you can track everything. And again, we're just talking about people, not just numbers and not just, you know, things that exist behind a screen. I really appreciate that answer and I like what you said about, it's not about perfection, it's about doing the best you can do with that data and consistency. I like how you reminded us of that as well. Ben, any challenges that you wanna call out that people might be encountering as they're, setting up, lead attribution and tracking. and things like that? Absolutely. I I think one of them is is doing too much too early and trying to manage too many channels and having too much too much automation. I think one advantage you have when you're a smaller business is that your feedback loop between marketing and sales is a lot smaller, meaning that you can figure out very quickly by having customer conversations where the lead actually came from. In the beginning, we very often had and we actually did a not to advertise you guys, but we did a, a campaign with Salesforce then. And, suddenly, our leads on the web page started working pretty well and we had a lot of conversions. And we for for a couple of weeks, we believe that those leads were coming from another webinar that we had done. And as soon as you speak to customers, it completely changes the picture that you have of your, lead source. Right? And and all of the customers said Salesforce brand, Salesforce brand. Then we realized actually that campaign was a lot more successful than we had originally anticipated. So being close to the customer also becomes very important because it helps you understand what their journey were was when they found you. Was it the Google search? Was it a blog post? What are the lead sources that have really influenced them and helped them tip over into a sales qualified lead. So that's definitely one of the points where I think, we could have done a lot sooner of understanding what the customers actually give us in in feedback. Yeah. Oh, I think that might might have been before my time. That sounds really cool, actually. I'm glad to hear it. Excellent. Thank you. I did want to open one final poll for the audience actually to hear about what their main challenges are. I'm just opening that right now as we speak. What is your biggest lead attribution challenge? Is it too many touch points? Is it long sales cycles? Is it poor data hygiene or setup, which again, back to Jen's point, or is it lack of time or resources? If your challenge is something outside of these points, feel free to pop it in the chat. Just a reminder to add any questions that you might have for us in the Q and A box as well. Nice. Thank you guys. That was really cool. It's really cool to hear about how you go about everything in a really practical sense and how you set it up and how you track and all of that stuff. I want to finish with the payoff to get people excited about potentially embarking on a lead attribution journey at their company. Jen, tell me some examples of attribution or pipeline reporting can that have helped you change the way that, you know, you approach marketing or your strategy? Yeah. I think the best example that I can give is how we evaluate our third party media and vendors. So I mentioned earlier that I joined Salesforce as part of an acquisition. So we had previously worked with Salesforce, Ben, and a handful of other vendors, and we didn't know if those same tactics and programs would work just the same, obviously, being in a new ecosystem. So we really decided to just throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, see what stuck, and created consistent reporting cadences with our vendors to really cross compare how they ended up performing, looking at things like tactics, total program spend, pipeline impact, and, of course, like, return on ad spend. But we also needed to consider how much internal time and effort it actually took to stand those programs up. Now Salesforce is a really large company, but we're actually a pretty small team within that marketing organization. So we are pretty lean. So we have to be very mindful of how we utilize our resources. So a program might look, you know, half decent on paper, but if it's really resource intensive, difficult to scale, that really does kind of impact our decision on what vendors we end up continuing to work with. So we look at everything apples to apples that helped us really decide what we needed to pair back, what to eliminate altogether if it just wasn't performing the same way that we had expected it to, and what to scale up or test for our future programs. really like that point on, like, how program can be really resource intensive, and sometimes that's not something you look at. You might be looking at ad spend or, yeah, actual money that you spent on it, but time is money at the end of the day and especially if your team isn't huge. So, yeah, that's that's a really valid point. I like what you said about the acquisition. I'm sure that must have been a really interesting dynamic to navigate, and hopefully, it unlocked kind of some new data that you guys can look at from other teams. Then I remember that on our call, that's actually one of the points that you made. Would you mind explaining that a little bit, you know, the advantage of working in a in a in a bigger company with different teams and kinda tapping into each other's data. Yeah. So, obviously, I've mentioned earlier that I am a part of a smaller team, but there are, I think, well over 4,000 marketers at Salesforce. So a really big advantage for us as we were new and came in as well as once we became more established and started running these programs is we built relationships with other field marketing teams, other campaign teams, and we could kind of cross share our internal benchmarks and just share kind of tips of the trade of, like, what programs they may have run with the same vendor or even, like, a vendor we had never even heard of where they're trying to target the same audience we're going after. So in the large organization like Salesforce, there's a lot of adjacent teams targeting our IT decision makers, security teams. We're able to really lean on those teams and understand like which channels are actually working right now that are engaging that target audience, which vendors are delivering consistent, strong ROI. And maybe use the programs that they trialed out and they did the hard stuff for us and we decided, great. Now we don't have to make that expensive mistake and invest in a program that obviously didn't seem to do well for our counterparts. So it's really about the internal relationships and cross team learnings becoming part of the measurement advantage. It's not just about the dashboard as much as I go in, you know, to my monthly routine of looking at our team's programs. It is about being able to access and leverage all of the other insights across teams. Yeah. I like that. And I think you probably have to be really intentional about it. I think for us working for a smaller company, we think, oh, surely they all work together. They all know the same things. But I'm guessing you kinda have to, you know, make the effort of tapping someone on their shoulder or sending them a Slack message and kind of digging into that data a little bit more. Mhmm. Yeah, that's really cool. Ben, do you have any examples of or any kind of insights to, you know, how does measuring the impact of your marketing activities better, more accurately, more consistently, how does that change where you invest? Mhmm. So, obviously, like you said, the the main goal is to to to define where we invest in future. Mhmm. We that that's another aspect that we keep very lean. So there's only three three things that we measure. So the first one being the cost per lead. How how much did we spend to generate that specific lead? Then we look at the conversion rate. Right? If we generated a 100 leads, how many of those were we able to convert? It helps us understand if we are reaching the right ICP with those campaigns. And then lastly, it's a lifetime value. So how much will the customer spend with us? And we have averages in the business already. How how much, dollar value will the customer spend with us over three years, for example, and will that prove a a positive ROI. Right? Because if it cost us $10,000 to generate that one that one deal, and the customer is only spending five times with us over the lifetime, then, obviously, it's probably not not a model that we would be investing in in again. So we're just trying to to make sure that those metrics are healthy, that we're not generating too much noise, and then end up becoming overly busy. And that happened a few times every day campaigns and we were like, wow, can't believe how many leads we're getting. And then you just have a BDR team spending hours and weeks qualifying leads that will never convert. Right? And that can be very painful as well, because of time you're you're you're chasing leads that are never gonna convert. You're missing out on the leads that could have converted. So those are the the metrics that we look at. Yeah. That's such a good point is where you put your attention and where you focus your resources as well. Yeah. Cool. Brilliant. Thanks, Ben. Great. I think those are all the questions I had for you guys today. Again, thank you so much for your time and for all those insights. I wanna take some questions, from the audience. Thanks everyone for popping them into, our q and a chat. So Zoe says, any quick wins for lead gen? If you have no historical data, what's a good way way to set? I'm guessing good way to start or good way to, like, start pulling together that data. I can take that. I think having been a part of a team that was acquired, we didn't have benchmarks at all. So we basically had to just quarter over quarter start using the data that we did have with, like, net new programs and just start building that out with, again, the context, letting stakeholders know, like, this may be what other teams are generating, but this is what we're experiencing based on the target audience and programs that we're launching. And then at the end of last year, we did a really big retro and looked at all the different programs and then set those specific benchmarks for our webinars or in person workshops. So I would say that, like, our KPI tracker that we updated month over month reflected not only the, you know, real time data points from all the different programs that we were running, but it is inclusive of those benchmarks so that we can share out with the team after a program ends. This is what we achieved with this program. It, you know, was either x percent under or over what we were anticipating based on benchmarks. And I think that's something the team has really appreciated. And our benchmarks, you know, right now look very different than the benchmarks we set in our early stages of, joining the team. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And so Zoe kinda followed up to complete, that her question was good way to set target. So that sounds like, yeah, you kinda have to start somewhere. Right? Then I guess industry benchmark is also good is a good place to look. Ben, do you have any quick quick wins with lead gen? I know that you've called out a few examples, but, I guess, what would you recommend to Zoe? I mean, the great thing, Zoe, thank you for the question. I mean, the great thing is if starting from scratch, I mean, this is the time where you can experiment a lot. And sometimes it's a good thing because we you started with a clean slate. It gives you the opportunity to experiment, with a few different, channels and then see which ones bring you the most success. What's very important from now on is making sure that there's some way where you can track the leads that you have generated and the channels, that they came from, as you start generating leads. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually quite exciting. I mean, if you have no targets and the world is zero is right, you can you can kind of start from scratch. And I like what you said. I can't remember if you mentioned this today or on our call, but what were the three channels that you focus on then? Can you remind us? I think it's the sales, is the AppExchange, LinkedIn. Correct. Epic change being being one of them. LinkedIn is. the other one. And And then obviously very big on on newsletters to engage with our current users. So we have about 4,000 users. So, we work a lot with, with newsletters and try to build tracks based on how they interact with us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's about, okay, you know, what what kind of resources do you have and how can you make them go as far as possible and start getting some initial data. Cool. Thank you. I hope that was helpful, Zoe. If you have any more questions, please pop them in chat. I would also I know that we talked about, you know, the importance of nurturing a lead and kind of when when is a good time to hand it to sales. So the fact that, you know, single engagement is not necessarily the right approach. So if we get more practical with it, you know, when when is a good time to handle to hand those leads over to sale? Jen and Ben, kind of, whoever wants to start. Yeah. I can start. So, obviously, for my organization, all of the automation on the back end for one sales is or a lead is deemed really ready to hand over to sales. Like, that's all automated, which really just comes down to the intense signals plus the persona feel like I mentioned earlier, both of which really need to be present that they're a good fit, viable, potential customer for the product, and they have engaged enough with us to demonstrate that they're ready to talk to a sales rep. So if someone's already engaging, but it's, like, really early stages in their buyer journey, they've only maybe engaged with a handful of, like, guides or more top of funnel offers. Probably best for marketing to continue to nurture them and nurture them with more of the relevant topics that they're interested in, a little bit harder CTAs like demos, maybe lower funnel webinars that talk about more of the product and solutions. I think for us that we had seen recently too is that I think the right leads were getting routed to sales, but the conversion rate for those leads that were getting passed, the conversion rate was starting to dip, and something that our team noticed is that we could be a little bit more prescriptive in the description of those campaigns so that when a lead comes through, the salesperson knows exactly what they engaged with, and we equipped them with the relevant sales play. So they knew exactly which product to position to tie it back to the relevant CTA that they had most recently engaged with to help make that a much more fluid transition for them. I really like that point on giving the sales team, like, more information and more context because, I mean, I feel like everyone in the audience gets sometimes, you know, really impersonal, really like anonymous feeling like follow ups from whether it's a marketing email or a sales email, and it's just never obviously lands. So the more information you can have, the better. I really like that point. Ben, did you wanna add anything on, you know, when's the right time for that lead handover and yeah. How do you how do you go about that? So from our side, we use Pardot as a marketing tool, and it has been quite useful when it comes to lead scoring. So we can look at different touch points. And based on those touch points, we will award points to the to the lead. But we don't convert immediately. We'd like to wait, to see multiple interactions in a very short period of time. And if we allocate more points, if the person was on our web website, for example, yesterday, today, they downloaded something the day after they submitted that form. So we'll then increase the points, and that's when we feel that those leads are ready for sales. As we increase our capacity in sales, we will then try to go in earlier and see if it has an impact on the conversion rates or not. But that's something that they will be experimenting with, to then see if, you know, it brings positive results or not. But I agree with Jen. Sometimes you can go in too early, or with not enough context, and it might have a negative impact on on the conversion rate. Yeah. For sure. I guess timing is really important. Nice. Thanks, Ben. Another question is, are you using AI as part of marketing? If so, how? Jen, do you wanna start? Yeah. So I'd say if you're not using AI, you're doing something wrong. So outside of referencing Tableau for, like, the big meaty pieces of data points like pipeline, ACV, response volume. I use AI primarily for analyzing audience makeup and trends because it just helps you slice through that data a lot quicker. So I use AI tools like Slackbot, Writer AI, NotebookLM. Really helps me just, like, give those systems the data and create visualizations, slides for sharing insights with stakeholders. For me, like, previously, I thought it was really helpful for spotting, like, which roles, regions, industries are really engaging and converting with our webinars and hands on workshops. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of those programs were very net new for us. So we had an audience in mind that we wanted to target, and then we ended up being able to look at the end of your data and actually see, okay. Did we actually engage those correct personas, or who is it that we're engaging? Is it more of the practitioner level? Is it more of the decision maker? And from there, it really helped us reframe our targeting for future field programs and adjust messaging where needed to make sure that we were attracting the right audience as well as plugging any gaps if we aren't engaging the type of audience that we need to. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. That's not something I've done personally with using AI technology data, so that's definitely cool. Jen, any sorry, Ben. Any any ideas from you? Do you guys use AI much in your team? How are you using it? Are you finding good impact? Yeah. I wouldn't even know where to start. I think AI is a double edged sword, which can become intimidating very quickly because, obviously, you know, it it has the the potential to to impact a lot of, a lot of roles globally, right, in in different, No. industries. And I think you have two options. You either you either join it or you don't join it. But. either way, I don't think it is something negative. I I think it's massively positive. It's the same thing with when spreadsheets came out. Everyone was scared for accountants because suddenly everyone could could do year end reports. The reality is we don't have less accountants today. You just become more productive. We haven't become we don't have less work because of AI. We we working probably more hours now that we have AI. We just have a much, much bigger, output. And part of that output is doing all the stuff that would be tedious tasks. So we we try to research accounts before we contact them. We haven't released that campaign, but we're looking at a campaign where we're gonna research every single, contact, analyze the buyers, and and write personalized messages to leads that we have in the system to see if we can convert them from an MQL to an SQL. But, ultimately, it's helping us as well with understanding if leads, when they come in, if they are part of our ICP. And before, we used to get the salesperson or a video jump onto those leads, spend ten to fifteen minutes per lead, and we're trying to remove all of that work with AI. The other thing is the speed to market. If you look at landing pages, we built a landing page. It took me thirty minutes with two prompts, we filled the landing page, which was connected with our product, was connected with our back end. It's fully functional. We're going to publish it in the next couple of hours. Previously, we're working with an agency. It would take us two days. We would pay $2,000, wait two days for it to be live, and now it takes thirty minutes and it costs us $20 or $30. So. the speed to market is incredibly fast, and I do think that if you're not using AI, take advantage of it. There's so much collateral on on YouTube. Everyone's using Cloud obviously because it's a very easy model to use, but you can integrate it with external applications as well, like with your GitHub, with your Slack, with anything else, which then makes it very intuitive and you get the results much faster. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think it also, like, it's not about like you said, it's not about doing less work. It's doing more valuable work. Like, I think, we all want to spend time doing things that are more interesting and more strategic and actually being handed the results of some manual tedious work instead of having to do it yourself and then you can just jump to the analysis, jump to the thinking, the creative. So, yeah, I love that. That's really cool. Amazing. Thanks, guys. I think this was really cool. I'm so grateful, for your time and for all the insights that you shared. I just I wanna bring up my final slides just to wrap up our conversation. But yeah. So, as you probably already know, at Salesforce, Ben, we have a variety of services. It's not just about distribution, advertisement. We also help people with marketing strategy, messaging. We actually create the content. We can support with, building awareness, with lead generation. And and just, yeah, just it would be really great to hear from you guys if there's any specific marketing challenges that you're facing, if there's anything that you might need support with, or if you just have some broad marketing in the Salesforce ecosystem questions, no strings attached. All you have to do is get in touch with our lovely team. Their e mails are here on the screen, but I'm sure you can also find them on the website later. So yeah, I just wanted to give them a quick shout out that, you know, if you need any support with anything, we're here to help. Thanks again to my two amazing speakers. Yeah, very grateful that you guys were were game for this. You shared so many really interesting insights that I hope our audience will find really, really helpful. And yeah. Thank thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you, Trent. Thank you. Thanks so much to everyone. for joining. See you soon. See you.