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5 steps to running your campaigns in Salesforce CRM
BEST PRACTICE
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About campaigns
Campaigns are usually the responsibility of the marketing department. Because a common campaign goal is
to generate leads for the sales department to use, it’s important to align marketing and sales. That includes
defining how leads are handed off and pursued. Salesforce CRM is flexible—because both departments use
the application, companies can decide what process works best for them.
Tip: At salesforce.com, we use the Comments field in the campaign object to communicate with the sales
team about how to best follow up with leads. For example, the campaign manager may suggest an email
template to use.
The campaign object holds all the information associated with campaigns, including picklists, fields, and
page layouts for tracking responses and other campaign details. You can customize this object to add
details you want to track—for example, the partners for an event—and remove those you don’t. The goal is
to have a single location for tracking all the information associated with a campaign, in an interface that’s
easy to use.
Because campaigns are part of Salesforce CRM, marketing activities can be tied to sales data and tracked
by the application’s built-in analytics. You can use the resulting data to analyze how each campaign
performs in reaching its goal.
5 steps to running a campaign
If you’re interested in improving your lead conversion rates, read on for an overview of how to create and
run a campaign in Salesforce CRM. You’ll work closely with your administrator, who will enable the
campaign feature, set up it up, and then customize it for individual campaigns.
Step 1: Plan your campaign
Identifying your goals and target audience are the basis for any successful campaign. You’ll need this
information when you actually create the campaign in Salesforce CRM.
Define your goals – Common goals include creating new leads, retaining existing customers, and cross-
selling or up-selling. These goals determine every other aspect of your campaign, including your offers
and your channels, such as Webinars, email blasts, conferences, or SEM campaigns.
Decide whether you need custom picklists, fields, or page layouts. For example, to analyze by
campaign goal, ask your administrator to create a custom campaign picklist called Campaign Goal, with
values such as Awareness, Lead generation, Customer retention, or Customer up-sell—whatever makes
sense for your goal. You can set up unique page layouts by channel, so you see only the data relevant for
that channel.
Decide what to measure – For example, you may want to measure how different campaign types,
channels, or offers perform. By tracking these metrics within the campaigns, either with existing or
custom fields, you can evaluate and report on the success of each of these tactics.
Determine your process – The process is about how sales and marketing are aligned. For example, what
happens to generated leads, who qualifies them, and how are they routed? For more information, see the
Best Practice “5 steps
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to effective lead management
