How to Track Sales Touches by Specific Personas

What you’ll learn

This playbook offers a thorough, step-by-step approach to using DemandbaseOne Marketing to identify the amount of sales activities performed on specific Personas within any given Account.

By following these instructions, you’ll be able to ensure that your sales team is engaging with the right people, at the right time and with the right frequency. Additionally, this is a heavily adopted concept to ensure multi-threading across the buying group and optimize your overall Sales strategy.

Why is this important?

Sales has historically been measured by daily activity thresholds. These activity minimums have been a way for sales leaders to ensure reps engage with prospects and follow up on Marketing-generated leads. But as Marketing shifts to delivering qualified accounts, Sales needs better engagement tracking.

It’s no longer enough to know a rep contacted one person. You need visibility into whether they’re reaching multiple stakeholders across the buying group.

With Demandbase One Marketing, you can track not only the number of sales touches for an individual but also how many touches have been made to different types of personas within an account. This ensures Sales is reaching key decision-makers and influencers, not just a single contact.

What you need to get started

You need to identify that you have the integrations and data to successfully create these insights.

First, you need to make sure that you have your CRM integrated to DemandbaseOne Marketing. You can also have your Marketing Automation Platform integrated.

Second, you need to identify how you are currently tracking activities from your Sales organization, in addition to which types of activities are tracked. In this guide we will focus on Emails and Calls.

Typically we see email activity tracked in one of two ways:

1. Utilizing the Gmail/Outlook integration with DemandbaseOne
2. Utilizing CRM tasks via an integration with a sales engagement platform such as Outreach, Salesloft, or Gong

Calls performed by Sales are usually captured in CRM Tasks, either powered by a Sales Engagement Platform or another methodology.

Lastly, determine how personas are tracked in your CRM. Marketing Operations or Data Teams typically set up processes to tag roles like “Marketing Executive” or “IT Manager” within designated fields on people records.

Step-by-step playbook

Part 1: Setting the Stage

Identify Framework

This guide focuses specifically on tracking Sales emails and calls. Before setting anything up, first determine how these activities are categorized. It’s highly recommended to consult your Operations team or whoever manages your CRM or sales technology to understand how these activities are being tracked.

Sales Emails
If you are using the Demandbase Gmail or Outlook integration to track your Sales Emails, those activities will be written back to your CRM as Tasks and have a standard naming convention in the Subject Line. This standardization will be “ [Demandbase] [Outbound Email]”.

If you are using a sales engagement tool such as Outreach, Salesloft or Gong, you will need to identify how the tool is identifying Outbound Sales touches when they write those activities back to your CRM. For example, Outreach uses a standardized naming convention in the CRM Task subject line, “[Outreach] [Email] [Out]”, to identify outbound emails. However, some platforms also utilize the Task Type field or a different methodology.

Sales Calls
Similar to logged email activities, outbound calls usually can be identified in the CRM Task Subject Line or Type field. For example, Outreach can be set up to input a type value of “Call” for outbound phone calls. Additionally, you can set up the platform to include the phone call disposition in the Subject Line of the task so it be presented as “[Outreach] [Left Voicemail]” with a Type of “Call”.

Define the Timeframe

One thing that you should align with both your Marketing, Sales and Operations team on is what is the timeframe you want to track this Sales Touch data within. Most customers usually start with 1 week, however as they mature we see that expanded to 2 weeks and 1 month. For example, using one week would tell you “how many sales touches did X Persona receive over the last 1 week”.

Confirm Persona Field

You will need to identify a field in your CRM (or MAP if it’s integrated to Demandbase One Marketing) that identifies the persona of a people record. We recommend reaching out to your Operations or Demand Generation team to learn more about how this is tracked today.

Create Custom Account Field(s) in CRM

If you plan to sync data back to your CRM, create custom number-type fields on the Account object for each persona you wish to track with sales touches. These should be created on the Account object so we can look across all the personas within the Account. This step ensures you can build dashboards, reports, snapshot the data via BI Tool and have overall visibility into the data within CRM.

Part 2: Tracking sales activity in Demandbase

Create an Activity Segment in Demandbase

1. Now that you have identified your sales email and call activities in CRM, you can navigate to Demandbase > Database > Segments and create a new Activity Segment to classify sales touch types.
   

2. Build two segment groups, one for Outbound Emails and one for Outbound Calls. Segments will review all records of the object type, in this example that would be Activities, and exclusively classify them into a segment group. If an activity does not meet the criteria of a Segment Group will be classified into the Other Groups section. Ensure the naming convention in the Other Groups section is clear to indicate these remaining activities are not part of the two listed segment groups.



3. Inside of the Outbound Emails segment group we now need to input the identifiers to find the CRM activities. Here you can see we have entered in the Outreach Subject Line identifier of “[Outreach] [Email] [Out]”. Additionally if you are using the Gmail/Outlook integration you can see that subject line identifier as well



4. Inside of the Outbound Calls segment group we now need to input the identifiers to find the CRM activities. In this example we are showing how to track calls made by Outreach via a combination of the subject line identifier and the task type value of “Call”

Later on you can create new segment groups to expand and include other sales touch types such as meetings or inbound activities if necessary.

Assign Engagement Minutes to Sales Activities

Before we move to creating a field, we need to make sure these Outbound Emails and Outbound Call activities are being assigned Engagement Minutes.

1. Given the nature of these activities, we recommend assigning 0.01 Engagement Minutes to both Outbound Emails and Calls. Since you are using CRM Tasks to track these outbound activities, you can set this criteria in the Sales Activities section of the Engagement Minutes Model

Part 3: Create persona-specific sales touch fields

Create a Calculated Field

1. Navigate to Settings > Calculated Fields > +Create New in Demandbase. Choose the Data Type as “Count of Engagement Activities.”



2. Create the Field Label, this will be the name of the field in DB1M. Ideally this field label will be mirrored in your CRM via the custom field(s) you have created to hold this data



3. Now that you have your data type and field name, you want to identify the time period for which you are analyzing the data. We find that using the time period of 1 week tends to be the most impactful. Choose your time period and identify it in the Time Range section
4. Click on the ”Define Criteria” text under the “Only include Activities when…” section. This will bring you to an area where you need to reference the Sales Touch Type segment you created above



5. Add in the Sales Touch Type Segment and select the Outbound Emails and Outbound Calls values. You will then want to delete the Activity Date constraint, we have already set a time period so this is an unneeded constraint
6. Next add in the field that you use to identify a person’s Persona. In this example, we are referencing a field called “Persona” and looking for a value of “Marketing Executive”.



7. By using the Sales Touch Type segment and Persona fields we now are only counting specific activities towards certain types of people
8. Click Save to return back to the field creation screen

Sync Data with CRM (Optional)

The last step is to map this field back to your CRM, however this is not required if you wish to only use this field in DB1M.
You will notice there are drop down menus for Account and People objects. Search for the custom Account field you created in your CRM in the appropriate drop down to map this new field back to your CRM. Once selected, make sure the “Write-back Enabled” toggle is showing blue

The results

Now that you have a new calculated field identifying Sales Touched by Persona, your GTM team will easily be able to identify who and how frequently Sales is actively trying to speak to within each account.

The easiest implementation of this new data point is to add the new CRM custom field(s) to Account layout

The goal of these fields is to help provide additional insight to your GTM organization either as a net new insight or as supplemental information to existing insights

Common Use Cases

• Add these fields to reports for Sales Managers so they can ensure that their team is multi-threading their outreach across an Account
• Create reports that show Engaged Accounts that do not have specific personas with Sales touches to ensure your team is reaching out to the right people
• Embed these fields in reports for Customer Success Managers so they can ensure they are talking to all of the right personas within their Accounts
• Marketing can use these fields to build program audiences to help sales garner interest from personas which are not engaging with Sales
• Operations and Data Teams can snapshot these fields via a BI tool during specific stages of an Account’s Journey to start to identify trends in persona sales touches combined with pivotal sales moments such as opportunity creation, stage movement and win rates