Episode 6 - Part 1 - Attract, Attain, Retain
Attracting Attention through effective Marketing in CRM
This is the first of a three-part series I'm doing related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It will be of interest to you if you don't have a lot of business experience or real-world experience dealing with customer relationships. IÕm coming from the angle of being a Salesforce instructor online and in the Salesforce space for close to a decade now.
I thought it would be beneficial to have a resource I could point people towards if they needed to understand the background information around how Salesforce specifically, and also at a high level, how businesses in general should handle marketing, sales, and service. So, IÕll call this the "Attract, Attain, Retain" series, going in the order of marketing, sales, and service. "Attract" would be for marketing, which weÕll cover in this episode. "Attain" will be the next episode for sales, and then "Retain" will be the third and final episode in this three-part series, where we will provide service and support.
ItÕs the full lifecycle of a business-to-business relationship or business-to-consumer relationship, where you have to first attract attention, then attain them as a customer by closing deals, and then retain them as a customer by providing excellent service and support.
In this particular episode, weÕre going to talk about marketing and attracting attention to your brand, product, or service. This will also be helpful to business owners who are trying to focus on their marketing efforts, as well as those trying to understand the knowledge areas on the Salesforce Administrator certification exam around sales, marketing applications, and service and support applications.
IÕm currently authoring the chapter in my upcoming Salesforce Certification and Study Guide book from O'Reilly Media on "Attract, Attain, Retain." My intention in that study guide book, which is coming out in early 2025, is to place that chapter before I go into those knowledge areas specifically for sales, marketing applications, and service and support.
One of the primary drivers of marketing in Salesforce, or in marketing in general, is the creation of campaigns. You may be familiar with campaigns in the context of politics and different political campaigns. One of the goals of anyone campaigning for office is name recognition. Usually, those that win elections are the most well-known, and itÕs very hard for someone to garner votes if they are virtually unknown. The first goal of marketing or campaigning is to attract attention. In the context of business, that means raising brand awareness and trying to interest potential customers in your product or service.
On the marketing side, some of the primary objects and different types of records youÕll be using and seeing in the interface would be campaigns. Inside those campaigns, there are a lot of data points around your intended audience, your anticipated spend, your anticipated return on investment (ROI), and tracking those different leads or people that have expressed some sort of interest or people that youÕre targeting for your campaigns.
Beyond campaigns, another important record would be any lead records. These leads can come in any number of ways inside your CRM system, whether itÕs Salesforce or another CRM. Some are inbound, and some are outbound. You may be doing outbound cold calling or reaching out through LinkedIn and finding new lead records. Or you may be enticing people to visit your website, download a whitepaper, attend a webinar, or enroll in a free course, among other examples. Whatever it may be, youÕre doing these efforts to bring new people into your instance of Salesforce or whatever CRM youÕre using.
In Salesforce, you can create what are known as web-to-lead forms and embed those on your website so that whenever someone fills out a form, it feeds automatically into your Salesforce instance. You want to try to capture, at the very least, their email address, and ideally their first name. On the marketing side of things, itÕs a fine balancing act as far as not asking for too much information. In practice, if you start having forms out there for people to fill out, the response rate and submission rates will drop as you add more fields and requirements. The main goal initially in attracting attention is to get the email address and possibly the first name. You can always follow up and start gathering further details.
In this emerging era of AI, you will have AI chatbots embedded into your websites, growing more intelligent every day. They can do some of that marketing qualification for you, asking questions of your potential customers hitting your website or engaging with your chatbot to find out their timeframe, budget, and interest.
There are different ways to track your referral sources and how they came to your website. These different channels need to be thought about strategically and measured so you know which marketing channels bring the greatest return on investment. Some of these channels include email marketing, which is one of the longest-running marketing mechanisms, chatbots, websites, television ads, print ads, radio, trade shows, and more. You want to think about all the different ways people might become aware of your brand and your product or service. You can segment your campaigns by channel to keep track of which channels bring the best results.
Inside Salesforce specifically, you can connect people in your campaigns so you can follow them throughout the lifecycle of any potential deals. You may have contact records in your campaigns in addition to the leads. Typically, you work with a lead at the beginning of that relationship. Once theyÕre converted, they become a contact. The lead record is no longer used; it doesnÕt get deleted but is hidden from use in Salesforce. You have them as a contact, associated with the account or company they work for. The company field name, a text field on the lead record, becomes an actual record belonging to the account object inside Salesforce, and the opportunity is related as well.
As deals close on the sales side, it can be tracked back through what is known as campaign influence inside Salesforce. You can attribute the influence of those campaigns on those closed-won opportunities, giving business owners more intelligence around where to spend their ad spend. The goal of any lead is to take them successfully through the lead conversion process, through qualifying them.
YouÕve maybe been on the receiving end of the qualification process as a lead yourself if youÕve ever stepped onto a car lot. YouÕll receive a lot of qualifying questions from salespeople, asking about your credit, employment, down payment, trade-in, and timeframe for leaving the lot. TheyÕll prioritize you based on your answers. Good credit, a large down payment, or paying cash, and being employed will get more attention from them, while bad credit, no down payment, unemployment, and just looking around will likely get you a business card to reach out when youÕre ready.
This helps prioritize leads with the most chance of converting to a sale, especially in a commission-based environment. You have to prioritize leads based on which are hot leads versus cold leads. A fun film recommendation related to how leads were handled before CRM systems like Salesforce is "Glengarry Glen Ross" by David Mamet. In that film, youÕll find great performances by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, and others. Their leads were tracked on three-by-five note cards, and the good leads went to the closers, as did the coffee in the famous line from Alec Baldwin, ÒCoffee is for closers. So, put that coffee down.Ó ItÕs a good reminder that customer relationship management has been around for a very long time, as long as commerce has been happening.
Good customer service and doing well in all three areas of marketing, sales, and service, where you attract, attain, and retain customers, bring success. Those that fail in one of those areas never truly hit on all cylinders. These are the three fundamentals of any business. I think about this with Salesforce too, especially before the emergence of AI. Those were the three fundamentals of Salesforce: marketing, sales, and service, or the Marketing Cloud, the Sales Cloud, and the Service Cloud.
With artificial intelligence, Salesforce now has a new mantra: Data + AI + CRM + Trust. TheyÕve grown their business from a CRM company to these four main legs of their table. Assessing the most lucrative channels and identifying gaps in your marketing process based on your marketing repsÕ behaviors and other marketing principles can give you ideas to improve your overall marketing process and adjust your CRM system accordingly.
AI is being baked more into CRM, providing real-time or just-in-time instructions or guidance for users. One of the things youÕll see mentioned inside Salesforce will be recommendations for generating marketing emails. AI excels in writing compelling copy and content. You can review and tweak that through feedback frameworks, making further adjustments and turning those into prompt templates for later reuse.
Inside your CRM, prompt grounding provides context for a particular record, which is invaluable for gaining intelligence specific to that lead record rather than a generic high-level overview. Salesforce is a good example of how AI can be used. Salesforce is one of the main barometers of the economy at large, part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average because of its far-reaching impact with large enterprise organizations across all imaginable verticals.
SalesforceÕs approach to responsibly handling AI in the context of respecting and securing peopleÕs data is important. They say, ÒYour data is your product, not ours.Ó This distinction is important, and I think many companies will follow SalesforceÕs approach. Their roadmap and goals with AI are sound, and central to that is the word "trust." You'll see that repeated often when dealing with Salesforce, especially related to AI.
Be mindful of the term "Einstein," which has to do with SalesforceÕs AI platform. Salesforce now says anyone can be an Einstein. They used to say anyone could code, but with AI, coding is more often done by AI. We donÕt all need to code now; we can be smarter than we actually are through AI assistants like SalesforceÕs Einstein platform. This idea means you can surround yourself with various experts advising you along the way in your journey, whether learning a new tool like Salesforce, a new technology like artificial intelligence, or setting up your own business starting with marketing in the attraction phase.
A good CRM system can handle multiple marketing processes depending on the type of customer youÕre targeting or the product youÕre selling. Salesforce handles this well with marketing processes inside Salesforce tied to different record types or lead record types. Record types can be hard to wrap your mind around when starting out or unfamiliar with Salesforce.
Another common confusion is the term "objects." Objects in Salesforce are like nouns: people, places, or things. Objects can be anything, such as jet engines, refrigeration units, jet freighters, or baseball cards. The common objects or things are leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities, referred to as standard objects because they come standard inside Salesforce. With those objects, you may have different types known as record types.
A good example of different types of leads would be real estate. You may have real estate leads for condos, townhomes, land, or single-family homes. For land leads, you donÕt need to capture the number of bedrooms, but for a single-family home lead, the number of bedrooms is important. YouÕd want different record types on leads to separate and focus on whatÕs important to a land lead versus a home lead.
Another example is vehicles or automobiles. The automobile is the noun or object, and you have different types: gas vehicles, electric vehicles, and hybrid vehicles. For gas vehicles, youÕd want to record the miles per gallon, but for electric vehicles, youÕd want to record miles per full charge or range.
ThatÕs a quick review of record types in Salesforce tied to different underlying processes. Salesforce excels with these, catering to large organizations when they outgrow selling just one thing. I always recommend holding off on using record types until youÕve outgrown a single record type. Salesforce works well out of the box with its default master record type for all objects. If youÕre only selling widgets, thereÕs no need for record types. But if you branch out into other areas, selling, for example, widgets and generators, or land and condos and homes, or gas and electric vehicles, then youÕd want to implement different processes for marketing those things. That means multiple record types and processes on the attract side to dictate what to do from initial attraction through lead qualification and conversion.
Effective CRM systems handle this by being highly customizable, identifying different stages or phases from initial inquiry to conversion into a contact, account, and opportunity, handing that over to sales. WeÕll dive deeper into the sales process in the next episode and talk about the attain phase on the sales side.
I look forward to the next episode of Urelevant. Be sure to subscribe so youÕre alerted to the next episodes. Next week will be sales, where we attain customers, and the following week will be the retain phase of the marketing, sales, and service lifecycle, where weÕll talk about service and support. By the end of this three-part series, this will be a great resource for understanding effective customer relationship management (CRM).
Resources:
Einstein Trust Layer
