About a year and a half ago we noticed an interesting trend in our business. While we were achieving the expected success in the mid-market and enterprises market segments for which our product was mainly created to target (at least back when we were at the drawing board), we were also seeing many SMB’s beginning to leverage our application. Through outreach with these smaller customers we learned that these businesses recognized significant value in the insight our reporting solutions could offer because with true understanding of what programs worked and which did not, these marketing teams were able to effectively allocate their marketing budget to the most productive programs. It’s exciting because it highlighted a new market segment to which “marketing optimization” is more paramount than ever – for smaller companies with limited marketing dollars it’s imperative that these do not go to waste.
An important thing to be aware of here though is that our full application “Response Management” technically requires our customers be using the Enterprise edition or above (our multi-touch attribution, “Campaign Influence” product is available at the Pro edition level). And for every SMB client we sign on there are many more companies, who are not yet able to harness the full value of our application because they still are on the Professional edition of Salesforce.
To offer a more technical explanation, our application leverages APEX code (standard Salesforce comp language) to solve for all the major gaps in the out of the box reporting platform and APEX code integration only becomes available at the Enterprise and Unlimited editions. This is not only what allows us to provide the robust reporting functionality, but more importantly allows us to ensure we can finally deliver Salesforce users accurate data. This usage of APEX allows us to bridge the Lead and Contact divide to ensure we report on every single campaign response relative to our different Campaigns. It also allows us to provide historical response visibility to make possible dynamic trending reporting, as well as allows us to provide true end to end funnel visibility which is essential to being able to report on things like volume, conversion rates, and velocity (velocity by date stamping campaign responses via APEX code). Lastly, this APEX code is critical in correcting issues around campaign attribution. TLDR: you will definitely need to consider the upgrade to the Enterprise edition if you want to be able to report in the future on the metrics that your board/ c-level is asking for.
Additional functionality for the modern marketer available at Enterprise level:
Customization:
You are now able to add custom fields to specific record types in order to track information specific to prospects or customers alike. Because our application allows you to pull from these custom field values with reporting, you are now able to track and report by these unique dimensions to deliver more compelling visibility for your organization. You are also able to create custom opportunity types to differentiate between the different types of sales you are making. Marketers can then harness this opportunity type field to then report and understand which campaigns drive these different types of opportunities.
Field Level Security/Profiles:
Another great benefit to marketers at the Enterprise level is the ability to control who has access as well as visibility into specific data in Salesforce. All to often I speak to prospects who struggle with manual manipulation of data. Perhaps sales is changing field on the Lead or Opportunity record in an effort to retain more credit. Their ability to manually manipulate this data creates significant inaccuracy in what our data is actually trying to tell us. Therefore, we can mitigate these issues by only exposing key campaign, lead source, custom fields, finance, etc. data so only the appropriate marketing profiles that require visibility.
Workflows:
Lastly, we can leverage access to Workflows in the Enterprise edition to help automate business process to ensure that all key data is being captured throughout the marketing to sales handoff and beyond.
