The first time I used Salesforce was in 2001. Yes, way before it was the tech giant it is today. I was working for a large database software company, and we were evaluating it for our sales team. At the time, Cloud Computing wasn’t a well-known way of the world — it was more of a vision. I remember thinking that this new CRM tool could be something that would revolutionize the market and help us better collaborate with our field sales teams.

And I was right.

Fourteen years later, I’m still a fan of Salesforce. At Virtual Causeway, we provide sales, marketing and research services to our clients, including Technical Consulting, Professional Services, and Demand Generation Services. In essence, we act as a virtual demand center for our clients, offering campaigns, project management, and best practices. We realized early on that using cutting-edge technology such as Salesforce would be key to remaining competitive. Over the past seven years, we’ve standardized on the Salesforce platform, and believe that it’s helped us build and grow our business.

Data-Centric Culture

From the beginning, we’ve had a very data-centric culture; the key to any successful initiative is data. Originally, we were leveraging many different sources of data for campaigns, and renting lists from publications and other sources. Once we migrated to data.com as our primary data source, we were able to realize better results, better data quality, and we don’t have to rent lists for every campaign, since we own the data. And our sales team loves the ability to pull targeted account data from within its CRM console, which helps each sales rep improve their prospecting efforts.

Operations

It’s not just our sales and marketing teams that rely on Salesforce, but our operations teams find that they use the data, to accomplish the following:

• Assess Market size and opportunity
• Plan staffing, and territory/industry segmentation, based on target prospect distribution
• Perform funnel math based on historical results to project conversion rates and revenues
• Budget marketing program fees to support revenue goals
• Define the demand waterfall process and definitions for MQL vs SQL

Marketing, also known as TOFU

When it comes to Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) activities, our marketers love to leverage data.com and Salesforce.com to intelligently develop and manage their campaigns. And combining data.com with our marketing automation tool has provided great results. The platform allows us to:

• Create lists of prospects for campaigns targeted at the agreed upon territory/industry segment
• Cleanse and refine data with landing page forms and progressive profiling via our marketing automation integration
• Monitor, report, and hold accountable the assumptions around the sales funnel math, and conversions to ensure ongoing alignment around both future opportunity and revenue expectations

Sales — MOFU

Once our leads reach Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU), our sales team is able to collaborate effectively to focus its efforts on optimizing and improving its conversion rates. Some of the benefits we have seen to date:

• Dramatically reduced sales cycles now that data is clean and sales intelligence is provided (via marketing automation that has been linked to data.com and Sales Cloud)
• Improved ability to generate faster and more compelling business cases using data sourced around performance of prospects’ competitors
• Deeper prospecting into organizations by identifying and engaging all potential direct and indirect opportunity influencers

In Summary, Data.com, Salesforce.com, and Pardot allow all internal teams to collaborate by giving companies like ours a single, holistic view of the market opportunity. Sales and marketing departments are aligned, and can work using a common language, including key segmentation attributes (industry, title, revenue size, employee size, location, etc). Most importantly, we have a common expectation around data quality for campaign and account development and execution.

Rick Endrulat is the founder and president of Virtual Causeway, a leader in sales, marketing, research, and technology services. With more than 20 years of experience, Mr. Endrulat and Virtual Causeway are focused on helping companies bring their solutions to market while increasing their revenue pipeline with professional services, best practices, and sales and marketing technologies. Endrulat spends time coaching and mentoring technology startups as well as evangelizing the intelligent use of data, metrics, and process in sales and marketing organizations of all sizes.