As a marketer using Salesforce, there is a ton of insight ready for you to tap into within your CRM by using standard Salesforce reports and dashboards.
Aside from the obvious ones like Campaigns with Campaign Members, Leads with Campaigns, Opportunities, and Engagement History reports (if you’re a Pardot user) – there are so many to explore. Pardot’s segmentation tools can often limit our scope, where we don’t get a look in on what other teams are doing, and where we could potentially support (or take advantage of ‘low hanging fruit’).
You could gain insight from your CRM that includes:
- Velocity, the speed that prospects progress through the lead and opportunity lifecycles (duration in each stage)
- Bottlenecks, eg. where are prospects spending too long? Where are they not converting to the next stage?
- High and low volumes (trends)
- Successes, eg. which leads were qualified? Which Opportunities are ‘Closed won’?
- Failures, eg. which leads were disqualified? Which Opportunities are ‘Closed lost’?
Now that we’ve got some inspiration flowing, let’s dive into my favourite Salesforce reports.
1. Leads with converted lead information
If I had to name the most understated Salesforce report, I would pick this one.
This report shows all the data related to a lead after it had been converted – the Contact, Account, and even Opportunity data! It’s enabled me to wow others with how much I can show in one report, pulling in multiple different objects in one view.
This is the report where you can access the ‘Converted date’ field, meaning you can show a trending graph of lead conversions over time. Do you want to check out which months historically have had the lowest conversions, so you can set your expectations for meeting your marketing objectives? No problem with this report, by grouping the ‘Converted date’ field by calendar month!
One way I’ve used it in the past is to report on Net New Leads in Salesforce Campaigns.
2. Opportunity Stage Duration
Want to know where Opportunity records are getting stuck? Marketing can get involved further down the funnel by keeping stale Opportunities engaged. Again, this report can help you establish some benchmarks for the average, shortest and longest duration in each stage.
Start with the “Opportunity History” report:
Two columns that should appear by default are “From Stage” and “To Stage”. Together, these show you Opportunity Stage field changes and how long that period lasted for (“Stage Duration” field).
Take some time to explore this report in more detail, there’s a lot to wrap your head around here! I recommend you follow this tutorial, even though it’s showing the Salesforce Classic interface, it is an excellent way to explore the report’s possibilities.
3. Without tasks (cross-filters)
Finding out which Leads/Contacts/Accounts/Opportunities have open Tasks against them can be useful to a marketer because Tasks signal that the record is actively being worked by the sales team.
I’ve worked in businesses where the sales team was protective over their records (and didn’t want their leads receiving automated marketing emails), and I’ve also put forward with/without Tasks as a way for sales to control/determine which records will be part of Engagement Studio automation, in other words, if they want to pull them out, create a Task against the record (this becomes a great way to avoid stale/forgotten about data).
Cross-filters are a Salesforce report feature that enable you to filter using ‘without’ (instead of the typical ‘with’). By default, you’re creating a report that will show Leads with activities – using a cross-filter means you can switch this to Leads without activities.
Above: I used the standard ‘Leads’ report. Add cross-filters on the ‘Filters’ tab.
Check out this deep dive tutorial to master cross-filters:
What are Cross Filters in Salesforce Reporting?
4. Deduplication
Your organisation may have reports set up for identifying duplicate records. As a marketer (and especially with Pardot AMPSEA), you should be invested in maintaining data hygiene to keep your marketing communications in check, and engagement analytics accurate.
Depending on your organisation’s tool of choice, you may find:
- Duplicate records reports: an admin can create custom report types to show records that were identified as duplicates (each gets a Duplicate Record Item reference). These are flagged when a record is created or updated; Lightning Duplicate Jobs run on a schedule and scan across your whole org, however, they are only available in Performance and Unlimited Editions.
- AppExchange third party providers (those native typically provide reports available in Salesforce)
If you want a lightweight way to check for duplicates based on a specific field, you can check out my solution, which will reveal how many duplicates you have in a data set in a matter of minutes.
5. Contacts (without accounts)
Did you know Contacts in Salesforce can be created without being associated to an Account? While users are forced to select a related Account, Contacts being created in other ways can bypass the need for Account association.
Extending the parent-child metaphor used when describing data relationships, these Contacts without a ‘Parent’ can be described as ‘orphaned’ (I wrote about this in detail here).
This can play havoc with any Prospect segmentation you want to do based on the Account-level and is especially jarring if you rely on Account-based Marketing (ABM).
Creating a custom report type that will show Contacts will help you scoop up these lost records, and reunite them with their Account.
6. Cases
Existing customers are low-hanging fruit for marketers, whether that be generating further revenue through up-sell/cross-sell campaigns, loyalty promotions, or a referral program.
Have some tact though. If a customer has an open Case with your support team, it indicates there’s an issue/complaint. You will want to avoid any faux pas by avoiding any messaging around new opportunities!
Not all Cases are created equal; some Cases may not warrant you to exclude the prospect from your campaigns. Personally, I like digging around Case reports because I’m interested in taking a pulse on customer experience, plus I’m somewhat nosy!
(ps. you can integrate Salesforce Cases as a Pardot custom object to put some guardrails on your automated segmentation, and keep those Engagement Studio programs under control!)
If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in Tools & Methods to Identify Business Needs – and Design a Strategy which gives an overview of other sources of marketing intel from all corners of the organisation, so you can make better decisions for your future campaigns.