#HowTo – How To Use Salesforce to Manage Affiliates Like A Pro

Running a great affiliate program is about one thing and one thing only: relationships.  The relationships you have with your affiliates will make or break the success of your program.  In this article, I’ll show you how to use Salesforce (or any CRM) to effectively manage your relationships so you miss less opportunities, have stronger ties with your affiliates, hold your affiliate managers accountable, and forecast your affiliate program’s performance in the future.

Salesforce is a tool that allows you to manage relationships with people you do business with.  I use Salesforce to manage relationships with prospects, customers, affiliates, advertising partners, vendors, employees, and pretty much everyone else I interact with while running my business.

There are 4 primary record types for managing relationships in Salesforce:

1. Leads.  A Lead is a company which you might do business with.  Leads can help you track the success of affiliate managers in converting open Leads to verified Accounts.  A Lead is converted to an Account based on criteria specific to your organization.  I will not be addressing Leads in this article, but you can use Leads as an intermediate step to creating Accounts.  
2. Accounts. An Account is a company or organization which you do business with or you may do business with in the future.  For the purpose of this article, when I mention Accounts, I will be referencing Affiliates.
3. Contacts.  A Contact is a person who works for an Account.
4. Opportunities.  An Opportunity records the metrics of a potential business deal between you and an Account.  Traditionally, Opportunities are used by sales people to report and predict their potential sales (e.g. their sales funnel).  In this article, we will cover how to use Opportunities to report and predict sales generated by your affiliates.

This article will show you how to use all of these record types (particularly the Opportunities) in order to more effectively manage and grow your affiliate program.

When I ask people running affiliate programs how they keep up with their relationships, the answer I get is almost always the same.  It usually involves some combination of email, Google Calendar, a spreadsheet, and of course, “my head”.  When I hear this response, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I think, “But what happens if you get hit by a bus?”

One of the advantages to using a proper CRM like Salesforce to manage your affiliates is that you’ll have institutional memory.  Any single member of your staff can get hit by a bus, quit, get fired, or win the lottery and the next person can just slip right in and pick the relationship up in no time.

Institutional memory is the difference between a scaleable affiliate program and one that is dependent on one or more of its affiliate managers, or even worse, you!

Creating Accounts

You need to make sure to create an Account for your top affiliates and affiliate prospects.  I’m not saying you need to enter every single affiliate in Salesforce, but for any affiliate old or new who has a potential to send you more revenue, you’ll need them in Salesforce to properly manage the relationship.

Account Record Example

You should name the Account based on the Affiliate’s company name, but it also doesn’t hurt to put in the name of their primary website for quick reference.  “Super Affiliate Co” isn’t as helpful to affiliate managers as “Super Affiliate Co / lcdtvbloggers.com”.  By being more descriptive in your naming conventions, you can make it easier for affiliate managers to remember who they’re looking at.

Additionally, you’ll want to record information specific to you and your program for your affiliate managers to use as a reference point.

We accomplish this by modifying the Account record type with custom fields.  We capture things like traffic, Compete score, primary properties, affiliate IDs, and a whole host of quick-reference fields which can help the affiliate managers more effectively manage the relationships.

The point to all of this is that you want to create an institutional memory of the affiliate’s company or organization.

Creating Contacts

Believe it or not, you can’t have a relationship without people.  This is where Contacts comes in.  You need to create a contact for every person under an affiliate’s Account.  If it’s just one person, that’s fine, but if there’s a team or a whole company, you want to log each Contact into Salesforce.  This way you can record and manage the relationships with each person as your relationship with the parent organization evolves.

Contact Record Example

Again, you can modify the Contact record type for custom fields like Affiliate ID, web properties, etc., as a quick-reference guide when reviewing a Contact’s record.

Make sure to record all of their contact information including email, alternate email addresses, Skype, mobile numbers, and any other way you use to make contact with the affiliate.

Logging Calls & Emails

You’re going to want to log all your emails and calls for each Contact you have a relationship with.  Logging emails is actually quite easy with Salesforce by using plugins for both Outlook and Gmail along with a host of other email solutions.  With the click of a button you can record an email conversation directly under a Contact in Salesforce.

You can record a call with an affiliate by accessing a Contact and clicking “Log a call”.  You then take notes on the context of the call.  This is one of the hardest habits to master, but logging your calls will provide a more complete picture of the relationship with the affiliate and help you remember what was discussed at a later date.  We also log notes from internal meetings relating to affiliates for the same purpose.

Your goal is to make a record of every communication relating to the affiliate so you don’t have to rely on your memory or the memory of your affiliate managers to recall the history of your relationship.  With properly logged calls and emails any member of your team can quickly review the notes and come up to speed on the history of the account or a particular item which was discussed in the past.

Now that you have your affiliates logged in Salesforce and you have an institutional memory of the relationship, you can now take action to keep those relationships moving in a positive direction.  For this we’re going to focus on Activities.

The three types of Activities are Tasks, Events, and Meeting Requests.  For the purpose of this article I will focus on Tasks.

A Task is a reminder to take an action at a future date.  For affiliates, this might mean seeing if the affiliate is running your offer, checking in on an existing campaign or just following up on new Affiliate prospects.  The Task is the most important thing in Salesforce because it is your trigger to take action at the appropriate time to further the relationship with the affiliate.

Prospecting Task Example

Affiliate Launch Task Example

Affiliate Management Task Example

Your goal is to set Tasks on each action item necessary to move the relationship along.  You should always have a Task set to do something on all of your valuable relationships.  Even if it’s cold lead and you set the Task a year out, always have a reminder set.  Tasks are what allow you to manage relationships without having to keep track of next steps in your head, calendars, and spreadsheets.

Every day you’ll check your open Tasks and only worry about those for that day.  Once you’re done with your Tasks for the day, you can relax and focus on other things.  When tomorrow rolls around, you deal with those Tasks, and so on.

You can access your Task list from your home page when logged into Salesforce.  I actually prefer using a custom report to view my task list (filtered by today’s date), as I find it to be a cleaner view than the default Task list in Salesforce.  Listed below is an example of my custom task list and the back end settings to build your own.

Sample Custom Task List

Custom Task List Back-End Settings

Opportunities are by far my favorite part of managing affiliate relationships with Salesforce.  An Opportunity is basically a tool to record the predicted success of Campaigns with affiliates.  The use of Opportunities can shed incredible light onto the future and past performance of your affiliate relationships.  The goal of your relationships is to drive more sales and Opportunities allow you to view the success of these relationships on an aggregate and even per affiliate manager basis.

With affiliate management, we have three primary sets of data we capture on Opportunities.

1. Information specific to the Opportunity like the name, type of advertisement, type of site, and any other relevant information related to the Opportunity.  Again, you can customize Opportunity fields based on your criteria.
2. The predicted performance of the Opportunity.  Typically this means impressions, CTR, clicks, conversion rate, conversions, and expected revenue.  This is going to be a lot of guess work in the beginning, but the idea is to start to quantify campaigns with affiliates.
3. The actual performance of the Opportunity.  You want to go in after you launch the campaign and record the actual performance in the Opportunity.  You can also use the Salesforce API to automatically integrate this data from your affiliate program.

These three elements allow you to predict the performance of your program and, with the help of the actual performance data, become better at predicting affiliate campaigns in the future.

You also want to make sure to set the Stage of the Opporunity.  The Stage could be Cold Calling, Warm Lead, Closed Lead, etc.  The criteria are tied to a chance of close (e.g. 10%, 50%, etc.).  You’ll want to customize these stages for your organization, but make sure to record the Stage, as this will affect the Sales Forecasting Reports we’ll discuss later in this article.

Sample Opportunity

Salesforce provides a whole host of Opportunity and forecasting reports built right in to the reporting section.  You can view pending and closed Opportunities, predict your performance in the future through Pipeline reports, and much, much more.  Listed below are the standard Opportunity reports available in Salesforce which you can use to track and manage campaigns with Affiliates.

Standard Opportunity Reports List

If you’re anything like me, you usually blow right past the standard reports and start creating custom reports on the systems you use.  This is especially true for me with Opportunities.  I create custom reports to show type of affiliate, type of placement, traffic, estimated revenue, and a whole host of other information that lets me prioritize and track the success of my efforts with affiliates.

Here is an example of a custom Opportunity report I created for keeping track of all Opportunities.  This report includes estimate traffic and revenue data along with the stage of the Opportunity (how close it is to closing).

Custom Opportunity Report Example

Custom Opportunity Report Settings

Now that you know the steps to use Salesforce to manage affiliates like a pro, you need to come up with an action plan.  Beyond just the steps I described here, you have to work on incorporating this methodology into your internal operations.  You need to get in the habit of recording calls and emails, creating and updating Opportunities, and keeping up with your Task list.

The instructions I provided in this email are easy to impliment.  It’s just a series of steps that pretty much anyone can acomplish.  The real trick with using Salesforce is using Salesforce.  If you don’t keep good records and keep up your instutional memory you’ll only get a fraction of the value you could be getting.

Write down your action plan for implementing Salesforce into your affiliate process and make sure you and your staff follow the rules and procedures you define.  The Salesforce platform is a monster for managing many affiliate relationships in an accountable and predictable way, but it’s up to you to keep it fed.

In this article I focused on the use of the Salesforce CRM for affiliate management, but there are many other CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) platforms that will work just fine.

In my company’s role as an OPM, we have assisted merchants with integrating the strategies described in this article on CRM solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, and many other platforms.  If you’re using a major CRM platform, chances are you’ll be able to execute the strategies described in this article, but watch out for the different naming schemes for your CRM.

My name is David Vogelpohl and I run a full service digital agency in Austin, TX called Marketing Clique.  One of our specialties is Outsourced Program Management (OPM).  In our role helping people manage affiliate programs, we help people build CRM solutions for affiliate management, just like the methods I described in this article.

I have been running Merchant side affiliate programs since 1996 for some very large and successful brands generating well over 350 million in online sales.  I speak at national online marketing conferences like Affiliate Summit and PubCon, and have been a contributor at blogs like Marketing Pilgrim and publications like FeedFront Magazine.

Affiliate marketing is one of my core passions and managing affiliate relationships in scaleable and accountable ways is the foundation for my approach with affiliate management.

Make sure to look for me at Affiliate Summit in January 2014 where I’ll be speaking about “Super Affiliate Publishing with WordPress”.

Thanks for reading!