Quick Tips for Setting Up the Optimal Account Engagement and Salesforce Integration

This post was written by Marketing Implementations Consultant Paul DeBoer and last updated on 11/17/23.

Or, how to dodge those “gotcha” landmines in the Account Engagement setup process and look like a seasoned implementation professional

Salesforce and Account Engagement have a symbiotic relationship that can’t be beat when it comes to B2B marketing automation. At Kicksaw, I often find myself talking to a potential client about their sales operations and find that the conversation will naturally venture into the marketing operations territory. After all, the Marketing department's goal is to send the Sales team as many highly qualified leads as possible. And while Salesforce has put together documentation on how to implement Account Engagement with Salesforce, Kicksaw has a highly skilled Marketing Ops team that has executed more than a hundred implementations, and along the way, we've picked up some valuable tips and made note of some important “gotchas” that are often overlooked during the implementation process.

Pre-Implementation Work

Connector User Setup

So, you’re motivated to get started and you’ve carved out some time in your day to get this implementation done? We understand the excitement, but don’t rush, or you risk being sloppy! You need to start off on the right foot and make sure that the user you will use for setting up Account Engagement is properly configured. Be sure to click the Marketing User checkbox on the user you will use for your setup, and don’t forget to grant the Analytics View Only User permission set to the user as well.

Downloading the Account EngagementPackage

There are a few places that you can go for access to Account Engagement, and if you’re a Salesforce pro, you may find yourself thinking that you should head to the Salesforce AppExchange. While this is typically a great place to get many add-ons and integrations for Salesforce, Account Engagement is an exception. Instead, use the link found in the documentation from Salesforce.

We’re going to skip ahead briefly to some tips for after you’ve implemented Account Engagement, connected the systems, and unpaused the connector. There’s still plenty of work to be done to realize the full functionality of Account Engagement for Salesforce!

Post-Implementation Work

Page Layouts

One of the first things you’ll want to do during the implementation process is map your Account Engagement fields to the Lead object in Salesforce. Navigate to Setup in Salesforce and search for “Object Manager.” Search for the Lead object and select “Fields & Relationships” in the left-hand nav. You will see something like the screenshot below.

By setting this up, it will help your Sales team see that a Lead or Contact is also in Account Engagement. Your reps can then see the visitor's total score accumulation based on their interactions with your marketing content. There’s also a direct link to Prospect record in Account Engagement so that you can view the same visitor on either platform with ease. You will have to add these fields to the page layouts in Salesforce. Be mindful of what fields are most useful, and place them in an easy-to-reference spot will help your reps take advantage of this treasure trove of data.

Don’t overlook adding the Account Engagement activities to your page layouts! You can do this on the page layout for both the Lead and Contact objects — just look under the Visualforce Pages section for Account Engagement Activities, Account Engagement List Membership, and Account Engagement Social Data. This will let your reps see specific Account Engagement activities (and when they happened) without having to leave Salesforce.

While you’re here, consider adding these two useful buttons to your Salesforce page layouts:

• Send Account Engagement Email — This button lets your reps easily send a one-to-one email using an Account Engagement template that you build. Full access to the design features found in Account Engagement means you can do everything from creating a fully designed template with many graphic elements to opting for the low-tech, text-only route for the more personal touch. With either option, take advantage of variable tags to make sending emails easier for your reps. Pre-fill the email with the recipient’s first name or company name to take some of the tedious customization out of the email process. Just be sure that your data is accurate!
• Send to Account Engagement — While your reps can certainly use this button as well, it is probably more useful for you marketers. You heard it from me, folks — it’s OK to be a little selfish sometimes. If you have a need to sync something quickly to Account Engagement and don’t want to wait the full 10 minutes for an automatic sync to occur, just push an updated Lead or Contact to Account Engagement with this button.

Add these buttons by placing them in the page layouts for both Lead and Contact objects. We recommend adding both buttons via the Buttons section as well as the Mobile & Lightning Actions section.

Users

One of the great things about Account Engagement is how simple user management is on their platform. But, one of the worst things about Account Engagement is...how simple user management is on their platform.

If you have a small team with a clear divide designating who will be responsible for certain tasks with no overlap, Account Engagement’s user management is a dream. But for marketing teams with a lot of overlap in job roles and outside vendors who assist with certain tasks, it's probably best to create custom user profiles in Salesforce so that you can manage access to Account Engagement assets.

Set up which Salesforce user profiles map to Account Engagement’s profiles. If you are using either Account Engagement Growth or Plus editions, you will have access to four user profiles in Account Engagement (in descending order of system access): Administrator, Marketing, Sales Manager, or Sales. If you using either Account Engagement Advanced or Premium editions, you can build custom user roles and permissions for your org. Now would also be a good time to read up on single sign-on (SSO). Salesforce made the push to get all Account Engagement orgs to use it in Feb 2021. Pay close attention to Identity licenses — they will be a boon for those third-party vendors you work with!

Conclusion

If it seems like I skipped over some important stuff between the pre-implementation work and post-implementation work, you aren’t wrong. There's simply too much involved in an Account Engagement for Salesforce implementation to contain in one blog post, plus, we can’t just give away the Kicksaw secret sauce. As I mentioned earlier, Salesforce has put together some great documentation on this topic if all you want to do is simply connect the two systems. But there’s a lot more to setting up the perfect Account Engagement and Salesforce partnership for your business. We’d love to talk more with you about the Kicksaw Way, and how we have helped many Marketing and Sales organizations like yours boost their marketing and sales operations capabilities. Drop us a line in the form at the bottom of this page to get the conversation started!