How is everyone handling sales attribution from ABM marketing leads?

Question

I couldn't find much about this out in the wild. I'm very new to NetSuite, but fairly experienced with CRMs.

Our company does a lot of account-based marketing (ABM) where we market to existing customers - a very large customer pool where we're constantly trying to cross-sell and make sure no one is underserved.

Back in SF, we used the legacy Lead process, where you always create a new Lead even if the Account pre-exists. That way, once converted, the resulting Opportunity would be tied to the original Lead - and therefore sales attribution would stay intact via direct connection from the Opp to 'Converted Lead'. Simply viewing a "Leads with Converted Opportunity Data" type report was simple and provided a perfect 1:1 relationship between the Lead supplied by the marketing team, to the sale created by the rep. With 'Lightning' the conversion process was enhanced to include better record merging (existing Account/Contact/Opp) during time of conversion.

Over in NetSuite CRM, there's a robust flow from Lead to Prospect to Customer, but I'm curious as to what others have put into place by way of hard controls or soft processes to ensure that sales with pre-existing customers, that were spurred by a marketing lead, still get attributed to the proper source/channel.

Any info or detail on your setup will be super appreciated! One person I talked to said they have the marketing team create the Lead/Prospect AND placeholder Opportunity. Is that pretty common?

Estee · Accepted Answer

I hope I understood your question!  I believe for what you described we use campaign codes to keep track of that information. When we have a new campaign/ABM project, we create a new descriptive campaign code.

Then when the rep gets interest, we create a $1 opportunity as a placeholder until they fully flush out the deal. We then add the campaign code onto  the opportunity via the Lead Source field.

The LeadSource field could also be used at the account level too if that was the original source for obtaining that company.

Then we generate reports based off of how much activity was done on that specific lead source.

Estee · Accepted Answer

You could start with some audit saved searches.

1) If an Estimate is created w/o being attached to an Opportunity (opportunity field = blank), send an email alert out to the person who created the Estimate that an opp needs to be created.

2) When an Opp is created for an account that is tagged with a Lead Source & the opp is not tagged with a Lead Source (Opp:Lead Source field = blank), you could send an email alert to person who created the Opp that a LeadSource needs to be tagged.

That's an easy way to start the audit process manually, just to keep your eye on how adoption is going. Then once things get a bit more clean you could move to a more automated option through scripts or workflows 😊