Sales share tracking

Marketing & Content Hub Blog, Website & Page Publishing
1

EDIT:

This might be posted in the wrong forum, sorry!

Hey everyone,

I hope the title isn’t misleading this is rather new territory for me.

The What:

We currently publish blogs rather often. Once published our sales team will then share the URLs via email, social, etc but they currently do not do this sharing via hubspot. So our tracking can get a little odd ( i.e. forwarding links with identifying query strings etc).

The Why:

I’m trying to set up a scalable way to track and quantify these efforts of the sales team per memeber. Currently I believe that the traffic from these URLs are labeled as “direct traffic” which is not the case, and I’d like to show that in reporting.

The How (current):

Currently I have created a campaign for tracking sales shares. This campaign is setup for the entire sales team per sharing channel ie “Sales - Blog - LinkedIn”.

The Problem (current and future):

I am currently setting this us per blog post, with future plans to bring in a account exec to handle this moving forward. The issue is that this will show the data for LinkedIn, assumning its used correctly, and it will not show us data per sales person. And as this effort’s intention is not to track the sales team but rather provided them with data about how effective they’re efforts are its not exactly useful to the degree we would like.

The Question:

Has anyone any insight or suggestions for doing something like this?

How might we measure this granularly without requiring the team to work out of Hubspot?

Is there an alternative?

Are campaigns the best method for doing this?

Thanks in advabced all! Looking forward to hearing what you and your teams ahve done!

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Hi @Kevin-C,

Thanks for reaching out.

I want to tag in a few subject matter experts who may be able to assist with this!

Hi @Phil_Vallender @Josh @Mike_Eastwood @mike-ward do you have any suggestions for @Kevin-C?

Thanks!

Jess

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Hi @Kevin-C ,

I’ve done similar things before, admittedly with little success, mainly due to the behaviour change aspect not being well-handled.

From a tech perspective, you can create URLs per team member easily enough and utilize some of the UTM tags you may not already be using, e.g.

www.amazingsite.com/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=sales-blogs-linkedin&utm_content=Salesperson-A

Just make sure you can see what you need to in HubSpot, I’m pretty sure there are reports there that include all the UTM parameters now.

Then you need to get the links to the sales people. How do they normally communicate with customers? Email? Through Salesforce, or HubSpot or just phone/Outlook/webmail?

What I would do is pull together a simple Google Sheet to generate the URLs (you can even plug in bit.ly to link shorten quite easily within Sheets). You can then add some automation to that (either through some scripting on the Sheet, or an automation tool like Zapier) to fire off emails to the individual sales people, e.g.

Hey <Jon>,

Please can you share our latest content with your social networks?

Here is the link to use: https://bit.ly/uniquelinkforjon

And here is a suggested post template - please feel free to chop, change, re-edit or write your own!

Lorem ipsum our latest product, dolor sit amet is the best. Learn more => https://bit.ly/uniquelinkforjon

You get the idea. If that’s over-engineered for your use case, you can of course use the Sheet to generate the unique links and send them out by hand, depends on your scale really.

Also, nothing to do with the tech, but just make sure it’s clear why you’re doing this. You say clearly it’s not to track performance of sales people, but it kind of is. Last time I did this we had a plan to gamify this with prizes for most visits/signups etc… but the campaign was cancelled, so never got to actually do it. I think it could have worked though if it had been fully embraced.

Hope that at least gives you some food for thought!

Cheers,

Mike

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Thanks @mike-ward

Awesome insight! You definitely qualified some of my fears with implementing something like this. Though the gamification is intriguing. We here have quite a lot to think about!

Thanks again!