If you are a company that wants to gain the most out of ABM, you’ll want to integrate these crucial five ABM best practices together:
- Audience Building
- Personalized Value Add Content
- Omnichannel Playbooks
- Lead Distribution / Sales Workflow
- Social Selling
The good news is that with Propensity's approach to ABM, leads start coming in almost immediately through the ABM Connected Website and your ABM Campaigns. However, to get the most ROI from ABM, we want to share a few best practices for lead distribution in Salesforce that will help you optimize your sales workflow and overall ABM strategy.
These tips and tricks have been used by the Propensity sales team and various Propensity customers and have helped them achieve impressive results. When used as part of a broader ABM approach, they’ll help you engage with more accounts and close more deals. But first, let's quickly make sure you've successfully installed and configured the Propensity Package for Salesforce. Review our Salesforce Installer Guide for step-by-step directions.
There are a few customizations we recommend to get the most out of your Propensity and Salesforce integration. Propensity provides data and you can use Salesforce to build automation surrounding that data. Here’s how you can harness the full power of this integration.
Create New Fields for ABM Intent and Accounts
You can create new fields for account data and ABM intent in your Salesforce layout. This includes roll-up summaries for Propensity Account Signals, such as the total number of intent signals seen, impressions, website visits, and more.
You can add a new field by going to Object Manager, Fields, and Relationships, then New. Under “Data Type,” select the type you want, such as Roll-Up Summary, then hit Next. Provide the “Field Label,” then click Next.
For roll-up summaries, under summarized objects, select the object you want to build a roll-up summary for, such as “Propensity – Account Signals,” “Propensity – Website Visits,” or “Propensity – Marketing Data,” and make a selection under “Select Roll-Up Type.”
Optionally, under “Field Criteria,” select “Only records meeting certain criteria should be included in the calculation” and provide the field, operator, and value. This allows you to filter the records included in the roll-up summary. Then, hit “Next.”
Confirm the details of the new custom field on the next page. Often, this summary won’t show up in the page layout, so if you want it visible, ensure you’ve ticked the “Add Field” option. Then, hit “Save.”
Create New Flows and Email Alerts
CRM Flows and email alerts are useful in any successful ABM Strategy. For instance, you can set up an alert to inform you when a new account is trending with an above 80% Propensity score or when an account has over 100 impressions.
To set up a new flow, go to “Home,” then “New Flow,” and follow the provided prompts. You can do the same for email alerts by going to “Home,” “Process Automation,” “Workflow Actions,” then “Email Alerts.”
The Propensity Integration adds new campaign members for your Salesforce campaign nightly. Flows can be quite handy in ensuring your sales team aptly and promptly follows up with these new accounts based on your sales funnel.
For instance, you can set up a Salesforce flow that alerts the sales team of a lead and asks them to follow up within 24 to 72 hours after they’ve been added. This fits nicely into your sales funnel and sales team’s workflow, allowing you to follow up with contacts most likely to qualify and convert based on their website visits, likes, interests, and other factors.
Build Reports and Dashboards Based on Propensity Data
We recommend you build reports and dashboards based on Propensity data passed through to Salesforce. You can also subscribe or create scheduled reports for Salesforce users. This can include an ABM Opportunity Driven Pipeline Report, BDR Outreach Report, and Propensity – ABM Connected Website Leads Report, for example.
Within these reports, you can set up useful fields using the data Propensity pushes to Salesforce. Some of these include “Visit Date/Time,” which shows accurately when an account visited your website, “Platform,” which shows which platform the account used to access the website, such as Android or iOS, and “Referrer,” which shows where they came from such as a Google search or email campaign.
You can add as many fields as you want as columns to your report as long as they provide relevant data to it.
All these fields can be filtered through the “Add column” search bar under “Columns” when creating your report.
Salesforce Leads vs. Salesforce Contacts
In Propensity, we use the term “Leads,” while in Salesforce, we save these leads as a “Contact.” We do not map to Salesforce Leads. In Salesforce, Propensity can save a lot more information about a lead when mapping it to a contact, such as work history, interests, education, and other important information that can make targeting and reports finer-grained.
You can also add to this information, giving you greater control and flexibility on what information you store about a contact and how you use that to build reports and analyze data.
For instance, using the Propensity Contact Signals related list and the information stored in contacts, you can build a report that shows every contact that went to a particular university and possibly create a contact list of people with shared alumni connections.
In this case, the contact signal is the education history, specifically college education.
Therefore, depending on what contact signal or data you’ve saved, you can filter out your contact list later and finely target accounts in your campaigns or generate finer detailed reports.
Propensity populates these signals based on public information your contact will put on their social media, such as likes and interests.
Using Flows to Generate Leads from Contacts
Teams tend to use unique sales flows for managing contacts and leads. ABM campaigns are account-based. However, if you want to generate a lead out of a contact, you can build a Salesforce flow that will create a lead once a contact has been created with a propensity ID field.
You can also use the propensity score field of the contact, usually a percentage given as 25%, 50%, and 75% for cold, warm, and hot, to notify the sales team of a new hot lead in the system if their propensity score is at least 75%.
How to Build a Report Using Propensity Data
You can quickly set up a report using Propensity data by going to the “Create a Report” page in Salesforce and then selecting “All.”
In the “Search Report Types” search bar under “Select a Report Type,” type in and select “Campaigns with Contacts,” then hit “Start Report.”
On the new page, Select “Filters” on the tab to the left, add a filter for “All Active Campaigns,” and hit apply.
Add another filter for “Campaign Name,” and under “use relative value,” type “Propensity ABM Connected Website.”
You can add the relevant fields you want to be shown in the report through the columns search bar, such as email, campaign name, first name, last name, interests, skills, and more.
Fields sourced from Propensity data typically have the prefix “Propensity – “. For instance, when you type in interest in the columns search bar, you’ll see Propensity – Interests, which will show their interests based on Propensity data.
Grouping Rows Based on Account Names
We recommend grouping rows by account name for you to see different data and information across various campaigns for a single account. This can help with per-account analysis and reports.
You can see when an account name was added by adding the field “Member First Associated Date” to the columns. Next to the account name, which can represent an organization, you can see a number that shows how many people from that account or organization are the right people to be talking to.
Syncing Your LinkedIn Campaign Data to the Salesforce Integration
You can also add data from your LinkedIn Campaigns to help generate reports that will prioritize outreach for the sales team.
To do this, log in to your Propensity account, go to ABM tools, select “View Accounts” for the LinkedIn campaign you want to sync, select “Schedule Sync” on the next page, and select “Active Daily Sync to Salesforce for this Campaign” then hit save.
With this setup, your LinkedIn ABM Campaign data will be synced to Salesforce nightly.
This field is accessible in the reports under “Propensity – Marketing Data.”
If you’re okay with the report generated, you can hit save, provide the report name, unique name, and description, select a folder, and then hit “Save.”