As marketers, we always have one eye on the present, and another on the future. It’s highly likely that you’ve already started your 2024 planning, with budgets to secure, events to target, products/services to launch, and campaigns to plan.
As 2023 was the ‘year of GPT’, so who knows what will be in store for 2024 (the rhymes work well, right?).
I’ve been in the depths of planning for 2024 over the past few months as we have a growing team and are introducing different revenue streams. To add more into the mix, SFB has both a B2B and B2C marketing model with their respective needs and considerations. However, I’ve taken some time to consider not only what I would like to focus on/fix in 2024, but also what marketers using Account Engagement (Pardot) or Marketing Cloud would be thinking about.
Here are eight new year’s resolutions that you may (or may not) want to follow – after all, it’s not all about the technology, but also about process and people which makes the nest marketers stand out.
1. Robust ROI Tracking
Sure, you can spend, spend, spend – then be forced to clamp down on your budget. When budget freezes occur, it’s not a case of siphoning off some channels in favor of others. What may deliver results at the ‘top of funnel’ may not trickle down to the ultimate goal: revenue. In other words, with the money you’re spending, seeing results could be a story of quantity over quality.
Campaign influence is one of the trickiest marketing concepts to grasp. By this, we’re referring to both the concepts and the set of features in Salesforce.
In an age where we are striving to become extremely data-driven, how most organizations work with campaign influence is not keeping up with the times. Were you aware that you may be facing:
- A conversion “black hole”, where some key conversion points aren’t tracked?
- “Spaghetti” attribution between more granular platforms (such as Google Analytics)?
- Manual campaign human error, where not all campaigns are created in Salesforce to represent all of your marketing initiatives?
- Missing pre-acquisition activities – those that occurred even before the lead record hit Salesforce – and the costs associated with them?
There’s plenty to consider, and a good time to take a hard look at your marketing attribution set up.
2. Calculate Pipeline Velocity Better
You may have got results in 2023, but could you have reached those results faster? Where are prospects getting ‘stuck’ in the revenue cycle – at the pre-lead, lead, or particular opportunity stages?
Velocity reporting – that is, the speed at which prospects travel from one stage to another – will give you the answers to where prospects linger longer. This is where marketing could target in 2024 with engagement or apps to shorten the lead-to-revenue time. Again, you don’t want to be misled with quantity over quality.
3. Email Deliverability
Google and Yahoo announced upcoming changes and guidelines at the tail-end of 2023, that will become effective in 2024.
It’s time to consider how you should prepare for, and monitor the changes to your email engagement and database.
4. Reassess Multi-Select Picklists
Multi-select picklists are a tense subject in the Salesforce community. While a boon for users in the Salesforce user interface, this seemingly innocent type of picklist can cause a manner of headaches for those building with Salesforce (particularly integrations), and reporting on Salesforce data (where each combination of selected values is reflected as its own grouping in reports – often causing a skewed, messy report).
How are multi-select picklists working out in your org? Are they necessary? Have you checked their usage in reports, so that inaccurate conclusions are not being drawn from reports? And what about their involvement with existing or upcoming integrations?
Thinking twice about existing multi-select picklists, or before you create a new one, could save you a headache down the line.
5. Reports and Report Folders
Reports are one area of Salesforce that’s typically used by many users, across different teams. With no way to enforce naming conventions for report names, or for which folder newly created reports should be stored in, overtime, you could be sinking in a swamp of reports that are:
- Disorganized (not in the correct folder).
- Duplicated (where two reports serve the same purpose, usually when a user couldn’t find the original because it wasn’t named logically).
- Inaccurate or erroneous (e.g. where a necessary filter hasn’t been applied, or a picklist value has been changed).
The above can have downstream impacts on segmentation for upcoming campaigns (i.e. over or underestimating the size of a target audience), or reporting inaccurate results.
The action here is to have report folders logically reflect your organization by business function (i.e. team), and easy to navigate subfolders. Audit reports to compare similar ones, and remove those that are duplicated or defunct. Then, establish and communicate a naming convention for everyone to follow.
You can pull a report on reports, including who created it, when it was last accessed, and which folder they are stored in.
6. Connecting Project Management to Operations
At SFB, we use a combination of Salesforce, Slack, and Asana to keep everyone aligned while mitigating chaos and gaining the reporting required to keep a pulse on the business. While this may sound like a cocktail of tools to some onlookers, there’s good justification – Salesforce as our system of record, Asana for project planning and assigning granular tasks, and Slack for general collaboration and urgent communication. You may use a similar setup yourselves.
So, how do we ensure we maximize the strengths of these tools in our fast-paced, rapidly growing team?
We have already set up an integration between Salesforce (the hub) and Asana (for generating projects/tasks based on changes to Salesforce records). This has been set up using Zapier for specific use cases, which we want to expand to other use cases – namely when a new campaign record is created, it will generate a project, with tasks, assignees, and dates, all auto-populated based on a handful of Salesforce campaign fields.
Slack is an interesting one. There’s no doubt that our company would not operate as fast without Slack, its strengths being quick messages to confer with a colleague/s, swarming when there’s an issue, and generally, maintaining a high team morale. However, what happens in Slack is unstructured (i.e. conversations) and as we are not androids ‘on’ 24/7, we approach Slack with care so that no one experiences ‘Slack fatigue’.
We have encouraged our team to integrate Asana with Slack, and they can use Salesforce with Slack to surface records, and update them, if they find that useful.
At the end of the day, integrating the three eliminates a ton of potential inefficiencies as team members don’t need to update information in more than one location. While adoption challenges persist (and need continued attention), everything is recorded, projects are repeatable, and everyone feels connected.
7. Take Copilot for a Spin
Copilot, unveiled at Dreamforce ‘23, is the built-in side panel of the user interface that guides users in leveraging Gen AI with Einstein. Since then, AI search has also been introduced. Plus, the Einstein Copilot Studio for those building on the Salesforce platform (such as admins) delivers three tools: Prompt Builder, Skills Builder, and Model Builder.
These tools enable Einstein to be tailored to how an organization wants Gen AI to be used within their own org, for their specific use cases with their desired boundaries for its usage.
Of course, there are ways that marketers can use Copilot on the core Salesforce platform. Yet, within Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud, there are additional Gen AI tools that you should test, and figure out whether you and your team should adopt them.
You can explore the current and upcoming features for Marketing Cloud here. Plus, in the upcoming Spring ‘24 release, Einstein Assistant for Account Engagement will arrive, for you to quickly create forms, landing pages, email subject lines, and email body copy.
8. Pass the Data Cloud Consultant Certification
Data Cloud was in vogue in 2023, having risen to fame as it underpins the Salesforce platform – in other words, speeding up the connectivity between different ‘clouds’ across the platform. Over the past year, Data Cloud has also become more feature rich (with plenty more to come according to the roadmap), and offered on a ‘freemium’ basis.
As a result of the impending demand for Data Cloud skills, the Data Cloud Consultant certification was introduced in September 2023.
Having immersed myself into the world of Data Cloud, I can say that this certification is not a ‘walk in the park’. I described the experience to colleagues as learning Salesforce again, due to Data Cloud’s own terminology and array of concepts. Attempting the exam in December, I failed – but that has not discouraged me. I will be attempting again at some point early in 2024, which is why this resolution is on my new year’s resolution list!
Summary
Oftentimes, it’s not all about what’s new and ‘shiny’, but going back and establishing a strong foundation and a tidy org, where your efforts will pay itself back in dividends as the year goes on. Let’s not blinker ourselves just to technology, but also people and process.
I hope that this rundown has given you a mixture of all three areas. And while this is what I’ve been observing, there’s likely more ideas that could relate to you when considering your year’s goals.
Let me know in the comments what you are going to be focusing on in 2024!