The most painful mistake you can make (when trying to get accurate funnel/pipeline data in Salesforce): Adding stage date stamps to Leads/Contacts/Opportunities (only). And not using a custom object. Why? 1. The buyer's journey is not linear. But you have built a linear reporting model that cannibalizes itself. > When the dates are on the Lead/Contact, and that buyer exits the sales process and then re-enters, the date fields are overwritten. Meaning you lose the history of the last sales process for reporting. 2. You need a unified data set. But you have built siloed data. > You're stuck pulling a Lead report, a Contact report, an Opportunity report, and a Campaign Member report. Then, you have to do hours of "Excelympics" to get a stitched-together (but still incomplete) dataset that you can build reports with. I used to think B2B SaaS companies were ok with this "siloed linear" method. But it gets very painful as you scale. It'll work for a little bit. Maybe until you hit series A. But as soon as this data is important to you >> upgrade immediately. But really, the sooner, the better because you don't want to be caught out when the difficult questions start coming from your board, investors, and a growing marketing/sales team wanting to know conversion rates, what to invest in, what to cut, etc. P.s. I know you can solve some of this with BI/data warehouse. But that setup brings a whole host of other issues e.g. data in BI not matching data in SFDC, reliance on your data team (that often deprioritizes marketing), additional cost, and extra lead time on making any changes. #gtmoperations #marketingoperations #revenueoperations
Adam Robbert
2mo
Hmm.. Sounds like "Lifecycle Stage" as an object. When tracking the entire journey of a lead (ultimately a Contact) creating a cohesive view into the journey of each "lifecycle" of that lead/contact makes sense. It's easier to customize based on the business requirements, rather than moving the data along with that individual, you move it along with the experience which makes a lot of sense! More complicated use cases will need more parameters, rules, and general understanding to make it work. The question I typically come across when discussing this with clients is how to be integrate this object into the existing tech stack, and help that data flow into existing dashboards that are used to report business health. If Hubspot is in the tech stack and you have a more straightforward customer journey, enabling this comes fairly easily -> have SFDC conquer campaign tracking, have Hubspot do the heavy lifting for data capture past that, and push it back into Salesforce as a nice and tidy package. Might find that you can implement it faster and easier rather than building the entire thing on Salesforce. The key difference I see here is how site and product interaction typically needs to tie into this. Totally agree with the motion!
Ilan Hertz
1mo
Good point, however, there are two important points to consider as well. CRM data initially was not designed for tracking B2B buyer journeys. For example, the separation in Salesforce between Lead and Contact, although often representing the same person, is an outdated model. Moreover, you didn't mention the option to view the journey on an account/company level, which is essential for B2B journeys. Custom objects, beyong being a "band aid" solution, will create an additional level of complexity, especially when it comes to integrations with external platforms where many don't support custom objects.
Mark Ruch
2mo
Thanks Charlie Saunders - I'm copying this to a notebook entry so I have a handy and concise/precise explanation when anyone asks me about the use a custom object to track volume, conversion rates and velocity through the customer lifecycle. And yes, Marketing people (especially) should be pleading with their board/leadership to update their company's lifecycle tracking using a custom object. The marketing data is going to be the leading casualty in velocity tracking because it's too ephemeral to track accurately and de-prioritized as a result. BTW - if anyone is interested in this topic and hasn't seen the quick video overview Crissy Saunders put together to demonstrate what types of fields/values might be included and why they're important, here ya go: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crveteresaunders_revenuwgrowtharchitecture-gtmops-revops-activity-7194422027762479104-n_jj?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Kamil Rextin
2mo
wouldn;t campaigns solve for this? (dumb Q)
Robin Dijst
2mo
Stupid I have never thought of this.. Facing this exact issue at a customer. We tried several things. A flow now runs whenever the stage changes, and it works well. But it doesn’t show the long term leads generated. Creating a separate lead for every time a lead is created would make a difference. Would you recommend creating a similar structure as HubSpot has (with leads associated to contacts (and this case leads)) or would you create a completely different approach?
Anthony McQueen
1mo
This is great. Another option I've found valuable is to adopt a modern sales process, something like Forrester's latest B2B funnel, or any other contemporary process that tracks the entire funnel in opportunities. You can then use opportunity history tracking, and something like a drop-off analysis, instead of a stage to stage conversion, to build your customer journey (like you mentioned, sales cycles aren't always linear).
Hanan Amos
2mo
For high-touch and long sales cycles, a multi-touch attribution platform is necessary. I recommend Dreamdata
João Dobbin
2mo
That makes sense. Going through this now. Curious to hear from someone in HubSpot land what would be the best approach: Custom vs Lead object.
Klaas-Jan Knol
1mo
😉 In B2B scenario I am often fan of a salesforce Account+Contact scenario with optional Opportunity utilisation. For example lead stages on a opportunity or a different record type for early stage "lead opportunities".
Founder at Align.ly - Attribution and Lead-to-Account Matching for Salesforce
2moCharlie Saunders why do you recommend a custom object instead of using the standard campaign member object?