Salesforce Case Study - Lead Analytics
During 2017, after multiple customer discussions, it was clear that there was gap in the market for some kind of tool that would improve a lead generation marketers efficiency and effectiveness. The business felt it necessary to explore and discover more about this route and so we set off onto our discovery and design process.
You can see part of the final product demo’d here at Dreamforce (minute 29:20): https://www.salesforce.com/video/1779213/
Framing the Problem.
Problem Statement: A key challenge for B2B companies has been measuring the overall effectiveness of their ad spend. Marketers need to move beyond knowing that someone on Facebook filled out a form and measure what ads are actually leading to a sale.
Hypothesis: We believe that by introducing the ability to measure the effectiveness of targeted ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience Network throughout the entire sales journey. Connecting Pardot and Sales Cloud to Advertising Studio to get a simple dashboard of how of your ads perform on your key business metrics. Will allow the marketer to become more proficient at measuring attribution, therefore funneling time and money into what gets you the best ROI.
Constraints
1) It has to talk to the Pardot API. 2) Built within existing advertising campaigns platform
Who
B2B. Looking at Sales people, Marketers, Advertisers. Both strategical and tactical levels.
Success Metrics
ACV being the most important metric to any business wide strategy shift.
Other more more leading metrics were number of campaigns connected to the new tracking system, budget/spend increases of tracked campaigns.
Customer sign ups to the beta and customer interview responses during testing .
Discovery
We embarked on a discovery phase to ascertain the validity of our business leaders direction and on which key customer problem we should be solving first.
This was joint venture between product, design, research and engineering. As we went through the analysis process and presented the feedback to the wider team. It was clear that marketing teams were suffering with heavy and laborious methods to prove the effectiveness of their marketing strategies (attribution). So this provided us with our first problem to solve and that was regarding smarter & automated lead attribution.
“With the recent research in tow, the team embarked on a journey to solve the key lead marketers problem, attribution.”
Workshopping
With the recent research in tow, the team embarked on a journey to solve the key lead marketers problem, attribution.
In what form that was to be, was still to be decided and experimented upon. We ran a workshop with the cross functional team.
The team level set on the problem, personas and other SME knowledge. We then got sketching out flows and wires and presented these ideas back to the wider team, whereupon we lay out a path to test these new ideas.
Note that a key principle here was a well guided first time user experience, in line with Salesforce strategic goals of improving trust and usability. So setup had to be as easy as we could get it, despite the technical complexities of integrations.
Design & Prototyping
After the workshop, it was time for me to flesh out the chosen idea by the team, and find the quickest possible route to get this MVP to “market".
However, it wasn’t a simple problem to solve, we had a decent idea of how to produce the end result, that wasn’t the hard part to get out there and test with our customers. It was the complex web of integrations and interactions with many different code bases and apps in the Salesforce ecosystem. Being in very large corporate cloud computing company offers a great deal of advantages but also comes with its hurdles.
For us in this instance, we had a multitude of hoops that our end user would have to jump through to reap the benefits of our idea. We had to somehow make this as easy as possible to get setup and going.
“ It was important that the setup experience was easy enough for our classic marketer, who’d be living in the tool, day in day out & could get up and running without the help of services or IT.”
Two prototypes were created. One prototype was created in code and the other in Axure, my weapon of choice at that time for testing out interaction design with users. Reason being, we wanted to produce a shell of the prototype in code and experiment with the different technologies to hand, with the hopes that our design choices weren’t completely wayward, we’d also be fairly ahead and prepared to get the real product out there in customers hand post user testing.
It was important that the setup experience was easy enough for our classic marketer persona, who’d be living in the tool, day in day out & could get up and running without the help of services or IT.
User Testing & Iteration
With the Axure prototypes built and ready for testing, we in parallel had begun working on our plans for the next round of customer interviews. We formulated our research goals, methods and questions and got recruiting. As normal, during our customer interviews, the entire project team were invited to the session to silently listen in.
After another group analysis session with the UX team and PM's, we presented our findings back to the rest of the project team. Our findings were positive, but with clear areas to improve upon. Our MVP was all but ready with a few iterations required.
Initial Release Notes:
Ads can only be filtered by date range (Last 7, 30, 90 days). Support for advanced filtering will be added in a future release.
Campaigns can only be viewed on the ad level. Viewing data on an ad set or campaign level will be added in a future release.
Only tracks ads for Facebook and Instagram. Support for additional platforms, led by Google, will be added in a future release.
A Few Industry Commentators…
"The Facebook lead ads API helps businesses grow by allowing them to form more meaningful relationships with business decision-makers. A solution like Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook is a great tool that leverages the power of our API to help B2B marketers better understand how their campaigns drive leads, opportunities and ultimately business outcomes" said Louis Moynihan, MarTech Partnerships Lead at Facebook. Source.
"We’ve seen fantastic results with Salesforce and are excited to leverage Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook to take prospect engagement to a new level by measuring the success of our Facebook ad campaigns all the way to a won deal—something we haven’t had the ability to do before,” said Jake Fabbri, vice president of marketing at Fonteva, a Salesforce.com partner that specializes in events and association management software, in a statement. “We’ll now be able to focus our budgets on Facebook ads that are working and increase the ROI of our ad spend overall.” Source.