Sales Cloud for Marketing 1: Intro

I’ve had my fun, talking about myself, letting my freak flag fly, etc. But now it’s down to brass tax and all that. No one starts a Salesforce blog just to see their words on the screen (I  mean, that’s part of it) – they do it to give back to the community that offers them so much.

I’m no expert (obviously), but like most solo admins out there, I have a unique situation that has given me some insight that others might not have. You see, technically I work for my marketing team. I am the “Marketing Data and Systems Analyst,” which is totally cool, but it doesn’t accurately reflect what I do.

In reality, I support Marketing, Sales, Account Management (Client Services), and pretty soon, Customer Support potentially. I also help out our training team and our implementation team sometimes. I work with Finance. And sometimes I rub elbows with IT.

But technically I’m in marketing.

The bulk of my data analysis needs to be for both Marketing and Sales, which means most of my data management must balance both teams’ needs, as well. If I were to romanticize what I do, I’d say that I find ways to bridge the data gap between Sales and Marketing. In reality, I just have two cats that I’m constantly trying to herd into one place without them hissing territorially.

There are a few ways I’ve worked this out, and I intend to share them. For the record, my solutions thus far have depended on the following:

1. We use the Enterprise version of SFDC, Sales Cloud only (so far)
2. We are on the SMB-Select edition of Marketo

To keep things relatively short, I’m going to break this information out into a couple of posts to make a series, the Sales Cloud for Marketing series to be precise.

I’m going to cover a few things that I’ve learned herding these cats.

My first post in the series will be Marketo-heavy, and it will talk about some best practices on building Programs that will sync nicely with Salesforce. Those of you that use other marketing automation tools, the following part might be more applicable, and it will be making the case for making most, if not all, SFDC users “Marketing Users.”

I look forward to sharing this journey with you!