by Mike Walsh | Aug 15, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
If you have a wide customer/client base and are regularly on the road visiting current and prospective accounts, proper scheduling and planning can be quite a challenge. Not only do you have multiple schedules to juggle, but you also have to figure out the most efficient route to take to get to everyone! Well, Map Plotter is here to help you figure out that geography part. This app allows you to beyond just reading your Salesforce data, and helps you visualize it.
Visualize your Salesforce data with Map Plotter. Take a look at where your customers are located to manage customer visits. You can also optimize your travel routes and vastly improve your marketing campaigns.
Check it out here!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Apr 19, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Would you like to have an automated system that pre-qualifies prospects in your CRM, based on the technologies they are already using? What if it even identified additional sales opportunities that weren’t part of your initial target? Most likely, you have already said yes. This solution is the HG Insights for Salesforce App. It pulls from a huge database and analyzes prospects and leads, giving you deep insights to be leveraged by sales and marketing.
HG Insights allows you to see the technologies your customers and prospects use, so you can create more effective sales and marketing campaigns, score and prioritize your prospects, and find new companies using competitive or complementary solutions.
Check it out here!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Mar 21, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Pardot B2B Marketing for Salesforce is an extremely powerful tool. You can link thousands of prospects and leads to your CRM and engage with them in all sorts of ways. However, with great power comes great… confusion? Specifically, how do you know which automation tool to use for each situation?
Pardot features a couple of primary tools to use for your segmentation and automation: completion actions, segmentation rules, dynamic lists, and automation rules. In this article, we are going to be looking at two of these, dynamic lists and automation rules. When combined, these two tools form the backbone of your automated marketing efforts.
What is the difference between dynamic lists and automation rules?
Are you saying, well duh, one is a list and the other is a rule? You aren’t wrong, but the thing is, dynamic lists are defined by rules, and automation rules can be used to create lists. So the lines aren’t as clear as they may seem.
In short, a dynamic list is a list of prospects that automatically updates itself, both adding and removing members, based upon the rules you specify. Automation rules can certainly be used to add prospects to a static list, but they can also be used for many other options, such as assigning prospects to a particular sales rep/team.
Both dynamic lists and automation rules run continuously, matching and working with any prospect who matches their criteria.
The short answer is, you should use a dynamic list when you are creating a list that will likely be changing regularly. Such as members who have yet to watch a video, or who have an upcoming renewal date. By using a dynamic list, not only will your prospects be added the moment they qualify, but they will be removed when they no longer are needed.
With automation rules, the best practice is when you have a rule, that will run continuously and be based on multiple criteria.
Use Cases
Dynamic List
ABC Coolers is looking to send a reminder email to each of their customers who have a subscription renewal coming up. This could be done via either a dynamic list or automation rule, however, the dynamic lists are the best practice, since we will be looking to create a list that is continuously changing. While the automation could be written to give similar results, the dynamic lists will yield better transparency, tracking and reporting options. As well as being cleaner in the system.
To do this, we would create a program in the Engagement Studio, specifying the email to be sent, a start and end point. Then we simply specify our new dynamic list as the recipient. Thus, whenever someone is added to that list, the engagement program fires, sending of the email. What’s more, the program to be set so that members can enter an unlimited amount of times so that every time a renewal is pending, your list will update and send those critical emails.
Automation Rules
For automation rules, better uses will be when a list is not needed. ABC Coolers is again looking to automate their process. This time, they want to achieve a couple of results:
- When prospects view a landing page but don’t take completely the form, they want a follow-up email to be sent.
- To do this, they would use a completion action attached to that landing page to designate if the form was completed. Then, the automation rule is simply “send an email if the page was viewed AND the tag does not equal completed”.
- When prospects haven’t been active in a while, ABC wants to slowly reduce their Pardot Score, so that only active leads will be pushed toward sales
- This automation rule would be based on any field that tracks how many X days since the prospect has been active, and then reduces the score.
- For every greater power, multiple rules could be built, with incremental dates, such as 15 days with no action, 30 days with no action, 60 days with no action, and at each of these markers, the score is reduced. Oh, and just to make sure the score doesn’t go too low, you can also specify that it only applies to prospects with a score above zero!
So, hopefully, this quick dive into the use cases for Automation Rules and Dynamic Lists has given you a couple more ideas into how you can use Pardot to better manage your B2B marketing efforts.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
Don’t have Pardot yet?
Want to get going with one of the top B2B marketing platforms available?
Contact our Sales team for more info.
Contact us
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Dec 19, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Proper lead management often requires more planning and detail work than most people realize. Doing it the right way is much more than a “set it and forget it” type of mentality. However, when done properly, a few simple best practices can really boost your company and help you keep a pipeline full of qualified, and worthwhile leads.
So below, we have a short list of some of these best practices. Some are specific to using Pardot, and some are just generally good ideas when it comes to lead management in general.
1. Make sure Sales and Marketing are aligned.
For any lead management plan to work, marketing and sales need to be on the same page. When a lead enters the system, many times they are not yet “sales-ready”.
The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.
This means mapping out a clear sales process in addition to the marketing process, and defining where and how leads are handed off to Sales.
2. Track anonymous visitors and use their history once they opt-in
This is one of the staple items of using Pardot. When you setup Pardot, you add a little bit of tracking code to all of your essential web pages, forms, and links. When a prospect converts by filling out a form or gives you their email, all of that data will be automatically added to their profile.
This gives you a detailed history of how they went about looking at your company, the path they took to get to conversion, data on how successful your campaigns are and hopefully specific info on the prospect themselves. All of this happens passively, but in the end allows you to improve your campaigns, and understand how best to connect with your target audience.
3. Score leads properly
Essential to know when to turn over your leads to Sales, is scoring your leads. Each and every action a prospect takes, from visitng your web pages to clicking on your links carries with it some level of interest. But don’t confuse casual interest with intent to buy. Take some time and consider exactly what actions are good indicators (such as looking at a pricing page), and score them appropriately.
In the end, it is the action-oriented items, like signing up for a demonstration, that usually indicates the really interested parties, and should be marked as your hotter leads. Understand the difference is essential so that you don’t assign un-interested prospects to Sales.
Pardot makes this extremely easy, through the lead scoring customization page. Users can alter each and every standard scoring item, as well as create all sorts of custom score objects to fit each company’s unique cycle.
4. Keep the whole sales cycle in mind
Properly nurturing a lead means working with them throughout the sales cycle. The job of marketing is to nurture these prospects through education, value, and promotion, so they get to the point where there are legitimately interested and knowledgeable enough to be ready to talk to an account executive, but also to find out more about them to determine if they are a good fit. If all goes well, you can weed out the prospects who aren’t a good fit, and begin sending sales a steady stream of qualified prospects.
You can and should use every channel at your disposal, from email to social media to partner media channels. Content offers should include thought leadership pieces, guides, tips, industry research, and other pieces of content that help them solve their daily pains and addresses the particular problem you’re targeting with your product. Just remember, that this nurturing should continue throughout the entire duration of the sales cycle, and (to a lesser degree) beyond the sale as well.
Again, Pardot makes all of this easy. With connectors to most social media channels, as well as integrated email and link tracking, you can easily stay in touch with all of your prospects and deliver content anytime, anywhere
5. Create a target buyer profile
It’s pretty straightforward, how can you find and manage leads properly, if you don’t have a target in mind? Are you selling to B2B or B2C? Small companies or enterprise? Are you looking at a particular location or vertical? Are you selling to a CEO, marketing director, or another decision maker?
Setting up one or multiple profiles that both marketing and sales can use is just another trick to make sure your lead management efforts are giving you the best results.
Pardot offers a sophisticated profile creation tool. Users can create multiple profiles using characteristic traits such as location, industry, job title, company size and more. Then, each of these characteristics can be given a grade value, resulting in each prospect being assigned an overall grade for how closely they fit your ideal buyer.
So there you have it. Some simple but powerful tactics to better manage your leads.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
Interested in getting started with Pardot B2B marketing? Already have Pardot, but need help getting the most from your investment?
The Salesforce Experts at CloudMyBiz are here to help.
Contact Us
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Sep 19, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Finding the right solution for email marketing can be quite a challenge. Not all systems come with every feature you want. More importantly, having a system that seamlessly integrates into your Salesforce, and gives you all the tracking and reporting options you need in an easy to access and use interface is what makes an email system great, or not so great. Getting all of this can often require a hefty price tag… not so with Campaign Monitor for Salesforce.
Use Campaign Monitor to quickly add your Salesforce records, keep your customer’s preferences up to date and see your sends, opens and clicks right from within Salesforce.
Check it out here!
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
