Building out a Marketing Cube w/ SalesForce Integration

Hello All,

I am a financial analyst in the finance department at a school, and I have been tasked with building out our marketing cube in Prophix and getting it to talk with SalesForce. Does anyone here have any experience with integrating SalesForce w/ Prophix or at least can shed some light/ share how the relevant fields to be extracted will work within the model manager? We’re looking only for lead level detail: lead sources, lead type, program of interest, etc…

Any help would be greatly appreciated in this area!

Warmest regards,

Leon

We just bring financial data from salesforce for pipeline and backlog

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We don’t have typical sales for my organization. I am interested in seeing the responses!

Can you give some more information on what your marketing cube is going to look like? What data are you thinking of bringing into Prophix from SalesForce?

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Thank you Gabrielle. Yes. We are looking into bringing in lead level information:

  • lead category
  • lead sources
  • lead type

Best,

Leon

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I apologise, I should say that I know very little about the integration, but I’m watching this with interest as we also use SalesForce and I hadn’t really considered what would make sense to bring in or how we could optimize this opportunity.

Are you looking to integrate these into your Budgeting process or just your reporting? or use it in another way?

I’d actually thought about the opposite direction - i.e., our organization uses Sugar, though not to a great degree at this point, and I was wondering if it would make sense to import our sales data into it for use by its users as they’re talking to customers. Another thought came up the other day in my Finance Road Map meeting, and that was around porting over A/R data, especially for customers that may be “a little delinquent”, so that when the sales team / executives are talking to certain customers, they could keep that in the back of their mind too.

Definitely not on a priority list even at this point, but it’s in the “Big Picture / 2020” pile.

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We use Prophix to track Marketing spend. We don’t import from Salesforce so I cannot really speak to that piece. We have a really cool channel category report we have built out. If you are interested in chatting, let me know.

My email is: michelle.ferris@allstardirectories.com

Here is a peek at our model for organization:

image

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If you have any systems that currently pull data from SFDC, I would take a look at those to understand what tables/fields are readily available for you. If it’s everything, it’s just a matter of narrowing down your queries.

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Thanks for the input, Stephen. Do you have a moment to help me navigate salesforce for strictly marketing purposes? I am very new to that platform.

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Hi Leon,

I’m not too familiar with Salesforce fields and how to extract, but from your original post I am somewhat familiar with how Salesforce data can be leveraged in Prophix as a sales/lead/marketing analysis tool. I presented a case at the 2017 Prophix User Conference (along with @michelle.ferris) and Prophix’s then Manager, Digital Marketing on using Prophix for Marketing Performance Management.

In the Prophix case presented the dimensions used in the model (in addition to Time, which was monthly, Time Perspective and Version) were:

  • Campaign - the largest and key dimension used in a bulk of the analysis and reporting. Contained multiple layers and several alternate hierarchies to view data based on different criteria. At the leaf level were specific campaigns ex. list of specific webinars, whitepapers, events rolling up into categories ex. all webinars grouped together under one parent to report total # of webinars. All of this information (campaigns, categories, and additional attributes for alternate hierarchy build) were pulled from Salesforce
  • Member Status - list of activities completed by a lead ex. registered for webinar, attended webinar, downloaded white paper etc.
  • Office - in our case this was used to determined by the country and/or continent where the lead was generated
  • Vendor - where necessary, if an external vendor was used to generate or develop lead generation content this dimension was used to track which vendor was associated with the campaign.
  • Accounts - contained relevant marketing expense accounts associated with marketing activities (ex. vendor expenses) and non-financial accounts to track or count marketing or sales accepted leads (MALs or SALs), marketing or sales qualified leads (MQLs or SQLs). These stats essentially were a flag and held a value of 1 or null based on the activity tracked in sales force. For example for each lead that registered for a specific webinar a value of 1 would have been imported.

Once you are able to flush out what you need or what is available from Salesforce you can leverage your CSP to connect with a Product Adoption Consultant to help you design the cube, or if you want to bounce some ideas around with them to talk through some of the requirements you might have in mind today they may be able to provide guidance on cube structure and what fields you should try to look for/see if they are available in Salesforce.

Thanks, and good luck with the lead modelling!
Judy

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We also just bring in financial data from SalesForce for backlog and probables

This is really helpful for something I am working on! Thank you!!

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