Measuring Marketing’s Impact on Sales Pipeline

Marketers have a real impact on the organization’s bottom line. You just need to use these attribution models to prove it. You also need a marketing automation platform like Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) automation solution to track everything.

May 12, 2022

Main Points

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Multi-Touch Attribution using Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns

Your prospects don’t just come to your website and click buy. The modern customer journey involves a lot of research before the first contact, multiple marketing touches and several interactions with sales. This is even more true for complex products which have longer buying cycles and usually involve multiple decision makers.

Which campaign will receive credit when multiple marketing campaigns touch the same prospect resulting in an opportunity creation? You want to measure how your marketing initiatives are tied to business results. However this is not a straightforward process. There are more ways to credit marketing activities which impact sales and there are a couple methodologies which you can use.

Marketing is not just money down the drain. Marketers have a real impact on the organization’s bottom line. You just need to use these attribution models to prove it. You also need a marketing automation platform like Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) automation solution to track everything. This blog post will walk you through those examples and how you can use Salesforce to measure that.

Data-driven marketers should continue to ask the following questions:

In which marketing campaigns should I continue to invest?
Which marketing campaigns should I abandon or what should I change?
Which campaign helped you acquire new prospects?
What is the cost per new name for each type of campaign?
Which campaigns influenced the most Opportunities, pipeline and revenue?
How much pipeline credit is last quarter’s webinar getting?

Definitions

Understand the following concepts is crucial when measuring marketing’s impact on sales.

Pipeline Credit - When sales opens an Opportunity in Salesforce
Revenue Credit - When sales successfully closes an Opportunity in Salesforce
Attribution - Method of crediting Opportunity value to one or many marketing activities

Salesforce Campaigns

These are essential in tracking all your marketing activities and touch points. They can have both Leads and Contacts as members. You can categorize your marketing activities, measure the success of each activity and tie them into Opportunities.

Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot)

In Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot), you can use Completion Actions for emails and forms to change the Salesforce Campaign member status of your Leads and Contact prospects. This will indicate they successfully performed your call to action in your marketing campaign.

Example 1

Date: May 2016

Department: Marketing Prospects

Activity: Registers for Webinar Campaign

Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us

Cost: $3000

Example 2

Date: February 2016

Department: Marketing Prospects

Activity: Performs the Call to Action in Email Blast

Campaign: EB 2016 Infographic

Cost: $1000

Example 3

Date: April 2016

Department: Sales

Activity: Downloads Whitepaper from the Website

Campaign: WC 2016 Advance Tech Specs

Cost: $3000

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In Salesforce, it will look something like this:

Campaign View

Opportunity Stage History

Opportunity Campaign Influence

First-touch (FT) Attribution

Simply means giving credit to the campaign that acquires a prospect.

Pipeline Credit

Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit for that opportunity? The initial campaign will receive 100% Pipeline Credit for that Opportunity, simply because the opportunity was created.

Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us

Cost: $3,000

Pipeline Credit: $100,000

Revenue Credit

Which campaign should receive Revenue Credit for that opportunity? The campaign that acquired the prospect gets 100% of the Revenue Credit if that opportunity closes.

Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us

Cost: $3,000

Revenue Credit: $80,000

Your Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot)Campaign Report is a good place to monitor FT attributions:

Multi-Touch (MT) Attribution

Simply means giving credit across all campaigns evenly when a prospects achieves success in multiple campaigns. The prospect must achieve a successful responded campaign status for all the marketing activities they participated in.

Pipeline Credit

Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit when multiple campaigns touch the same prospects resulting in an opportunity? Only the January Webinar and February Email Blast will split the credit because they occurred before the opportunity was created. The Web Content campaign does not receive any credit because it happened after the opportunity was opened.