Marketing Automations

Many organizations assign Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) prospects who are not yet sales ready to a “Cold” leads queue in Salesforce so data syncs and is available for reporting. The problem is that Pardot can’t reassign these leads once they “score up” and many get stuck in the cold leads queue in perpetuity.

In this post, we’ll discuss how leads can be automatically reassigned from the cold leads queue with the help of Salesforce Flow and some Apex code. This solution allows marketing teams to have full-funnel lead reporting in Salesforce without burdening sales with unqualified leads.

To Sync or Not to Sync?

The question of when to sync prospects from Pardot to Salesforce is one that comes up quite often when speaking to my clients. The answers from marketing and sales often differ. And both sides are passionate about it with compelling arguments.

The Marketing Perspective 

I need to show the full impact of my marketing activities and the leads my team is generating. If leads are only synced to Salesforce when they are sales ready, my numbers are going to be understated. That means my budget is going to be questioned — and probably slashed.

The Sales Perspective 

My time is valuable and I’m working on a commission. I don’t want to be distracted by a bunch of junk leads. I need to focus my time and energy on leads who have an interest in what we have to offer. I have a quota to hit!

I’m often pulled into these conversations and asked for my recommendation. Without hesitation, my answer is always the same — it depends. Some organizations need all prospects in Salesforce for reporting purposes and some only want sales ready leads added into Salesforce. Both approaches have merit and are correct based on the needs of the organization. 

However, you can have your cake and eat it too! Enter — the cold leads queue.

The Salesforce Cold Leads Queue

My favorite solution to satisfy the needs of my friends in marketing and sales is the introduction of a cold leads queue. 

The cold leads queue is the best of both worlds solution. It allows all the Pardot prospects to sync immediately to Salesforce — which allows for accurate lead reporting for marketing while not burdening sales with leads that are not yet ready. The cold leads queue is also a great place for sales teams to find additional leads to call in the event they are running low on MQLs to call.

So What’s the Catch?

Like all good things, there is a catch to using a cold leads queue. By design (and for good reason), Pardot can only assign prospects if they are currently unassigned. Once the prospect is assigned and synced to Salesforce, Pardot can’t change the assignment.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. In our case, we would assign a lead that does not meet our MQL criteria to the colds leads queue (in Pardot), so it will sync to Salesforce. This is perfect as the lead is in Salesforce for reporting purposes and is not cluttering the lists views of our sales teams. 

But what happens when that prospect interacts with our marketing campaign and “scores up” to meet our MQL criteria? Houston, we have a problem!  

Reassigning MQLs from the Salesforce Cold Leads Queue

I’ve seen this many times. Leads get stuck in the cold leads queue and are not reassigned once they hit the MQL threshold. 

Why does this happen? Well, there are a few reasons.

1. People forget that Pardot can’t reassign previously assigned leads and assume that their automation rule is doing the trick!
2. Since reassignment has to be done in Salesforce, the marketing team does not have the proper permissions to do the job.
3. Manual reassignment of leads is not a fun or glamorous job that Salesforce Admins look forward to doing.
4. People just plain forget about leads once they hit the cold leads queue.

So what’s the solution to this issue? I’m glad you asked. 

The solution is to use a Salesforce flow and Apex combined to automate it.

Let’s Start With Some Definitions

Apex 

Apex is a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute Flow and transaction control statements on Salesforce servers in conjunction with calls to the API. Using syntax that looks like Java and acts like database stored procedures, Apex enables developers to add business logic to most system events, including button clicks, related record updates, and Visualforce pages. Apex code can be initiated by Web service requests and from triggers on objects.

Flow 

A flow is an application that can execute logic, interact with the Salesforce database, call Apex classes, and collect data from users. You can build flows by using Flow Builder.

*Definitions from the Salesforce Glossary

The Big Reveal

I know I talked about having your cake and eating too at the beginning of this post. Well, it’s time for cake! The trick to using cold lead queues effectively is automating the process of “promoting” leads from the queue and into the hands of your sales team — and here’s how you do it.

• Step 1 – Determine the criteria that should trigger the reassignment of leads that are in the cold leads queue. This could be a Pardot score crossing a threshold or the change in a custom field value.
  
• Step 2 – Review your Lead Assignment Rules (Salesforce) for accuracy and make and needed updates.
  
• Step 3 – Create an Apex class to call your lead assignment rules from Salesforce — in sandbox. This is an invocable process and can be called by flow. Below is an example of how this code could look.
  
  
  
• Step 4 – Create a test class to ensure code coverage. You’ll need to have 75% code coverage in sandbox before your code can be pushed to production.
  
• Step 5 – Create a record triggered-flow based on your MQL criteria. As an example, your flow could be triggered when a lead is updated and their Pardot score exceeds 150 points.
  
  

When creating your Flow, it’s important that you include an asynchronous path. This will ensure that the flow runs after the changes to the lead record (that triggered the flow) are complete.

The rest of the Flow is pretty basic and will look something like this.

• Step 6 – Test and validate. Test your Flow first using Debug to make sure it’s being triggered when your lead score is changed to exceed the target score. Once verified, activate the flow in sandbox and test on some actual leads.
  
• Step 7 – After validating your flow in sandbox, create your outbound changeset. In production, validate your inbound change set (since this change set does include Apex code, be sure to run all local tests). Deploy once validated.

• Step 8 – Activate your flow and relax — knowing that no good leads are going to go bad in your cold lead queue!
  

Get Those Lead to Sales!

This post provided a high-level overview of how to automate the reassignment of leads from your cold leads queue. This is a common problem and addressing it is a great way to get some great leads into the hands of your sales team immediately. 

If you need a hand setting up the actual process, contact us with your questions.

With Salesforce moving to Flow as its go to low-code automation tool, and Workflow Rules and Process Builder planned for retirement, it’s a good idea to migrate your existing automations to Flow. Here are best practices to get started on this process BEFORE you begin migrating.

Reviewing Your Current Automation Stack

Depending on how old your org is, it may have a lot of legacy configurations from old or obsolete business processes that don’t mean anything for your organization today. Do you really need to bring all of that technical debt along in your migration process? Or would you rather have an opportunity for a fresh start with your automations?

Before jumping in and migrating all of your current automations, this is a good opportunity to develop a migration strategy so that the changes being made now will meet the current and future needs of your organization. 

Develop a Salesforce Flow Migration Strategy

STEP 1: Audit your current workflow rules and process builders

First, inventory your list of workflow rules and process builders and perform an analysis. Here is a template you can use for your audit (click File > Make a copy).

When looking at your current automation, consider the following questions:

• Which automations are active?
• What automations are still relevant?
• How many automations are there per object?
• How complex is each automation?
• Can any automations be combined?
• Which automations make updates to the same record that triggered it?

STEP 2: Decide Which Automations to Migrate

After completing the audit, you will have a better idea of the automations in your org, which are still relevant and need to be migrated, and which can be decommissioned. 

This is also a great time to decide on which you will consolidate. Candidates for consolidation are:

• Automations on the same object with the same trigger criteria. For example if you have 3 workflow rules that trigger from a Lead Status change, these may be a good candidate for combining into a single flow.
• Automations that include field updates on the triggering record.
• Automations that have similar components that could be combined into a subflow that’s called from each flow.

STEP 3: Prioritize Your Migration Plan

As you assess the automations in your org, you will become aware of those that are critical vs nice to have, and which can be combined into a single well performing flow. Use this understanding to prioritize the workflow rules and process builders you want to tackle first.

STEP 4: Get Familiar with Salesforce Flow

If you’re not familiar with Flow, and the types of flows available, this should be your next step before jumping in, to help make informed decisions about your flow strategy.

There are many resources available to help you get started.

You can check out my recent blog post for more information and links to a few great resources. Or this one from Mike Morris that outlines a process to manage Salesforce campaign activation with Flow.

STEP 5: Decide on a Flow Strategy

Ok so you know what workflow rules and processes need to be migrated and which to tackle first. So how are you going to actually migrate them? 

Salesforce Migrate to Flow Tool

• Salesforce provides a Migrate to Flow Tool to help with the process of migrating current Workflow Rules and Process Builder to flow.
  • Support for migrating Workflow Rules is generally available as of Summer ’22.
  • Support for migrating Process Builder is coming and estimated early 2023.
• The tool is very easy to use and does pretty much all of the lift in the migration process, creating the flow with start criteria and each action, and even makes it easy for you to deactivate the old and active the new.
• One consideration is that the current version of the tool will migrate each workflow rule into its own flow. So if you have 20 workflow rules and use the tool to migrate you will end up with 20 flows. Will this work for your org?

Third-Party Migration Tools

• The UnofficialSF site has a tool called ConvertToFlow v2 that can be used to convert Workflow Rules and Process Builder. I personally have not used it but it has been recommended in the community.

Building Flows Manually

If you have identified automations that can be combined, or are migrating process builders, you will no doubt build some flows. Before clicking that New Flow button, decide on:

• Will this be a ‘Before Save’ vs ‘After Save’ record-triggered Flow?
  • Will the flow make an update on the same record that triggered the flow? If yes then a Before Save flow may be the best fit for better performance.
  • Will this flow be invoking an action or creating/updating related records? Then you will want to create an After Save flow.
• Is there an existing flow with the same entry conditions? Can it be updated to include the logic you are currently migrating?
• Is there an existing flow that has the same components involved? Can those components be converted into a subflow to be used in each of the flows?

Step 5: Build your Flow(s)!

Now that you have completed all of this awesome prep work, you are ready to roll up your sleeves and get building!

Questions about using Salesforce Flow? 

Let us know how you’re using Salesforce Flow in the comments section, or reach out to us with any questions.

We’re here to help!