Campaigns, lead capture, and forecasting

Marketing tracks its work with campaigns and their members, and brings in leads from web forms and imports. Assignment rules and queues route those leads to the right people. Forecasting rolls up the expected revenue from opportunities by forecast category and hierarchy.

Campaigns

• Campaign: A marketing effort such as an event, email send, or webinar, with budget, expected and actual cost, and expected revenue.
• Campaign members: Leads and contacts linked to a campaign, each with a member status such as Sent or Responded.
• Member statuses: Configured per campaign. Each status is marked as responded or not, which drives response counts.
• Campaign hierarchy: Parent and child campaigns (up to five levels) whose statistics roll up, such as a yearly program made of quarterly events.
• Campaign influence: Connects campaigns to the opportunities they helped create, so marketing can report on the revenue it influenced.
• Users need the Marketing User checkbox on their user record to create and edit campaigns.

Capturing and routing leads

• Web-to-Lead: Generates HTML for a web form that creates leads in Salesforce, with a daily limit on how many it accepts.
• Lead assignment rules: Only one can be active at a time. It holds ordered rule entries, and the first entry a lead matches decides its owner, a user or a queue.
• Queues: Holding areas owned by a group of users. Members pick records from the queue's list view. Queues work for leads, cases, and many custom objects.
• Auto-response rules: Send an email template back to the person who filled in the web form, chosen by rule entries in order.
• Importing leads: The Data Import Wizard can apply the active assignment rule to imported leads.

Collaborative Forecasts

• Forecast categories: Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed, and Omitted. Each opportunity stage maps to one by default.
• Forecast hierarchy: Usually built from the role hierarchy. Managers see their team's numbers roll up and can adjust them.
• Forecast types: Define what is forecast, such as opportunity revenue or quantity, and by which date.
• Quotas: Targets per user and period that the forecast is measured against.
• Forecasts depend on the fiscal year settings, so set up fiscal years before turning on forecasting.