Using Salesforce? Here’s why Google Analytics helps complete your sales and marketing puzzle!

Sales and Marketing Misalignment?

Let’s face it, the alignment of sales and marketing is more important today than ever before! The article titled “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” outlines the negative impact of misalignment on business performance. Salesforce is a great tool for supporting the sales force (no surprise) but not so much for the marketing team.  Yes, there is Marketing Cloud and Pardot, but those tools don’t focus on improving the relationship between sales and marketing.   This article does not intend to cure all the misalignment problems.  However, the problems and solutions discussed can shed light on how to make the relationship between sales and marketing stronger.

Wouldn’t it be great if the sales team knew which marketing leads were more likely to convert?  Wouldn’t it also be great if the marketing team knew which of their activities attracted the most valuable leads?  The simple act of trying to answer these two questions requires a discussion between the sales and marketing teams.  If you use Salesforce, Google Analytics can help support that discussion and help answer these questions!

Salesforce CRM supports building a valued relationship

Founded in 1999, Salesforce has become the world’s #1 CRM.  Based on information published on Salesforce’s website, their CRM delivers value through 6 core benefits:

1. Improved Informational Organization
2. Enhanced Communication
3. Improved Customer Service
4. Automation of Everyday Tasks
5. Greater Team Efficiency
6. Improved Analytical Data and Reporting

These benefits make the sales team more effective when communicating with prospects and customers.  But what happens when the sales team is not at the center of the communications with the prospect? 

Shift in shopping habits.  Salesperson no longer the gatekeeper of information 

Our prospect’s and customer’s shopping habits have changed dramatically.  Think about how your own shopping habits have changed over the past decade or so.  Both Salesforce and Google were founded in the late 1990’s.  Before that time, the sales person was the gatekeeper of information.  If you wanted to know how much a product costs, you would have to reach out to a salesperson.   If you wanted to know the specs of a product, you would reach out to a salesperson.  After Google became popular, every business created a website and made more information available online.

Research in an HBR article indicates that 94% of B2B purchasers perform online search before contacting a sales representative.   The article emphasizes the point that the role of the salesperson has changed and so should the way they operate.  When Salesforce was founded, the focus was on building a strong relationship between the salesperson and prospects (or customers).  Today, a large part of what a prospect learns about your product or service happens online, without the salesperson. 

The lead form to the rescue?

Enterprising sales and marketing executives realized the shift in shopping behavior and created ways to try to take advantage.  Inbound Marketing was one of the more popular approaches. Inbound Marketing is all about leveraging your website and other digital assets to attract the right visitors to your site.  Once a prospect is on your website you can try to collect their email address.  The hope was that a visitor would provide an email address in exchange for access to content such as whitepapers.  The salesperson would then support the sales process and help shape the prospects information gathering activities.  

This approach has shown some positive results.  However, what about all the activities leading up to the decision to provide an email address?  There are most likely other articles and page-views that are contributing to that whitepaper download.  This is where Google Analytics can help.

Google Analytics provides behavior tracking and audience insight

Google Analytics allows you to:

1. Track site visitor’s behavior – pages viewed, videos watched, apps and other resources downloaded
2. Understand audience demographics – age, geography, technology used
3. Understand audience Interests – music lovers, auto enthusiasts

Think about how valuable this information is for segmenting and improving the overall customer experience.  Salesforce realized the value of this information for their CRM user-base too.  In 2018 they announced an integration with Google Analytics 360 the paid version of Google Analytics.  The integration makes it easier to combine analytics data with Salesforce data.  This ease of use comes at a cost.  Google Analytics 360 has an estimated price tag of $150,000 per year and may be too expensive for some organizations.  If that is true of your organization and you can do without some of the real-time data, there is still hope. You can leverage the free version of Google Analytics and realize many of the benefits of the Salesforce integration.   There are other articles that cover that topic and I will share my experience in a future post.

Salesforce+Google Analytics: What do you have to gain?

Leveraging web behavior and audience insight is great, but that’s not the best part.  Google Analytics’ true power is realized when the data collected is combined with conversion data.  This is just the type of data available in Salesforce.  The Salesforce CRM has data about who made a purchase and what types of products and services they bought.  The combination of these two pieces of information (online behavior and purchase behavior) allows you to do some cool (and necessary) things like :

1. Measure ROI on marketing activities
2. Evaluate Lead Quality
3. Understand which sales and marketing activities are more likely to bring in leads that convert
4. Optimize sales and marketing activities to increasing business value
5. Understand the interests of your customers so that you can target prospects with similar attributes

These benefits are focused on delivering value in support of a mutually beneficial relationship between sales and marketing.  The questions presented in the second paragraph help get the conversation between sales and marketing started. The insight from combining Salesforce and Google Analytics data help keep the conversation going.

I’d love to get your thoughts.

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