How many Sales Opportunities credit Marketing Campaigns?

Less than 20% of Opportunities tracked in Sales force automation systems like Salesforce.com, on an average, credit campaigns. Marketing systems that rely on sales people tagging opportunities with campaigns for ROI calculation purposes are setting themselves up for failure. Here are a couple of reasons:

• Sales guys like to spend more time selling products and services rather than doing data entry in software systems. Typical data completeness metrics in Sales systems are very low compared with other business processes.

• Even for the opportunities that do get tagged with campaign information there is subjectivity around the appropriateness of the campaign that gets selected. Sales guys have minimal visibility into the effectiveness of a marketing campaign that a Prospect was targeted with prior to the prospect becoming a qualified Lead.

So, what options do we have? One option is to decipher the Campaign tracking information from associated entities. I am going to use salesforce.com as reference.

1. Every Opportunity is associated with an Account and/or multiple Contacts. 
2. If a Contact is associated with the Opportunity and tagged as the Primary Contact, we can select one or more Campaigns this Contact was targeted with for ROI calculations. We might still have the data completeness problem because the sales guy is expected to associate a Contact to the Opportunity.
3. If no Contact is associated to the Opportunity, we can select one of the Contacts that belong to the Account. We need to ensure that the owner of the Contact record is same as the owner of the Opportunity record.

This multi-step approach will significantly reduce/eliminate the problem with lack of data and the subjectivity around the data. The last thing one wants to do is have the objective of capturing a key Marketing metirc depend on flaky data.