Your CRM is Sabotaging B2B Marketing Efforts

Hello, and welcome to the Revenue Marketing Report powered by CaliburMind. I'm your host, Kamala Thompson, and today I will also be your guest. But I have Doug Bell here to do the honors of temp hosting. Hi, Doug.

Hi. We do this a lot, don't we, Kamala? We switch on and off. We're both longtime podcast hosts.

So hopefully I can handle this. I'm not sure. I know, but it is weird being a guest on my own hosted show. So that's a new one for me, but I'm excited because it's something I'm really passionate about that we're going to be talking about.

So what we're going to be talking about today is, I'm going to mistitle this a bit, but sort of the insidious impact of people misunderstanding CRM. And really it is CRM is sabotaging marketing, and this is how to fix it. I love the topic. So, Kamal, I know when we were talking last week, there was a moment, you had this aha moment, this epiphany, if you will.

So just tell us a little bit about that. I'm going to guess just a wee bit, but you had this epiphany about the drag CRM is creating on marketing, and I'm going to guess it has to do with how different organizations see CRM differently. Very much so. It's also how different system administrators see systems, because ultimately they're responsible and there's not enough cross-pollination.

So it was just, it was very much, yes, the light bulb moment. And so tell us, okay, unpack that for us. What do you mean by system administrators? Specifically, these are the Salesforce and HubSpot and, oh my God, I hope not, Microsoft Dynamics administrators.

Are they the ones getting this wrong? and Zoho CRM and Zoho campaign administrators. Let's just cover all of them. And Sage, don't forget Sage.

And that's Pipe Drive. Pipe Drive. Oracle CRM had a moment and it was a terrible moment, but okay, we're moving on. Yes.

So what I want to emphasize here is that traditionally the CRM administrator was embedded in sales and the marketing automation administrator was embedded in marketing. And when you have tiny organizations, it may be one person trying to do both things. It's too big of a job for one person, but that's for another day. But the problem is each of these administrators shares the views and cares and priorities of the organization they're embedded in, and they don't necessarily know what the other team doesn't know.

And how does this show up? Give me an example of a symptom that your everyday marketer would recognize. Oh my gosh. Okay.

So I see this particularly with Marketo and HubSpot instances because they have some really powerful automation to send campaign data in all these different directions. So marketing leaders are highly concerned about proving out their digital advertising budget. And I get it. I've been there.

I understand. But what happens is because we can capture where these ads are coming or form fills are coming from, what we do too often is we split up all the campaigns under a parent in a CRM like Salesforce. And we have a campaign for a digital ad, a digital ad, a Facebook ad, you get my point. The problem with this, there's a couple problems.

One, the CRM isn't structured to report on layers. And what I mean by that is when you look at campaign influence, when the sales team looks at what caused the lead to come across their desk, they're only seeing one layer. And it's probably the layer, to be quite honest, brutally honest, they probably don't care about as much because when they're following up on a lead, they really need to know what that person did and what they'll remember to get them to interact. You know, you bring up a problem that I think we all encounter and you talk about it in terms of data layers.

And quite often this ends up being, gosh, like if you're really unlucky, you're stitching this together in a spreadsheet. Are there other options for everyday marketers to be able to stitch together? Because you're talking about different campaign types within a given CRM in different campaigns and your ability to understand whether something worked or not to oversimplify the world, your ability to sort of stitch this together is key. So what are the alternatives for folks that need to do this?

So perhaps maybe before we even get there, we can talk about why should marketing leaders care about this? Because it's a really tedious, in the weeds thing to know. The reason why marketing leaders should care is that the way the CRM works and the way all of their marketing platforms work are vastly different. And the types of information should be different in those systems or differently displayed.

So what I mean by that is marketing, we care about every touch point, every interaction, every engagement, every intense signal. I get it. I get it. But when we're talking to the sales team and we're trying to sell something like attribution, whatever has the most activity is naturally going to get the most weight and the most quote unquote credit.

It's also going to pass a lot of info over that the sales team can't act on. So you're going to run into data limits in your CRM. You're going to confuse your sales team and you're not going to get the reports that the executive team wants. So what I want marketing leaders to really keep in mind is that the best thing for the business is to elevate those high value lead actions or campaigns that sales can act on and has a chance at converting.

That should be your top priority and you need to start thinking about campaigns from that perspective. Now, it doesn't mean we can't still get all the UTM goodness that we need in order to tie everything together. And I'll go into that in just a second. But what I want people to think about is campaigns and campaign members need to tell the sales team what they should be reaching out about and contacting the person about And that thing should be the most meaningful sticking point in the mind of the prospect And it should be the most meaningful thing tied to conversions on the sales and marketing side.

So do you have any questions? That was a lot. No, no. And I see, like, I'll bring up an example of how, I'll give you an example of a symptom I see quite often.

And then sort of how sellers or sorry, I would say sales operations are working around this to benefit sellers. So a good example is anybody knows Zapier. I think it's an amazing software, by the way. If they had stock, I would buy it.

It's great middleware between, you know, map and your WordPress instance is an example. But it also has a lot of really great orchestration. And I feel like I know when folks are having trouble with the exact same thing, Camel, which is making campaign data useful for sellers. is that I see them using Zapier to sort of summarize lead information in a single email.

It sounds great, doesn't it? Except when you have, let's say, 100 emails, or sorry, 100 leads coming in per seller per month. And then suddenly you're having these conversations as a sales leader, and the seller's going through and sorting their email. In other words, it sort of goes around, it skirts the problem you're talking about.

And that's how I see this showing up. Right. And I've made a career out of helping organizations structure their data and then analyze it to figure out what's overwhelming the sellers and not really productive versus what they can convert. And as a marketer, it's really tempting to have them chase after everything.

But everybody, time is a precious commodity that all of us don't have enough of. And we really need to think about what's best for the business and what will lead to more pipeline and bookings. So I want to unpack this a bit more if we can. And what I'd love to do, if it's okay, is let's take the campaign object.

And you sort of settled on a solution here that talks about using campaign objects, sorry, a campaign in, let's say, Salesforce or HubSpot or wherever, using that, a special type of campaign to really address seller needs. But I think it would be important to sort of talk about, so let's start with marketing. How should marketing think about the campaign simply in terms of its ability to do its job? Because you've given a solution for sellers.

What about for marketing? What does that campaign structure look like in Xero? Such a good question. And this is pretty specific to Dynamics, Salesforce, and other organizations that structure their data like that.

HubSpot's a little bit different. We'll have to talk about that later, probably on another podcast, to be honest. But don't tune out because it's still going to be useful to you. So in your CRM marketers, I want you to know some things that your CRM admin probably hasn't told you.

And it's not their fault. They just don't know what other people don't know. And that is, first and foremost, Salesforce and most databases love a flat structure hierarchy wise. So what this means is parent-child relationships, that view hierarchy button.

It looks really cool in the CRM and we can see how things roll up to region, initiative, campaign type, like all that stuff. You can't replicate that in your reports in CRM. And I see this mistake made over and over again where we want some visual organization. What I really, really encourage you to think about instead is when we have standard values we're using over and over again, like region.

or maybe it's an audience, there are custom field options for you for just about any scenario you can think of. And these custom fields, because they're on the record making it flat and not up several levels, like parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, because they're on that one record, it's very simple for your team to pull that field into a summary report, charts, anything you want in Salesforce, they can probably do it a lot cleaner, or it's possible to do it when before it wasn't.

So that's the first thing is stop organizing information by using the parent and grandparent. Keep it flat. I also encourage marketers to think about campaigns themselves as the CTA or the action that you're trying to get the person to do, as opposed to what they clicked to get there. Now, we're still going to capture that information.

But what we're going to do is we're going to use Flows in Salesforce and Salesforce Ben, CaliberMind has a guide that's coming out. There's so many resources that will help you do this. But what we can do is actually push those UTM parameters instead of using a campaign down to the campaign member. And this may not make sense to folks, but what the campaign member is, is it's your signal of the CTA and the person performing that CTA.

And then with these custom UTM fields, we're also capturing on the same record what they did to get there. That's a pretty radical transformation. I mean, what you're doing is saying, if I'm understanding this correctly, Kamala, is you're saying a campaign should represent an asset, a marketing asset. Yes.

Or a webinar or something along those lines. And the status on that campaign member should say what they did with it. So a webinar, they could have registered, they could have showed up, or they could have no-showed. and to what detail you can go to depends on the provider you're working with.

But that campaign member should really be used to describe what exactly they did with that asset, program, campaign, whatever you want to call it. But I think, so I'm saying it's radical. I think it's actually incredibly logical. It's taking, it's really at the end of the day, taking the most essential element of, let's call it a program or a motion, in this case, an asset, and assigning a campaign to it.

So you sort of getting away from these grandparent hierarchies that sort of trip up reporting and understanding what working So that makes sense to me But can you give me an example or examples of how marketers are currently using campaigns So what I see with a lot of companies I consult with is we have a great, great grandparent region campaign. And then we have an initiative that rolls up to the region. And then an audience that rolls up to the initiative. And these are each campaign.

So we're three levels now. And then I see the campaign type, how I think of it or the asset. Then I see the ad they clicked on or organic or however your system is sorting it out, depending on the URL string. So the problem with that is we can only report one level deep in summary reports in Salesforce.

And there's very little we can do to report on parent data when it comes to like opportunity, campaign influence reports. It's very, very, very rigid. So the alternative I'm describing is you have one campaign for the asset or CTA. You have drop down pick lists for your region, your initiative, your audience.

So you're flattening it all out. And then on the campaign member level, you're going to push down those UTM parameter values. And the reason why this is really smart to do is because people rarely go where we want them to when we give them an ad. So if you have persistent UTM tracking and they click all over the place and they don't download that ebook, but they go, heck, I want a demo.

Now, this method allows you to take those UTM values and put it on the demo request, even though you meant to have them do a download. And because this is so flat, you can use campaign member reports to actually summarize data on those UTM values and look at all the campaigns or assets you're actually influencing as opposed to making an assumption based on their URL string. So Cam, I like this a lot. I think this is really, really logical, if you will.

And it's already helping me sort of unpack some of the challenges that marketers face when they get into these complex hierarchies. We've got a white paper coming out that you authored. It's not out there yet. So in the meantime, where can people go to see sort of good content around how to pull this off?

You mentioned Salesforce, Ben. Yeah, Salesforce, Ben is a great resource. There's a lot of consulting agencies, too, that give this information out for free. And then CaliberMind has a lot of ungated resources already that detail campaign structure, account-based marketing, and how that should impact your campaigns.

There's a lot of good material there, too. So I think there's a lot of information out there. It's just a matter of your marketing automation person and your CRM person knowing about these things. Okay, that's really helpful.

And I'm looking forward to your guide getting published because I have to say I think it's the best summary of what we're talking about that I've seen. So I want to do two things here. I want to go in the direction of how do we take what really is, at the end of the day, a new sort of operating model for campaign data? And I want to talk about how one might organize and understand a motion.

And I'll give you an example. So again, we're going back to this idea of asset-based campaigns. Doesn't matter the system. But quite often what happens, and we know this for folks that don't have attribution, don't have attribution, shame on you.

But if you don't have it, quite often you're asked to say, hey, how did this campaign perform? We're not talking about a Salesforce object. We're talking about a combination of steps. And you mentioned this as layers, right?

So an example I will give is, say, a proto account-based marketing. I know I'm going to go after 100 accounts, so therefore 1,000 accounts. I'm going to put a digital campaign together. And then I'm going to have my head of products reach out via LinkedIn asset, right?

Because they're going to have an offer with that asset. And then I'm going to run an email campaign that has another asset embedded into it, let's say a special diagnostic offer, what have you. And so how does somebody sort of stitch this together from a motion standpoint, meaning multiple different sort of orchestrations and multiple different assets to achieve a goal of, say, driving bookings or driving pipeline? Well, you just found the one exception where I do recommend using a parent.

So the only time I ever use a parent is when we're going across multiple what I call campaign types or assets across a campaign. I'll challenge a couple things, but let's walk through how I would set this up. So I would actually use an ABM parent that's specific to the strategy that you're running with. And I would think about, do we want, if we're running a pilot, if we're running different aspects of this campaign, are these different parents?

Maybe, maybe not. So it just depends. Are you naming the assets or collection, the tranche or, to steal a word from you and Jeff, or different section or segment? so it could be handled a couple different ways but I would recommend a parent campaign one one layer in this one case so this is the one exception or if you're doing a major trade show initiative or some kind of like amazing multi-channel marketing so this is really for multi-channel marketing so yeah it makes a ton of sense yeah you have your abm parent you have your digital asset.

And then I would challenge whether we actually use a campaign for the emails and hear me out. So email activity is one of those things that probably isn't going to push sales over into saying, yeah, I need to follow up with that person unless they directly respond. So what I try to challenge marketers to think about is what's the thing you're trying to get them to do with that email? And can we track that in a campaign and capture that it came from an email using UTM tracking.

We probably can't. So I would challenge that and really focus on the digital assets and then push the UTM parameters down to the campaign member level. I love that I think that really sound advice And yes I thank you for the exception to your rule because at some level you have to have that parent to be able to pull this all together so so we have talked a lot about what the everyday marketer should do we talked about how mobs can support sellers by sort of carving out campaigns that are specific to the seller's needs things i can act on we didn't talk about management we're management uh at the end of the day so we're talking about ourselves but but talk to me about how how um management would think about campaigns and what do they need?

So it depends on what kind of management you're talking about. I think marketing management, depending on their specialty, they're going to care about more detail than the CEO or CFO or VP of sales. So what we're really trying to do is think about budget season and the question we always get, which is for each channel that I put money into, how much money do I get out of? A million dollars.

It's one-to-one. I'm just kidding. Everybody should know I'm kidding. So what we're really doing by helping Mops think about this from what does sales care about is we're also talking about what finance and the CEO care about in terms of meaningful actions and all that other data.

We're still going to have it. We still need it in marketing. I am not shooting down any of the other actions we have to take. Trust me, they are all important.

I'm just saying that unfortunately, not everybody thinks the same way. And if you can show what they care about really well, you're in a better position in your job, your team's in a better position, your next year's budget is in a better position. We really win, we just have to really challenge how we think about it versus how our boss thinks about it. I don't know.

I didn't hear anything you said. All I heard was you should buy attribution with an ROI module. Or that. That would make it easier.

Make my life easier, people. So I'm going to kind of try and digest this with my feeble little CMO's brain. Okay, can I try and distill this and you tell me if I have it right? You're really good at distilling.

I'm going to do my best. Okay, I'm going to do my best. So think about your campaigns in three different ways. But ultimately, we're going to give you a structure here that you guys can lean into that will work across all three different areas.

One is we talked about sales ad nauseum. Great campaigns that give them the things they need to act on. Cool. Marketing.

Use the combination of asset, campaign, and campaign member with our good friend, the UTM. So you're thinking about your campaigns as assets. when you need to string them together, that layer on the top is the one place you're allowed to use that parent, if you will. And when it comes to, you're saying CFOs or CEOs, but basically the people that are cutting the checks, really that's going to help support that whole structure we just talked about.

It's going to help support. But my question back to you to round this conversation out is where the heck does the dollar stuff go? Does that go like, where is that? How do I get the dollar things that go so I can roll it up and go Mr.

CFO or excuse me, Miss CFO. It was a 10 to one spend to pipeline ratio. I spent $1 and got 10. That's the right answer, by the way.

So this question, as you know, is very difficult to answer because it's easier to answer with like a CDP or a platform like CaliburMind where, you know, if I'm pushing down to the UTM level and the campaign member, the campaign ID, I can integrate right with that platform and pull out spend data for that. And I have the campaign costs for the actual asset on the campaign and Salesforce. If you don't have that, you're still in a much better place reporting on it this way, because you have a better tie to how these campaigns are influencing opportunities.

and you can use that data plus your overall top level spend data if you have to start there or break it down by channel and work with an analyst who can combine that information to give that ratio. So it depends on if you're going top down, bottoms up, but at the end of the day, if you don't have a great platform and you can't invest in one right now, which is I feel bad for you. There are ways to get to this still. Yeah.

And I will say from personal experience, it's just you're going to get to the data. You're just going to get to it less often than you want to. So it's probably a monthly, it's probably monthly or quarterly where you're going to have a look back and you're going to be able to say what your ROI is. And that's okay.

I have to say that that works just fine for a lot of organizations. But if you've got, say, north of a $3 million discretionary marketing budget, and you've got a fairly complex multi-channel model, it starts breaking down really fast. What else would we be thinking about here, Kamala? Any advice you want to give to your listeners before I switch things over and ask you to take us out?

Well, I do want people to remember these folks who you're working with, the administrators, it's impossible to know everything. I mean, their system does so many things and touches so many different people. The reason why I really wanted to talk to marketing leaders about this is because we're so deeply impacted by our inability to tie campaign data to bookings in a way that jives with the CFO and CEO. So it is important to get in the weeds a little bit and push your teams in a very nice way, but also give them some grace because they're dealing with so many things and a huge backlog and they probably haven't had the time to proactively research this.

So send them Caliber Minds campaign guide. It'll help them. Wish I had a URL to share with you, Kamala. The work you did there is absolutely amazing.

So I think by time this podcast is published, we'll probably have a URL we can promote as we go. But it was wonderful being your guest today, Kamala. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you for hosting.

And it was a trip being the guest and I really enjoyed it. And this is probably the only time I'll be doing this. So I really leaned into it. Thank you.

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