Putting together a campaign for lead generation in Salesforce.com is more complex than you might 
think. There are several pieces to the puzzle. Our new Infographic “What Does It Cost to Build a Lead Generation Campaign in Salesforce” gives a summary of the required components and their likely costs.
First, we decided to pick a middle ground between the very large organization and small businesses. Our analysis is based upon a team of 10 users. Probably 1 manager, 1 marketing team member and 8 sales people.
Additionally, we’re building an automated outbound campaign starting with emails where a series of emails will be sent to a cold list of potential prospects in your target market and then sales people will call those that engage with the emails either simply by clicking the emails or additionally by “converting” through some registration page on your website.
For the purpose of our analysis, we decided not to include the actual cost of writing and designing the emails themselves. That may be done internally or you may want to hire expert help.
For more on how to create the emails for a lead generation campaign like this, see our Lead Generation Starter Kit video series.
Lead Generation in Salesforce – Components
Of course, you’ll start with the “Sales Cloud” as the platform and the CRM system and primary interface for the sales staff. You’ll also need a marketing automation component like the “Marketing Cloud”. This is where the email campaigns will be created and managed.
Email List for Lead Generation
Of course, you’ll also need an email list to send to. This is where a surprisingly large cost can arise. You may already have a very large list of opt-in emails ready to go but, if you don’t, you’ll need to purchase it and you’ll find that Salesforce presents hurdles to importing and emailing to lists you purchase outside of their Data.com solution.
And to be sure, you will need a very large list. If you’re expecting to feed leads to 8 sales people, use these benchmarks to estimate the number of email addresses you’ll need on your list:
- Open rate of 10 to 20%
- Click rate of 1 to 2%
So, if you’d like to get 5 leads to each salesperson each week, then you’ll need at least 30,000 to 40,000 emails on your lead generation list. Certainly, its recommended to start small. Purchase a sample list and test the emails and the list, then optimize based on the results. When you’re hitting at least the benchmarks above, invest in a larger email list.
Manpower Requirements
The challenge to making your lead generation campaign in Salesforce really work is setting up all the pieces and ensuring they talk to each other properly and maintaining that system. Practically, you have two options for staffing the set up, integration and maintenance of your Salesforce Lead Generation system:
- Allocate staff time to training, then set up and integration initially, then to maintenance and adjustment on-going.
- Bring in a Salesforce Certified Consultant.
Of course, another challenge is leading this effort. If this is your first automated lead generation campaign, all the moving parts may get overwhelming. You’ll be working with 2 or 3 separate support teams to get help and possibly 2 or more consultants. This leads to a lack of accountability and a complex project to manage.