Encouraging sales to enter valuable marketing data into SFDC

Interesting question, Olivia.  But let's not forget... salespeople are inherently lazy and motivated only by work that will boost their numbers.

Luckily you can use that comical unfounded stereotype to your advantage.  There are also other methods of qualifying & normalizing your database.

Option 1: infer information about existing contacts using fields that were already populated (from either a manual or automated process)

Option 2: set up validation rules in Salesforce to prevent users from creating contact records without certain information populated

Option 3: create SLA between marketing, sales, CS, and other teams to require information to be populated, otherwise it will be deleted

Option 4: create automated email for SFDC report and set user roles for everyone you want to see the report

Option 5: use an enrichment service that is managed by Marketo's Webhooks to associate information from a 3rd party source

Hope that helps.  Good luck.

PL

Hi Olivia,

I agree with Philip's overview above - fundamentally Sales teams are stacked out (and yes a bit lazy sometimes) but one of the biggest blockers we've found in our work at LBDGA is that Sales teams don't know what happens (what comms/ nurtures etc) their prospects get when they put them into any system - a good shake up of Sales and Marketing alignment will help give them visibility of the process and the reason behind needing the data.

Nothing is as powerful though as a sales bod actually showing their peers a "success story" - i.e. really giving them the WIIFM case!

Hope that helps

Helen 

There are a few things you can do :

• First, get rid of any data manipulation outside of SFDC and Marketo. Stop using excel files for instance to prepare targets for campaigns, including campaigns such as VIP events. Use SFDC campaigns instead. Sales have to understand that what's not in salesforce does not exist and that you do not have time to manipulate Excel spreadsheets. You got a superb set of tools to do exactly this, so...
• Second, announce that you will soon stop targeting everyone in your campaigns and start targeting precisely, based on the data you have. And do it. So if contacts / leads have no data in salesforce, they will not be targeted and that's a sales problem. "No email, no marketing". Information such as job title, company size, industry, gender (if the country you are in requires gender for personalization) will be the key for your campaigns.
• Continue with the fact that you will take actions based on the fact that Contacts aare linked to opportunities (such as stop sending marketing message or sending content specifically tailored for these contacts). But explain you can only do this if the system knows that contact are attached to opportunities.
• Implement and Use Sales Insight (if not done yet) and train the sales on how to use it. They will understand the value of the information provided by Marketo
• Push information back to salesforce using MSI (above) and also SFDC campaigns. Synchronize your programs and/or do it explicitly in your samrt campaigns, but do it and let sales understand how to read campaigns and campaign member statuses in salesforce

My 2 cents,

-Greg