Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re checking in with Kate Elliot, Principal Success Specialist at Salesforce, discuss strategies and best practices for expanding into marketing cloud.
Join us as we talk about how why is the most important question we can ask, how to get your sales and marketing departments talking, and the unique challenges of working in Marketing Cloud.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Elliot.
Kate works in the Salesforce.org wing helping nonprofits, K-12s, and higher ed organizations get the most out of Marketing Cloud. “I come in to provide strategic guidance, best practices, training. It kind of depends on what the customer needs and oftentimes it’s a blend of all three,” she says.
If you’re an admin looking to get more involved in marketing using Salesforce, Kate recommends that your first stop should be marketing automation tools. However, Kate says, “I think a big conversation has to begin with what’s the overall purpose of your Sales Cloud CRM?” There are tools like Pardot where you keep leads outside of Salesforce until you’re ready for them to keep your data cleaner, so you need to really think deeply about how your marketing will impact your funnel on the Sales Cloud side.
“In my experience, especially working on the Marketing Cloud side, a lot of what I try to ask customers is what are your KPIs? What are you responsible for tracking on the marketing side?” They often get answers about some specific metric like opens, but it’s clear that there hasn’t been a conversation around why that metric is so important to a stakeholder. It’s important to have clarity about what your metrics are telling you because as Kate says, “When you bring in this layer of email marketing automation it can get tricky because it can make your funnel giant and a lot of times it can create a lot of inflation.”
When it comes to making strides with operations, Kate likes to focus in on one simple question: What takes up a lot of your day? This can help you identify places where tools like content blocks, dynamic content, and automation can score big wins for people. “Another question I like to ask,” Kate says, “is could you go on vacation tomorrow?” Most people say, “Sure, but I’d need to check my email at least a couple times,” but they can’t even consider a world where they step entirely away for a couple of weeks and everything is still running smoothly when they come back.
The final question Kate uses to get marketing teams thinking about how they can do better is to ask for an analysis of how their marketing programs have done. “A lot of times they have some data that doesn’t necessarily show what they think it shows,” Kate says. This can sometimes get a bit combative, so Kate tends to lean on the first two questions, but all three are useful when it comes to shaking up someone’s view about what makes for a smoothly running marketing operation.
When it comes to working with organizations to revamp their communications channels, Kate’s work is generally customer-driven. With the Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, it’s become easier for customers to see what their technology is building up to and how they want to implement that in their own organizations.
“Where I see people coming up to me and asking if they’re ready to go on to the next step,” Kate says, “a lot of times they’re trying to replicate what they’ve done before.” When an organization is fixated on one specific feature or capability, Kate says, “the biggest question an admin can ask is why? What value is it adding?” You have to be crystal clear on the purpose of a text versus an email, for example—how you store that data and how people can opt in or out. Ultimately, any functionality you add needs to be a step towards the bigger aspirational vision of where your marketing is going, instead of something you’re doing because everyone else has it. “While you are directly competing with other people in your industry,” Kate says, “at the end of the day, you are ultimately competing against everyone in your inbox.”
Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you become an awesome admin. I’m Mike Gerholdt and today we are talking about strategy and best practices for expanding into marketing cloud.
Mike Gerholdt: It was a super, super requested subject, and I am here to try and bring you the best people. So we are talking with principal success specialist, Kate Elliot. Without further ado, let’s get Kate on the podcast.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So Kate, welcome to the podcast.
Kate Elliot: Thanks. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Mike Gerholdt: Kate, we were connected through another guest of the podcast, Jay Stedman. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and kind of what you do at Salesforce to get us started?
Kate Elliot: Sure. I work in our salesforce.org wing and that’s with our nonprofits, our K-12, and our higher ed customers. Right now, I work on our marketing cloud team and as a principal success specialist. That means that I come in and I help customers on limited engagements. I don’t perform services anymore.
Kate Elliot: I’m not support, not break fix, but I come in to provide strategic guidance, best practices, training, a little bit, it kind of depends on whatever the customer needs. Oftentimes, it’s a blend of all three, to help customers kind of get from whatever stair-step they’re on to move up.
Kate Elliot: Whether that’s help with the strategy of, “I don’t actually know where to go from here” or whether that’s, “I think I know how to delete contacts, but I’m not really sure and I just want to make sure that I’m doing this correctly.” I tend to help a lot of the marketing cloud admins on the .org side.
Mike Gerholdt: Sweet. You mentioned a couple of my favorite words, strategy and best practice. I want to kind of level set us there because I think, and we talked about this earlier, I think a lot of admins and for a lot of people, when they get started, Salesforce is a sales tool.
Mike Gerholdt: I know for me, in my career, it was brought in as a sales tool. And the next evolution in that is as the Salesforce admin, I need to go and I need to make friends in marketing. Those are often an entirely different group.
Mike Gerholdt: Sometimes it feels like the sales team operates one way and marketing operates another way. I would love to jump in with you and kind of have that conversation and help our Salesforce admins really understand strategy best practice for, “Hey, we’re doing great with Sales cloud and my team loves the automation.”
Mike Gerholdt: I’m able build things out and the executives are starting to knock at my door of how do we get marketing involved, so I’m going to pitch that to you. Executive just knocked on my door and the Salesforce admin and “Hey, I want to get marketing involved with Salesforce.
Kate Elliot: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: “What do I do next?”
Kate Elliot: Yes, I think from there, first of all, there are different marketing automation tools that are possible to use, but I think a big conversation has to begin with what’s the overall purpose of your Sales cloud CRM? Because we have marketing automation tools like Pardot where you keep leads outside of your Sales cloud CRM until you’re ready for them.
Kate Elliot: You’re able to perhaps keep your data a little bit cleaner or do some data hygiene. As marketing is generating these leads that hopefully are getting warmed up through their marketing program, to be handed off to sales, and then experience that beautiful automation that you’ve just built.
Kate Elliot: There becomes a question of how soon should they enter this beautiful automation that you just built? I actually used to work in sales operations and a little bit of marketing operations and that was a question that we wrestled with so much, with just the marketing metrics, that the director of marketing had, versus the metrics that the VP of sales wanted.
Kate Elliot: And oftentimes they ended up being a little bit, not quite in opposition, but they were often contrasting each other, when you’re starting to look at how your funnel converts. I think a big question that needs to be answered and asked to the executives is when you start adding the marketing piece on, so that very top of the funnel, that lead generation, how will that impact the rest of the metrics that you have on the Sales cloud side?
Kate Elliot: And then if you decide that you want to keep leads that are cold or you don’t know much about them or you’re still doing progressive profiling or something like that separate and held out, that could be a different product. That could be completely different processes.
Kate Elliot: There’s potential gotchas there. But that’s a huge strategy question that I think is really key to nail down before you start engaging with the marketing department. Someone who did that to soon.
Mike Gerholdt: Let me play devil’s advocate. Should I just assume that strategy conversation’s going on between those executives or do I need to tease that out?
Kate Elliot: Oh, good question. I never would assume that strategy conversations were happening between departments. In my experience, and especially in working on the marketing cloud side, a lot of what I try to ask our customers is, “Well, what are your KPIs? What are you responsible for tracking on the marketing side?”
Kate Elliot: And a lot of times we get answers such as, “Well, I need opens.” And we go, “Well, what do those prove?” They say, “Well, so and so likes to see the opens because it proves a hypothesis that they have,” or someone else cares about a different KPI and they never actually talk to see how those are connected.
Kate Elliot: And you’re not getting to the rates or you’re not getting to, if you don’t open you can’t click and things like that. In my experience, I think, at least asking the question and it’s a bonus if they’ve already had that discussion and then they can fill you in on it.
Kate Elliot: But when you’re thinking about how to run an operation from the top of the funnel all the way through your sales cycle and when you bring in this layer of email marketing automation, it can get tricky because it can make your funnel giant and a lot of times that can add to a lot of inflation.
Mike Gerholdt: I’m thinking so far and we’re only a few minutes in, we’ve painted a blue sky green field in that the marketing team’s been receptive to my emails and they’re probably not unhappy with the tools that they have. In your experience, when you go in with customers and you’re helping present this vision, work through best practices and strategy, there inevitably has to be somebody with arms folded, across the table, that’s just listening because their boss told them to be there.
Mike Gerholdt: What would you advise as an admin who’s trying to work through the business of bringing expanded platform to their organization and presenting a vision or working through some of those ideas from marketing, but meeting the resistance?
Kate Elliot: Yeah, I can definitely picture the people across the table with the arms folded. And I would say a couple of approaches have worked for me and especially in my role now, where I’m trying to help.
Kate Elliot: A lot of times it is a grassroots movement that’s trying to move operations forward, so they kind of need some momentum. One thing that I tend to ask is “What just takes up a lot of your day?” And from that, in the marketing department, a lot of times you hear things like, “Well, I have to collate these lists,” or you know, “Every week I send this newsletter and this newsletter takes me three of the five days of the week before in order to get it ready to send out.”
Kate Elliot: And those are really good points where, especially marketing cloud, Pardot has some of the tools as well. Can be really helpful with content blocks or dynamic content or helping with just general automation on some of those easier tasks to automate something like that.
Kate Elliot: Another question that I like to ask as a push is I go, “Okay, great. I’m so happy that you guys’ marketing department is well functioning and you guys feel like there’s nothing that takes too much time. Could you go on vacation tomorrow?”
Kate Elliot: And a lot of times the answer is, “Well, yeah, I could go on vacation. I just check my email at least a couple times a day.” I go, “Okay, well, what happens if you decide to take your family on a cruise and you’re in international waters and you don’t have access to your phone for seven days? What will happen to your marketing operations?”
Kate Elliot: And oftentimes the same people that are very proud of the operations that they have and truly are really using the tools that they have to the best of their ability. They kind of go a little pale and they go, “I don’t really know what would happen. I can’t conceive of that.”
Kate Elliot: That tends to be the two questions where I can kind of help get someone out of the mindset that they’re in, to to be a little bit more receptive to the idea that a marketing automation tool could help them go on vacation or could help them maybe take that newsletter creation from three days down to one day or something like that. Because they get the templates that they could really use.
Kate Elliot: Those are two questions I tend to use a lot. I would say the third question that I sometimes bring into the mix is I will ask them for an analysis of how their marketing programs have done. And a lot of times they have some data that doesn’t necessarily show what they think it shows.
Kate Elliot: That one can be a little bit more combative. I try to avoid that one if I can, but I think the first two questions tend to help people get a little bit out of their comfort zone and ready to listen.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. I feel like, and help me through this. We started that initial conversation. Of course, I’m going to have more conversations as an admin, but you know I’m feeling pretty good like I’ve got maybe some flows or processes built.
Mike Gerholdt: I’ve done some lightning layouts in Sales cloud. We’ve got an opportunity process. It’s humming along. As I transition over and I’m looking to add functionality with marketing cloud and I’m looking to understand more nomenclature. What are some of the gaps that I’m going to run into that you see working with customers that maybe they didn’t anticipate, as an admin?
Kate Elliot: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the biggest ones is the concept of a sandbox. In Sales cloud, as an admin, you develop everything in your sandbox or that’s the best practice that we talk about all the time. Where you build it, you make sure it’s not going to break anything. You can do potentially even some progression testing.
Kate Elliot: Then you’re able to move it into production when it’s gone through more of a rigorous governance testing or whatever your internal process is. In marketing cloud, there is not a sandbox. Everything is in production. There are some ways that some orgs, you know, they perhaps purchased an additional business unit, so that it functions like a sandbox where they use it for testing or things like that.
Kate Elliot: But they’re, let’s say in my sandbox org, if I decided to buy one and have it function that way, I build out in automation and I’m really happy with it. It’s an automation studio. I test it, it works. There’s no way for me to push that into what I’m considering my production business unit.
Kate Elliot: To have the same level of rigorous testing before it goes to production is different. There’s different workarounds you have to do. There’s perhaps some yet, yeah, you’re going to have to probably work with support or your account team if you truly want to make a business unit a sandbox.
Kate Elliot: And it’s just a little bit of a different philosophy, in terms of the testing, where you know it is happening in your production org with your live data. That requires a lot more. It’s a lot more thought behind how you organize things. It requires a lot more thought in your training because someone can accidentally send to your entire list where they’re testing. If the right permissions aren’t turned on and things like that.
Kate Elliot: I think that’s the number one biggest concept that I find Salesforce sales cloud admins, when they move over to marketing cloud, rightly have a ton of questions on, because it is very much a shift in the development process.
Mike Gerholdt: I feel like I should know that.
Kate Elliot: I would say it’s not, well, it’s something you typically learn when you’re in implementation.
Mike Gerholdt: So as the plane’s on the runway ready to take off.
Kate Elliot: Yes. That’s my experience.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay, good. As we talked through this, I come back to some of it’s strategy, the other part is best practice. I’d love to know, from your perspective, because you meet with a lot more customers than probably most Salesforce admins do. What are the categories of best practices that seem to come up on your radar the most?
Kate Elliot: Oh goodness. I never thought about it in categories. I would, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, topics. I was trying to give you something broad, so you didn’t have to answer like “Well, in general it’s the subject line for,” because I feel like, especially when I worked in sales, people always want to know exactly what someone else exactly like them is doing. Generally so they can copy it.
Kate Elliot: Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: Right? Tell me who’s figured this out so that I can act like I’ve figured it out.
Kate Elliot: Yes. I would say there is some of that, in terms of high end, not high end, high level campaigns. I do get a lot of campaign specific sorts of best practice questions. Things like “Who’s done a preference center really well?” Or “How many emails do you typically see in a welcome journey” Things like that.
Kate Elliot: And those, especially for marketing, are a little bit harder to answer, because there’s so many variables to kind of factor in to an answer like that. Especially if you’re trying to, and in the nonprofit higher ed space too, there’s also different sizes of nonprofits. There’s global or regional or whatever it is. That gets interesting.
Kate Elliot: I would say there’s the campaigns specific ones. I would say there’s marketing specific best practices. Things like, “Do you track opens? Do you track clicks? Are those valuable metrics anymore? Are you doing just single channel email? Are you bringing in multichannel or omni-channel, those sorts of approaches to your marketing?”
Kate Elliot: I would say that’s a big series of best practices that I tend to get asked about. And then another is the product specifics of marketing cloud. Questions like “I want to set up my data so that my end users don’t need to worry about writing a SQL query. What should I do?” Or, “In Sales cloud, I have these beautiful dashboards built and I want to add a component for email marketing. How can I get that back over to Sales cloud? What’s the best practice there?”
Kate Elliot: They tend to fall into, I would say those kind of three high level buckets. Of course, the marketing cloud product one, you could probably split into data, implementation, governance and training.
Mike Gerholdt: Training always being a huge, huge factor. I’m thinking back through the discussion and I’m trying to work us through the implementation, right? We started off with the conversation. We’ve asked for best practices. I think, at least in my experience, sometimes when you onboard other departments, you kind of have to go back and have that gut check with the first department or original department that you brought in.
Mike Gerholdt: What tends to be next steps for admins after maybe they bring in marketing cloud and now they have marketing and sales in Salesforce. Is it “Am I going after service or am I going after that next level functionality?” What do you see with customers as they’re working with you on best practices and strategy?
Kate Elliot: Right. I would say what I typically tend to see is you start off implementing core marketing cloud. That’s maybe some marketing automation, that might be the connector, if you have sales cloud. You have kind of that loop between your sales cloud and your marketing cloud.
Kate Elliot: The next step that I tend to see is sometimes bringing in different channels. Bringing in texting. We have mobile connect. Sometimes bringing in social or ad studio to kind of build on some of the work that you’re doing in marketing cloud.
Kate Elliot: For example, we have a product in marketing cloud called journey builder. We are able to have dynamic decisions, splits and things like that. But you’re also able to bring in other channels. You might start in your implementation, it might even just be an automation in automation studio and then it moves to a journey where you can get a little bit more one to one segmentation.
Kate Elliot: And then the next level is, “Okay, well, now I want to bring in direct mail or I want to bring in texting or I want to bring in paid ads that all factor into these campaigns that I’m building. That’s where I tend to see the kind of next step is bringing in some of these other products.
Kate Elliot: Sometimes it’s bringing in more reporting. Something like a data-rama or even like perhaps a Tableau, so you’re able to see what is my year over year, quarter over quarter with my engagement rates? Sometimes we have Einstein, some Einstein features and marketing cloud, too, where you could bring in and say a really popular one is Einstein frequency where you can say, “Okay, now that I’ve been sending for six or 12 months,” whatever it is, “I can see that I have a bucket of people that I on average every month touch five times.”
Kate Elliot: And I have another bucket where I send them 10 emails. I have another bucket where I’m sending them 20 emails and then I can see who’s performing better. I think it’s kind of that optimal. “How often should I be interacting with our customers?”
Kate Elliot: Sometimes it’s Google analytics, so I tend to see more of the marketing level integrations as the next step, just to bring in other data sources or other channels and try to make a little bit more of a full cohesive campaign that could be multichannel with some more complex reporting.
Mike Gerholdt: Do you find, so kind of, I guess, abstract of our conversation of guiding an admin through. I’d love to know, as I heard you talk through that adding other channels, right? Like texting and some of the other stuff.
Mike Gerholdt: Do you find, in your role, which obviously this answer’s going to influence what I ask next, but that it’s often the company coming to you saying, “Okay, so we’ve been doing email, we feel we’ve got email down solid. For example, we know it’s five times a month, right? Then we’ve got to email people and now we want to text.” Or is it you coming to the organization saying, “You’ve got email down, right. Are you exploring these other options?”
Kate Elliot: I tend to work a little bit more with the first, but a lot of times it’s presented more as aspirational, where it is “We feel like we are probably good on email. We’d love for you to take a look because really our goal is that we need to text.”
Kate Elliot: Especially in the nonprofit space, it’ll be, “We have this one annual campaign and we feel like we finally have an email program that’s pretty good. We might be able to be a little more dynamic, but this has been working for us. Now we need to get texting in for this campaign.”
Kate Elliot: So it tends to be a little bit more customer driven, in my experience. Occasionally, I’ll get an account executive, or someone that has no really deep relationship with an account, reaching out to say like, “Hey, I think we should prod them along.”
Kate Elliot: But with marketing cloud, especially with the journey builder product, it is I think a lot easier to see kind of the, if we’re thinking crawl, walk, run, the vision of running, than ever before in marketing clouds. I think it’s a little easier for customers to say, “You know, I really want to be able to drag over this activity because I can see where I could split off here.”
Mike Gerholdt: Right. The reason I asked that is, I know myself included, when I was a customer and even now, you would go to Salesforce events, you go to dream force, you see this. Right?
Mike Gerholdt: And immediately you start plugging in, “Wow this would be great if my company did that.” Because clearly you know they don’t. You know they don’t have texting for example or you wish they would do social customer service.
Mike Gerholdt: And you have to come back and present that vision. And I guess that’s where I was going with that was I would love to know when you come in to those customers that you want to prod along. Because for some, in sales, I know what works, I know how to put numbers up on the board and they’re the numbers everybody wants.
Mike Gerholdt: And if I keep things aspirational, then we can always aspire to do that. But at least then I don’t fail putting it out there and I know sometimes, as an admin you’re coming with, “Yes, but Salesforce can do this now. And it’s not that hard for us to do it.”
Mike Gerholdt: I would love to know some tips maybe that you could pass along to admins to help push that aspiration through and drive it to something that we can implement and move through and show a win.
Kate Elliot: Yeah, absolutely. I think passion marketing cloud, where I tend to see people coming up to me and asking if they’re ready to go on to the next step or they want to. A lot of times what they’re trying to do is replicate what they did before. What I see is, again or that example of the nonprofit that just has to have texting for their event. The biggest question that I think an admin can ask is “Why? What value is it adding?”
Kate Elliot: There is a lot wanting to keep up with the Jones’s and that sort of thing. And especially with marketing, especially when you want to do realtime communications, you have to be crystal clear on your strategy then, of the purpose of a text, versus an email. And how people can opt in and opt out and where you’re going to store all that data.
Kate Elliot: I think pushing on the strategy behind the new innovations or the strategy behind moving to dynamic content instead of building on HTML or something. To be able to show how it’s a building block towards the bigger picture of where the marketing team has their aspirational vision can be very powerful.
Kate Elliot: I think it can be really easy to get caught in the trap of “Well, we have to do texting because that’s what everyone’s doing.” Or “We need to get on Facebook because that’s where this audience is.” But if you don’t have a strategy around it or if you’re sending the same thing on a tweet that you’re putting in your email, that you’re putting on Instagram, that you’re texting someone. If someone’s very engaged, they’re getting that same message then from you five times.
Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kate Elliot: Then they start becoming unengaged on channels. I think when you’re presenting your vision and when you’re trying to push forward on more functionality, really trying to explain the strategy on why it is different, to be able to text someone this information, versus send them an email.
Kate Elliot: And how you can be more responsive and really think about the customer first in that sense. Because it can be very tempting for people that I speak with to want to send things because they think it will look good for their metrics.
Mike Gerholdt: Sure.
Kate Elliot: But the customer doesn’t care about your metrics. At the end of the day to really put yourself in the shoes of the customer and really be able to present and say, “If I was a member of this campaign, it’d be really powerful if I was able to sign up for text messages, opt out of emails, so that when I’m at this event, I can learn more about all the stories of the people here that I’m trying to help.”
Kate Elliot: I just think being able to really speak to the strategy and really speak to the actual customer experience with all these channels can really help move the needle and really get that executive buy-in.
Mike Gerholdt: If I could be laying on the floor, I would be doing that right now, because your answer is amazing. Relentless focus on exactly what the customer experience is and what the vision is. And executing through strategy and learning best practice. If I had to sum everything up that you’ve said, I think I’ve probably asked you four or five different questions and all of those are the fundamental answers, which is just something that I feel everybody needs to be reminded of. It’s great.
Kate Elliot: I used to be a Salesforce sales cloud admin, too. And I think there’s a big difference when you’re thinking about your internal users and the focus on, perhaps reporting and it’s part of how someone does their job and yes, you need to think about their experience. But it can be a little bit harder to kind of go a step out, for the customer, because there is this whole team kind of in between that does a lot of things off platform.
Kate Elliot: With marketing, that’s so much different because everything that I configure is going to our customers.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kate Elliot: I personally get, I will say I do get a little frustrated sometimes when I am speaking with customers and they get so tied to a process that they’re doing because they want to prove something like the value of email.
Kate Elliot: And when you start doing that, you’re doing something because it’s the metric that your manager likes to see. I guarantee you it’s not what your customer wants to see. That’s just such a, for a customer, is such a confusing experience.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kate Elliot: Because if you don’t know why when you sign up for newsletters, you’re getting donation requests, it’s confusing. You don’t know why, if you sign up for a particular brand, then suddenly you’re getting sister brands because you don’t know that they’re owned by the same company.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kate Elliot: It just gets very confusing. And then when you start adding in these other channels, that’s when people start thinking it’s creepy that I looked up something on my phone and now suddenly I’m getting an email about it.
Kate Elliot: And now you’re texting me about visiting this store and all of a sudden it starts becoming just this overwhelming, in a bad way, experience because you’re starting to get the same message from so many different channels. And you’re starting to, as a customer, feel like, “Do these people really know me or are they just trying to bombard me?” And that causes a lot of disengagement.
Kate Elliot: I think with marketing, as an admin, that’s just one of the huge differences. There isn’t that buffer layer. Everything that you’re setting up is going live. If someone can’t tell you the strategy or if you can’t understand, if I’m a customer and I’m just trying to do this one thing and along the way I’m going to get hit by all these other asks or messages or campaigns or what have you. If you don’t understand it, your customer doesn’t.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kate Elliot: That’s the big thing. And I think that’s a big push, that I like to push back on, is I guess maybe another question I had to ask the marketing department on this. “Have you signed up for all the emails that you’re sending your customer?”
Kate Elliot: “And if not, sign up for them as an admin and count them in a day.”
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kate Elliot: Especially if they’re asking for other channels or other things like that. But I think it’s just definitely a different mindset from being a internal admin to an admin setting up a team for external. Because at the end of the day, you could be the person that helps the sales and the marketing team talk to each other, to know that they’re sending almost identical sends to the same group of people.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Kate Elliot: And no one else might be able to see that, but you.
Mike Gerholdt: And all of that needs to be in a manifesto because you’re spot on with everything that you said and in addition, it’s also the perspective I would challenge everybody to make when they’re setting up sales processes.
Mike Gerholdt: Think through what the sales processes that’s going to be guiding this person as the customer comes through your organization, so that it compliments what marketing’s doing. But also is thinking through what is the perspective on the other side of the table?
Mike Gerholdt: Because it’s not always pushing emails every five or 10 minutes because they haven’t made decision. This is great. You should do a whole session about this at dream force, if you haven’t, I’m going to encourage you to do so.
Kate Elliot: We do a lot of round tables where we talk about this and they call them circle of success for more of the retail and other industry focused and we call them The Power of Us Live. It’s really interesting to hear different customers talk about their perspective. It’s fun to see the light bulbs go off, but I haven’t done a session yet, so maybe I’ll sign up for one.
Mike Gerholdt: I’m going to challenge you to do a session, that and I would also say I think your perspective is a perspective that other admins should have. Getting out and hearing what other companies are doing in different spaces. The power of joining the user group and hearing. I’ll never forget being in a Wisconsin user group and having two very different companies talk about leads and watching the two admins look at each other like, “I had no idea I could do something like that.” And getting that perspective is just huge.
Kate Elliot: I will just, I know we’re wrapping, but just one note on that.
Mike Gerholdt: Please do.
Kate Elliot: Another thing to think about when you’re a marketing admin and we actually talk a lot to our universities about this is, while you are directly competing with other people in your industry, perhaps whoever’s going to buy your shirt, at the end of the day you are also competing against everyone in your inbox.
Kate Elliot: You really limit yourself if you are just looking at the same industry. Because I think a good example in my own experience is there are a lot of retail giants that are very responsive, so they know what you like, they’re able to give you good recommendations, they’re able to contact you at the right time, things like that.
Kate Elliot: And then when I go and get my car fixed, I get what looks like a newsletter that should be printed out in my inbox. And that’s not what I’m expecting anymore from a professional email campaign, because the people that are doing it very well, they are setting the standard for everyone in the inbox.
Kate Elliot: That’s also something just to think about is yes, when you’re going against within your industry, it may impact your sales or your conversions and that’s absolutely a competitive view you need to have. But also the people that are leading the pack just in general in this space are setting the standard for the entire inbox.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s such a cool perspective. Thank you for sharing that. And is something to think about. Wow, I learned a lot today. That was great.
Kate Elliot: Well, happy to help. Happy to-
Mike Gerholdt: That was great.
Kate Elliot: I had a lot of fun.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, thanks so much for being on the episode. I definitely want to have you back. Not right away, but continue our conversation, dive deeper. Think about other things about marketing cloud. This is definitely one of those strategy best practices. You can’t get enough of them. And I appreciate you taking time out and dropping some knowledge on us.
Kate Elliot: Anytime. Happy to do so.
Mike Gerholdt: Will do. Thanks Kate.
Mike Gerholdt: I am so thankful we could have Kate here to talk about strategies and best practices to expand into marketing cloud. She had some really fantastic strategies and best practices that she could share with us.
Mike Gerholdt: And I think, as a Salesforce admin, the biggest question we can ask is why. And we did a podcast on this with Kevin Richardson. It’s phenomenal, but really we want to make sure that as we’re driving further functionality into our organizations, they’re always making sure to bring in the why, so that we understand the metrics.
Mike Gerholdt: And also, as we’re expanding now into marketing cloud, that we’re having our sales department and our marketing department talking together. As admins, it’s up to us to facilitate those conversations across departments, so that really marketing can bring some of that data back to sales and sales can help be more productive and help marketing be more productive. We want everybody pulling in the same direction.
Mike Gerholdt: Kate brought up a lot of great information such as there’s no sandbox in marketing cloud and so you want to make sure that you have a lot of training scheduled and that you’re ready to move forward with that. I thought that was a great reminder.
Mike Gerholdt: And of course, there’s a lot of time that I could spend talking with Kate about strategies and best practices, I think, wow, she knows so much and I’m so thankful we could have her on the podcast.
Mike Gerholdt: Now I want to remind you that Salesforce admins is on Twitter. You can find us at Salesforce admins. No I, and of course, your one stop shop. I wake up every morning. That’s the first page I go to admin.salesforce.com.
Mike Gerholdt: We have tons and tons of blog posts there. Some that I’ve published, some that other evangelists have published within Salesforce. It’s really a breadth of information. We also have webinars posted there. You can listen to additional podcast episodes. With that, I want to thank you for tuning in and we’ll see you next time in the cloud.
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lisa Tulchin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about user learning styles and how to use them to create better training sessions. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lisa Tulchin. Choose […]
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the keys to creating an effective presentation, how to prep, and how to create a strong ending. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation […]
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website. Join us as we chat about what admins and devs can learn from each other and why everyone can learn to code. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are […]
