Everything Has a Lifecycle

When I talk to customers about Marketing Automation, the idea that is most exciting is adding Customer Engagement to their segmentation mix. Thinking about communicating to your audience based on their interaction with you adds a whole new dimension to the conversation and really stimulates the imagination. The most important engagement is an organization’s customer lifecycle. But once you dig deeper within an organization’s data you will discover that almost every object has a lifecycle: contacts, opportunities, support cases, products, contracts, etc. By digging into these lifecycles you can really help narrow the conversation and make it even more meaningful.

Unfortunately most data bases have this “lifecycle” information scattered about in many forms, multiple true/false fields, start and end dates, transaction files that need to be summarized, etc. When trying to make sense of this, use the following guideline. There are three basic pieces of information that you need to find:
Status
Status Date
Status History

Status
Status is another word for Stage. Think of the process that the object goes through and identify the main stages of that process. I am going to use a slightly different example to help illustrate the point. Let’s say that your organization involves some of your customers in an Advisory Committee.  Is there really a lifecycle for this?

Yes, it looks like this:

A committee is active but maybe your committees are actually formed annually, or around specific topics and so they are disbanded, or replaced. But the history is important; these committees are now just “Inactive”.  This may not be too interesting, but there is another lifecycle here, the Committee Member status. When you add that it looks like this:

Committee members come and go. They are “Active”, then leave and become “Inactive” So now you actually have 4 statuses to play with, and in fact eight combinations of status that are interesting.

Date
When looking at an object you will want to not only its status, but when the object reached that status. Simple questions like ”Who has been on the committee the longest”, or even more interesting “Who became active this year, and how does that compare with the interest level of last year”? You see what I mean when I say that your marketing automation projects can suddenly take on a new life. But there is one more piece of information.

Status History
The best situation is when your database retains the history of when the object reached (or left) each stage, including the stages in which is no longer resides. This lets you answer the following question “How many people have served on committees for at least two years.”  That could actually include people who are no longer active in a committee. In fact it could include committees that are no longer active. But that group of people was engaged with your organization for two years, and that information is interesting. So you are looking for information like this. As I mentioned above, as long as you know the sequence of stages (see diagram above) you only have to know either when an objected reached a stage or left a stage. You can construct the rest.

Good news for Salesforce.com users
Those of you that use Salesforce.com as your marketing database can use a simple tool to make capturing this information easier: Field History Tracking. First of all, make sure objects in your database have the following fields:
Status
Status Date

Identify the process that the object goes through and identify stages of the process (see the lifecycle diagram above). Make those Stages pick list items for the Status field (put them in chronological order rather than alphabetical order to enforce understanding of the process with your Salesforce users). You will also want to make the Status Date, which represents that date that the object entered that selected statge that the Status field represents, a required field.

Once these fields are created, set Field History tracking on the Status and Status Date field. Salesforce will automatically keep track of any changes for you (see below).

This information can be accessed through the standard reporting, by Selecting “Other Reports” and finding your object with the “History” option. You will be presented with the history shown above as fields that you can select and filter on.

The Marketing Automation takeaway here is to keep digging into customer engagement data. The more you find, the more you can target your message. And the more targeted your message is, the more likely it is to be heard.