Everything a Marketing Admin Needs to Know about the Salesforce Opportunity Object

If you’re an accidental admin (a marketer that is now stuck with owning or admining parts or all of Salesforce and Pardot), or an accidental marketer (an admin who is now owning marketing tasks), you may need some brushing up on how the key Salesforce Objects work and how they tie into Pardot. 

A complete understanding of the main Salesforce Objects is crucial for those using Pardot and Salesforce as we see these two systems fall deeper into their loving marriage with each other. 

This post will dive into Opportunities in an effort to help marketers and admins use their tech stacks to their fullest potential without (or before) buying more tools. 

You can also check out my posts on the Lead and Contact/Account Objects.

What is an Opportunity?

Of course, I’ve seen the Opportunity Object used in a variety of ways, but here’s how I think it is best used (which, by the way, is the way Salesforce would like you to use the Opportunity Object): 

An Opportunity in Salesforce is created when you start a revenue or monetary conversation directly related to your products or services. Once this conversation starts, you can create an Opportunity and add the person(s) you’re speaking with as Contact Role(s) on the related list within the Opportunity.  

So, to be clear, an Opportunity is not a Lead or any form of a human. If you have a human Lead and have an opportunity for business, then the Lead gets converted to a Contact and associated to an Account (company) and THEN an Opportunity is created.

I have seen some confusion about what Opportunities are from some terminology that has been thrown around such as “convert the Lead to an Opportunity.” This might cause one to believe that an Opportunity is a person. It’s important to not let colloquial verbiage diminish what the Opportunity Object is really all about. 

The Opportunity is the conversion path and process for a sale. Contacts are related to the Opportunity only through adding Contacts to the Contact Role related list within the Opportunity. 

Opportunity Stages

Opportunity Stages make the Opportunity Object very robust, and when using Salesforce Lightning, it’s even more powerful. The Opportunity Stages can be customized to your business process and are meant to provide a progression for your sales team to move an Opportunity from start to finish. 

Your stages might look something like this:

• Prospecting 
• Discovery
• Proposing/Negotiate
• Closing
• Closed-Lost
• Closed-Won
• Disqualified

Of course, you can pull Salesforce reports based on the stage, find out where Opportunities might be getting “stuck”, build forecasts and more by using the Opportunity Stage field.

How Opportunities Relate to Pardot

The Opportunity Object and its Contact Role related list is currently the ONLY path to attribution and the trigger to connecting revenue opportunities to Pardot. Contact Roles within an Opportunity is how Pardot picks up on closed or in progress revenue and associates it to the Contact and the campaign(s).

This might sound confusing, so let’s walk through a scenario:

John registered for one of our monthly webinars, therefore he is now part of our webinar campaign. We don’t have enough information about John to push him to sales or our biz dev team, so he’s currently a Lead owned by the marketing queue. 

It is now the marketing team’s job to collect our predetermined set of field values and Pardot score for John in order to move him out of the marketing queue. We also have Pardot set up so that if John takes one of three actions, such as completing our Contact Us or Request a Quote form or speaking directly with a salesperson, he trumps our criteria/score threshold and immediately gets assigned to a Sales user. 

None of the trumped actions have happened, so John is included in a Pardot email inviting him to a tradeshow we are having in his area. Because of this, he’s now also a part of our tradeshow campaign. 

John ends up going to the tradeshow and visits our booth. His badge is scanned, which updates his tradeshow campaign status to Booth Visitor.

John speaks with our awesome salesperson Sandy, they have a great conversation and John tells Sandy they are looking to purchase widgets in the next 3 months. Sandy documents this in Salesforce and sees that John is assigned to the marketing queue. She converts John from a Lead to a Contact, adds his company as an Account and creates an Opportunity in one fell swoop. 

Within the Opportunity, Sandy updates fields such as the product of interest, estimated close date, probability of close, stage and estimated expected revenue. She is sure to add John to the Contact Role related list and creates a task about her call with him on Monday and associates the task to John via the related lookup field. 

During their Monday call, Sandy meets John’s colleagues to further discuss the Opportunity. Sandy adds these three additional team members to the Contact Role related list and defines a role for each. John is labeled Conversion Point, Allison Decision Maker, George Influencer, Roxanne Procurement. This Opportunity is now associated with any campaign these contacts have ever been a part of.

Are you starting to see how powerful this is? Marketing and Sales is aligned in moving forward in unison and closing business opportunities. Everything is tracked so we can see attribution and report ROI. 

Using Opportunity Fields in Pardot

Even though as marketers we may be focused on prospect fields while inside Pardot, it’s important not to lose sight of Opportunity and Account fields as syncing them to Pardot will be very beneficial. 

In Pardot, navigate to Admin>Configure Fields and click on the blue button Add Custom Field. Then click on the Salesforce.com Field Name drop-down menu, which will give you a list of all the custom fields from Salesforce available to you. 

Work with your sales team and admins to understand what Opportunity fields are important and why, then decide which fields should be in Pardot and how they should be used. 

Let’s run through a simple scenario with an Opportunity default field to show its value inside of Pardot:

You create a dynamic list in Pardot based on crucial or close to close Opportunity Stage fields. If you add this as a suppression list in email sends, you’ll be sure none of your prospects are getting a generic and impersonal marketing email while they are in negotiations with sales.

Pulling this list in Pardot is actually a little tricky, so be sure to check out the screenshot below.

Create a list and select Dynamic. When choosing your dynamic list rules, first select Prospect opportunity. Then Match prospects with related properties, then to Opportunity. After you’ve set this up, a new rule group with pop up so you can add your qualifying information. Choose the Prospect opportunity default field as Stage, then you can either add a new rule for every stage you want to include or insert “contains” and use semicolons to separate your field values. 

Run your dynamic list which will aggregate your data. Spot check your list to be sure you’re getting the prospects you want. If needed, add more criteria to keep people off this list such as created date or a certain product/service line. 

Pardot Life Hacks

Do you feel better about the Opportunity Object? There’s a lot of customization that can happen with this object so if your process needs some work be sure to get in a room with all necessary parties to discuss and make a plan to get your ducks in a row. I’ll wrap up with a few Pardot Life Hack tips:

• If you’re not paying attention to the details, your competitors are. Sync Opportunity fields to Pardot and create suppression and other segmentation lists to optimize your communications.
• Contact Roles are your best friend and what links Opportunities to Contacts and allows Pardot to mingle with them along with campaigns. Use them!
• Use Roles within the Contact Role related list of an Opportunity. This will allow you to segment and easily remarket, cross-sell or filter out prospects as you continue to run marketing campaigns. You can also pull reports based on Role. 

Best of luck to you as you navigate Pardot and Salesforce. Have something to add to this conversation about the Opportunity Object? Add your comments with the hashtag #trailblazertalk. 

Stay hydrated #ohana…