Monday, November 15, 2010

Creating Reports from Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com


(guest post from Ben McPhee)

As you may know, we recently launched a new sales tool called Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com. This application, written entirely on the Force.com platform, provides sales reps both individual and account-level activity insights paired with flexible tracking tools so that they are able to understand which prospects they should be engaging, with what content they should be engaging them and when engagement would be most effective.

But the question comes up:

How can management and executives get the same information? What about the management and executive level folks that do not directly own or engage all sales opportunities but want to leverage the insights provided by Discover to keep track of general activity within territories and understand who the hottest accounts are?


Because of the way Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com is designed, you can easily generate rollup activity reports right in Salesforce.com based on rep & region and know exactly which Accounts in which regions are most likely to buy. Here’s what it can look like:

The graph below illustrates which regions have the greatest purchase interest at the Account level, broken down by which reps own those Accounts



The graph below illustrates which Accounts are showing the most buying interest, by region. Hovers allow you to quickly see exactly which Accounts are exhibiting the highest engagement



How do you do this? It’s actually pretty straight forward.

In short, you just make a report in SFDC that references a few extra fields that Discover has added to your Account object. You could also do it based on fields added to the Contact and Lead objects (the same fields are added to all), but for illustration purposes, we’ll focus on the Account rollup reporting here.

Once Eloqua is up and running with activity synchs to SFDC and you have installed and configured Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com, you can go to create a new report.

To create the reports shown above, you will want to create a Accounts & Contacts report, then base it on Accounts.



Select the type of report you want (e.g., Summary) and then when you get to the Standard Summary Fields interface, scroll down and you will note additional fields that have been added to the Account object by the Discover application:



Opt to Sum any of the fields on which you want to report – in this case, we have used Total Buy Signals and Total Open Opportunities (we are using Total Open Opps so that we can filter out Accounts that do not have at least one open opportunity).

Depending on how you want to group the data (e.g., You are interested in seeing, by region, WHICH ACCOUNTS have the most Buy Signals), select the appropriate metrics. For the second graph above, we use the following grouping logic:



Then make sure that in your Columns selection, from the Account: Custom Info area, you choose the 2 new fields – Total Open Opportunities and Total Buy Signals:




Then, make sure you apply a filter that weeds out:
• Accounts linked to no open opportunities
• Accounts that aren’t showing a relatively significant amount of activity



Depending how your regions are broken out, you may also want to generate several different reports only covering certain regions or certain reps (as we have done in this example), so the filters are entirely up to you and will simply dictate the breadth of data you want to cover in each overview report.

Now, you just have to put the finishing touches on your Chart. The below outlines the basic setup for the Hottest Accounts by Region report:



And you’re done!

Now that you can quickly whip up overview reports of your hottest Accounts, Leads and Contacts, Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com quickly becomes an invaluable tool for not only providing your sales reps with close power but also for providing your sales management and executive team with high-level insight into which regions, reps and accounts are seeing and generating the most interest in your products.

If you’d like some general info on Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.com, please get a hold of your Customer Success Manager and/or check out http://eloquaforsales.eloqua.com/.

A question out to the readers and users – will this type of reporting prove valuable? Why? If not, what are the additional metrics and perspectives that would really drive this over the fence?

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Cloud Connector Installation, Step by Step


(guest post by Dave Seaton)

An exciting new capability within Eloqua that you may have heard mention of a couple of times is the Cloud Connector concept. Essentially, Cloud Connectors allow anyone in the Eloqua community to build their own steps within Program Builder. If you're interested, the instructions for building Cloud Connectors are here, but for now, we'll focus on installing one that's already built.

Here's a step by step guide to getting your first Cloud Connector installed and ready to go.

1) Enable Account

First you need to have your account set up correctly. Please ensure that your company is enabled for API usage and that the user account you plan on using is enabled as an API user. To confirm your company has the API enabled please contact an Eloqua Product Specialist at 1 866 327 8764. If you are a customer administrator for Eloqua you can go to the user management tab and ensure that the user has the API User role enabled as well as one of Advanced User - Marketing or Basic User - Marketing User Role. Please feel free to contact an Eloqua Product Specialist if you require assistance setting up an account.




2) Find A Connector

With an API-enabled, account, you're now ready to set up a connector. If you have built one already, or have a third party you're working with, great. For this example, we'll use one of the connector prototypes that Eloqua has built, available at cloudconnectors.eloqua.com, but the same sequence of steps is used for whatever connector you're looking to install.

Each connector is identified by a unique code, and a URL. These should either be displayed in the connector's setup screen, or provided to you by your Cloud Connector provider. You will need to copy the Unique Code and Configuration URL into Eloqua.




3) Install Connector In Eloqua

To install this Cloud Connector in Eloqua go to System Management and you will see the Cloud Connector Manager on the left side. (Setup -> Management -> System Management -> Cloud Connector Manager)

Name your Cloud Connector in the service name field, copy the Configuration URL from cloudconnectors.eloqua.com into the service URL field and copy the Unique Code from the provider into the Unique ID field. Click add - you have now created a Cloud Connector!



4) Implement Connector

With this Cloud Connector installed, it will now be an available option within a step in Program Builder. You can use it once, twice, or as many times as you like, as you would a normal Program Builder step. To implement the connector go to the Program Builder module in Eloqua. In a program you need only create a new step and set the default action to Cloud Connector. Then use the drop down menu to select the Cloud Connector you have created.



5) Configure Connector

While editing the default action of your cloud connector step you will need to configure the external program that the Cloud Connector connects to. Simply click on the configure button, login and a window will open that connects you to the login for the Cloud Connector's configuration screen.



You have now installed and configured your first Cloud Connector!