Today at Dreamforce, I had the opportunity to attend the “Pardot Integration with Salesforce: An Inside Look” session. The implications of this integration are dramatic. By bringing key marketing data into Salesforce (into a native Marketing Actions object), the integration will break down the silos that Sales and Marketing often operate in and natively give both a 360-degree view of their prospects and customers. Here is what the future of B2B Marketing Automation looks like:
- Sales will be able to see key details about the marketing actions that have touched their prospects or customers from inside Salesforce and the Salesforce1 mobile app. Pardot captures marketing actions such as emails sent to prospects as well as prospect activities on your website such as downloading white papers, registering for an event or webinar and visiting key pages on your website. Bringing these actions inside Salesforce gives Sales insight into how engaged their prospect is and where their interests lie, allowing Sales to effectively tailor conversations with prospects and close more deals.
- Marketing will be able to take advantage of native Salesforce reporting, allowing them to link marketing actions to pipeline behavior and better understand what is working and what isn’t. This will make it easier to modify lead scoring rules and show executives concretely how marketing actions positively influence pipeline. Marketing will also be able to use Salesforce criteria to define Pardot lists so that as leads and contacts are created in Salesforce, they are automatically added to marketing lists in Pardot.
While this integration is not yet generally available, a beta program is available now. I would highly encourage any of our customers currently using Pardot and Salesforce individually to sign up as I think this really has the power to transform business through taking advantage of the data you are already capturing and making it more useful.
