A constant refrain we hear is, “How do I enforce Contact Roles in Salesforce so I can properly attribute revenue to my marketing programs?”

It’s hard!

Salespeople are focused on the money. They aren’t often keen to spend the extra five minutes to properly link up their key Contacts to the Opportunity. Thus, in Sales Operations and Marketing Operations we’ve created a cat and mouse game of trying to automate this process or chase down salespeople. In case you are new to this part of Attribution, I’ll go over a few of the top tips.

Why do you care about Contact Role?

In general, it is always good to associate specific Contacts to an Opportunity using Contact Roles. This ensures that the history of the Account is as accurate as possible, without relying on the memory of fleeting salespeople. If Sales assigns at least one Role to the Opp, then we at least know the key person. If Sales can assign more than one Role, then we can see the influencers and decision-makers.

Contact Role also helps sales managers understand whom to call if a Salesperson becomes sick or leaves the organization before the deal closes. It’s good record-keeping for you and the company. Good record-keeping is also helpful if we do analysis on who the real buyer personas are. If our guess is Corporate Strategy VPs, but the two people who end up buying 80% of the time are in Supply Chain Management, we should change our approach to the market.

Attribution and SFDC Campaigns

In Salesforce, Campaign Influence relies on the Contact Role to automatically associate a Campaign to the Opportunity. If you leave out a direct Contact or Contacts to an Opp, the Influence isn’t attributed and distributed properly across the specific Responses in Campaigns.

Attribution and Marketo Programs

Since Marketo is a Lead-based system, it also relies on Contact Role in a similar way. When a Lead becomes a Contact in SFDC, Marketo does not view it differently. When a Contact is assigned a Contact Role, however, Marketo can then directly associate the Opportunity to the Programs that influenced it.

When an Opp is created with no Contact Role, however, Marketo cannot connect the Opp back to a specific lead, or even a specific set of touches. In Marketo, then, we need to set the Programs, Channel Types, and the RCE attribution to “Implicit” which looks at all Contacts, essentially granting attribution credit to everyone in the Account and every Program Success within the Opportunity Open to Close timeframe.

While the reporting is far better than without this attribution, it is broad-based. We’d much rather be able to narrowly attribute Program Success to the 2 or 3 people who were really involved with the Opp. Of course, the Buying Team may be much larger than 2 or 3 people, so it’s certainly a decision to make up front. You can see more of this impact here.

Contact Role Enforcement

To enable better attribution then, we need to operationalize the enforcement of Contact Role. There are several methods that I know of. I believe MOPs experts have become better at this, so I’d love to hear of more methods in the comments.

Easy Methods you can do yourself

1. Remove New Opp button from the Account Page
2. Permit New Opp from the Contact page only, or during Conversion to Contact.
3. Manually review a Report of Opp by Contact Role and discuss with the lead.

Scalable, Complex methods that require coding

• Apex Trigger – on Opportunity Created, check if Contact Role is present, then request Contact Role in a dialog.
• Apex Trigger – check Contact Roles each night and do exception reporting.
• Apex Trigger – do not permit Closed Won until Contact Role is present.

None of these methods will be perfect, however, they can reduce manual exception fixes. And this will allow Sales and Marketing to better understand the original source of Accounts, Leads, and Opps for improved resource allocation.

Need help with Attribution & Reporting?

Out of the box, most marketing automation platforms don’t have the intuitive ability to report on campaign influence. Etumos has its own Lead Source Framework – combinations of marketing technologies vetted for common business needs and selected because they provide the most comprehensive solutions to a Chief Revenue Officer’s needs.

At the behest of Grant Grigorian and Kristen Malkovich, producers of the Architect’s Garden MOPs podcast, we are providing you with a “Team Size Calculator.” Despite all of the helpful blog posts on marketing operations team structure, there isn’t a clear way to calculate how many people you need.

Often, it’s not until we are preparing marketing budgets does the discussion of team size arise.

How many people do I need to run marketing automation or operations?

Answer: It depends.

Marketing Automation may not equal Marketing Operations. This is a subtle distinction. We’ve seen that when people say “marketing automation” they often mean “who is the Marketo Admin?” The size of that team could be very small, while Marketing Operations or even Revenue Operations could be quite large. Those teams may encompass reporting, analytics, sales ops, data or devops, marketing systems, etc.

Some firms do quite well with one or two people, while others have 20 or 30 people. The difference? Often it is complexity, not the size of the firm.

Some situations we’ve encountered:

• Demand Gen runs the MAP: .5 or 1 FTE is the “admin” usually this team rarely gets past Stage 3 on the Martech Maturity Model™.
• Demand Gen dedicates 1-2 FTE for Admin and harder work. This team may get to Stage 4 on the Martech Maturity Model™.
• Central Production Service: 1-4 people, but this can vary widely.
• Global – Distributed: usually 1-3 Global Admins with 1 expert or admin per Region. The experts train marketers and the global team enforces rules and deals with global projects or rules.
• Global – Regional only: 1 global admin with 1 or more Regional experts.
• Large Scale Operation: may not be global, but activity and complexity requires FTE to own processes and help marketers. Perhaps 1 FTE per major system involved, with team leaders. This is where the various factors below inform the “rules of thumb.”
• Workload: can’t get it all done, so hire more people.
• Reporting & Analytics: 1 FTE once reporting becomes a burden.

Need insight into how to build your Marketing Ops team? Edward Etumos has a great video to provide insight between the “architect” and the “specialist” roles.

How to Calculate Potential Team Size

Included here is our Team Calculator with lots of assumptions and possible tools. Please be sure to adjust assumptions and ratios for your situation.

Factors to Consider:

• Marketing Team Size
• Number of Marketing Programs per time period
• Company Employee Size
• Revenue and Revenue Ratios to spend on Marketing
• Size of Demand Gen Operation
• Data complexities
• SaaS Product and Integrations
• Preference for In House vs. Agencies

Rule of Thumb Methods

In the Calculator, these items are placed for you to answer: Yes or No. It’s a rough estimate that you can scale back depending on the various factors.

• Global Team: Distributed Admins vs. Global. – generally, you need at least one Admin or Expert per Region and Globally to enforce rules and train marketers.
• Central Production Team – use the calculators below, but at least 2 people.
• Sales Operations – if you have a Sales Ops team, you likely need at least one corresponding person to help manage the integration.
• Database Size – At one or two million records, you need at least one person for every doubling. It’s not the scale, it’s that if you have that many records, your operation is much larger and there is lots of activity.
• Level of Activity – this can include number of programs run per week, budget, data flow.
• Product Integrations – if you run a SaaS firm, then each major product you connect to your MAP will require someone to manage it. At least during the build out, more than one person is needed.
• Marketing Data Warehouse (MDW) – large organizations build MDWs and there must be at least one database admin who runs the tool and its connections to other systems.

Production Calculators

In small firms or early stage firms, or first time MAP users there will be one marketer who “owns” the MAP and learns how to use it. That person by default becomes the admin and the person to help. If you are building a central service, it’s helpful to understand the total workload, average hours, etc.

• Programs per Week
• Hours per Program (average)
• Total Hours Required per Week
• Divide by 40 hours/week
• # of FTE you need to consider

See the sheet for more!

Agency vs. In-House

Once you have the Production information ready, you can compare In House vs. Agency. As consultants ourselves, there are many good reasons to hire one, and some very good reasons to build a pipeline of people in-house.

• In House Benefits
  • The sole focus is this instance.
  • Talent pipeline to avoid “key person” risk. (And build your empire).
  • Long term cost is less.
• In House Negatives
  • Harder to remove underperforming staff.
  • Less flexible as work goes up or down.
  • Talent may not have right skills.
• Agency Benefits
  • Easy to scale up or down.
  • Swap consultants if underperforming or clashes.
  • Easy to find right skill for one-time project.
• Agency Negatives
  • Building an initial relationship.
  • Paying for overhead in cash.
  • May cost a lot more than building in-house talent.

NOTE: An important thing to consider when factoring cost/hour. In-House may cost less per hour but, at first, may take 2-3 times longer. When it’s work that will be repeated, it may make sense to invest in training with a consultant.

The calculator can help you navigate these decisions. We’ve seen many firms have 1 FTE and leverage an agency for implementation services, hard projects, or just need extra staffing for awhile. 

For our team, success occurs:

• When a clearly defined SOW is established
• Good working relationships are created with communication protocols
• A solid framework and check-in process is built

Ultimately, it is up to you to determine how many people you need, but if you’d like additional insight, we help our clients make these decisions. Give us a call.

It’s been nearly nine months since my last update on this topic. In this quick post, I’ll talk a bit about the salary information I’ve seen recently.

There are increasing data points related to marketing automation salaries. This week, I did a search for “marketing automation salaries” and discovered many more dedicated pages than in December 2016. This is good news since that means a better understanding for those negotiating salaries on either side.

Salary Survey Data

At the Marketo Summit 2017, Inga Romanoff and Jason Seeba presented their latest Marketo Salary Survey. Of the 200+ respondents, 81% were using Marketo for more than 1 year. Thus, be careful when comparing data to experience with other platforms. I would tend to believe similar experience levels with Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot would yield similar salaries.

The data show us a long tail with 31% between $75k-99k/year as a median salary range. People with 1-3 years of Marketo experience should expect to be in this range. People with much more experience were generally above $100k.

• Entry level staff should experience $50k-99k for 1-3 years.
• Managers or more than 3 years of experience with Marketo will start to see salaries around $100k, however, the bands shown indicate to me that many Managers are making less than $100k. Those above $100k have more overall experience or specialized skills outside of marketing automation.
• Consultants always make more on average, even with less experience.
• Geography matters, but high salaries mean high cost of living.
• Companies in the 250-999 employee range tend to pay more for Marketo experience, on average. Smaller firms and larger firms likely have more inexperienced staff dragging down the averages.
• Size of Marketing Team has no real impact on salaries.
• Marketo Champions, who are typically more experienced, make more. From experience, I would say this was a good selling point to get an interview, but the experience level itself was what got me higher compensation.

Unfortunately, the cross-tabs shown aren’t enough to really judge overall work experience against Marketo experience. I have seen plenty of people with similar marketing automation experience receive similar salaries even though their overall experience is wildly different.

From my experience getting hired and hiring people, I still see a bulge at either end of the market:

• More inexperienced people are showing up and still in the lower range as shown in the salary data.
• More experienced people in marketing automation are in high demand as Consultants, Admins, and Marketing Automation Architects who are asking for $100k+ salaries (as shown in the report). This group I call “people who know what they are doing and can be trusted to do it right.”
• Few mid-range people – solid Marketo or marketing automation users looking for marketing automation or operations roles. If you’re a marketer who is comfortable in Marketo, perhaps it’s time to explore roles in mops?

How much does level and title matter?

I continue to see confusion in the market caused by how Marketers have made themselves feel better over the years. In last year’s discussion of marketing levels, I wrote about how this works. Marketing automation and operations is struggling to get past these Title, Level, Experience names as the field becomes more mature. Here is some of my recent thinking from chats with industry leaders and hiring experts.

• Specialists (Jr, Sr) – this “level” is often confused with “Associate” or “Coordinator”. I have decided to start using this as “person who is becoming an expert and is not usually a people manager. More like Marketing Automation Engineer I, II, or III. IBM, GE, and Google are good examples of putting people on “super engineer” tracks if desired.
• Associate/Coordinator – in marketing, this denotes “entry level.” I prefer “apprentice” for entry level. But most people know this is for those fresh out of college.
• Manager – I’ve learned recently that “Manager, Marketing Automation” means people manager, while “Marketing Automation Manager” means mid-range experience or even Admin at a smaller firm. This is a critical distinction because more experienced people who have or want team leadership will be attracted to the former title.
• Marketing Automation Admin – could mean different level of experience at smaller or larger firms. However, it’s typically an individual contributor role unless it comes with “Global” or says it’s a managing a team.
• Marketing Automation Consultant – typically an expert or mid-range experience who is part of an agency or solo agency.
• Marketing Automation Architect – until recently, I’ve seen this title exclusively at consultancies. Sometimes it is written as Solutions Architect, which is more in line with process and tech consultancies. I am a big fan of this role because it denotes expertise, a level of maturity, and experience. This a “customer facing role” where I would feel comfortable delegating critical relationships and design work and confident of someone’s work output. In terms of career path, I would see this as one step above Sr. Specialist, Admin, or a variation of the Manager roles. As a consultant, I would expect a promotion to Engagement Leader from this role.
• Director, Marketing Automation or Operations – always implies team leadership, however, startups and smaller firms could mean this role in the marketing automation admin. Startups always say this is a “hands on” role and you should not expect to delegate for some time. The expertise of people in this role varies from Admin level with low overall experience to very experienced people managers with tech/process experience.

[Update: December 13, 2017]: Bizible’s 2017 end of year salary survey.

I’m curious what your experiences are with salary ranges or that mid-range experience level. Let us know below.

Interested in getting a role in marketing automation? Send me a note! If you’ve got potential, I know people.