Years ago, Salesforce released a feature called “Campaign Influence” with the promise of allowing you to track campaign ROI directly in Salesforce. Unfortunately, this feature didn’t get any roadmap attention and Salesforce stopped working on it for several years. The legacy campaign influence object wasn’t even in the API!
One of the huge side benefits of Lightning is that it’s forcing Salesforce to re-imagine some features as they bring existing tools into the new framework. A great example of this is the new campaign influence feature rolled out in Winter ‘17, which is something you should take note of. Let’s take a look at how the “Customizable Campaign Influence” feature works compared to the old “Campaign Influence” model.
Previously, when there were several campaigns associated with an Opportunity, the Primary Campaign would get 100% of the influence credit; every other campaign would receive 0% of the credit. In essence, this means that all of the revenue from that Opportunity would be attributed only to the designated Primary Campaign. This made it difficult to understand which campaigns were actually influencing details.
This issue has been addressed with the new release. Now, the revenue attribution is flexible and can be applied across various campaigns. For example, you could set up your model so that 50% of the credit goes to the first-touch campaign and the other half goes to the last-touch campaign. Or you could spread the influence credit evenly across all campaigns.
This gives you a much better understanding of which campaign(s) played the largest role in moving the opportunity through its stages or in closing the deal. This will allow your marketing team to measure a campaign’s influence accurately, so that you can direct resources to that campaign or similar ones in the future.
Setting Up Customizable Campaign Influence
This new feature works in Classic as well as Lightning. When you enable Customizable Campaign Influence in Setup, “CampaignInfluence” and “CampaignInfluenceModel” are added to your org as standard objects. You can choose the out-of-the-box Salesforce influence model which supports auto-association, or implement custom attribution models to assign credit for opportunities to campaigns.
Once that’s set up, assign the “Campaign Influence” permission to the appropriate sales and marketing users, then add the “Influenced Opportunities” related list to the Campaign page layout(s), and the “Campaign Influence” related list to the opportunity page layout(s). Finally, add the “Campaign Results” section to Campaign page layouts, so that users can see the money brought in by the campaign, based on your influence model.
Setup recommendations:
- Timeframe should be 90 days
- Think about campaign types, because you don’t want to reward small initiatives—you want high quality marketing campaigns
A major consideration:
- Influence is based on the opportunity contact role. So you need to ensure that sales reps are adding relevant people to the Opportunity. However, the reality is, most reps aren’t doing this, which is why I work with clients to determine automated ways of assigning contacts.
Note on custom models:
- The plethora of options is great, but, currently, this requires additional setup. For example, you’ll need to set up triggers to determine if an opportunity contact role should qualify for attribution.
