Blake Markham and Mark Knapp of Salesforce held little back during the Pardot Roadmap session at Dreamforce 2015. While leading with the familiar “Safe Harbor” slide, they quickly delved into new features and updates to existing processes that will soon impact Pardot customers.
*The following updates were revealed under the Safe Harbor statute and rollout timeline is non referenceable*
In front of a packed ballroom, Blake and Mark categorized the new Pardot features into four categories; Salesforce integration, modern workflow, flexible reporting and enterprise power.
Salesforce Integration
The Pardot Roadmap highlighted two products that should change visibility for both marketing and sales users; Salesforce Engage and Pardot Engagement Studio.
Salesforce Engage creates even greater visibility of Pardot prospect activity in Salesforce, giving sales reps contextually relevant data to continue conversations further down the pipeline. The Pardot/Salesforce synchronization is getting a boost as well, with synchronizations occurring every two minutes, and up to 150,000 prospect record syncs per hour.
Pardot is also toying with the idea of removing prospects’ email addresses as the unique identifier for prospect records. Along those same lines, Salesforce is adding the ability to create a prospect record in Salesforce without an email so you can add it later when you’ve learned additional information. This could result in duplicate records, so if this doesn’t seem like a good solution for you, reach out to Pardot as they are surveying customers to determine the impact of such a change. Engage is also getting some much needed upgrades. This tool will soon integrate with Outlook 2013 and Office 365 – which is big news considering it primarily works with Gmail.
Modern Workflow
The modern workflow category is where Blake and Mark highlighted Pardot Engagement Studio. Engagement studio is an environment where marketers can test robust workflows, with over 100 different scenarios. The tool uses sound logic to suggest options for each step of the workflow and even gives recommendations to help you reach a goal. Engagement studio will integrate closely with lead scoring, so if you haven’t implemented scoring yet, now is the time to test and refine.
This tool is set to debut in Spring 2016 and will presumably replace the lackluster Pardot drip email functions. One Pardot product manager went on to say this tool could replace all functions under the Pardot “Marketing” tab. If you are on the verge of deploying workflows, you may want to hold off on implementing new 30-60-90 day workflows until they can roll out this new feature as it looks to be a game-changer.
Flexible Reporting
During the Pardot roadmap session at Dreamforce, Blake and Mark revealed that Pardot will allow for flexible reporting. When viewing email reports, you will soon be able to sort on any column (CTR, Opens, Bounces, Opt Outs, etc.), and breakdown columns (soft bounces vs hard bounces). You will then be able to save this view. This new enhancement will roll out in the Winter Release. Pardot is also allowing customization of many of its data grids, including the notorious prospect table. We wait in anticipation…
Enterprise Power
The enterprise power category will resonate with a large portion of Pardot customers. It seems Pardot has acknowledged that in B2B marketing, certain prospects qualify quicker and you cannot assume the same score qualifies across all product categories. In this Dreamforce Pardot roadmap session, they hinted at a new, multi-scoring model that will allow engagement scoring by categories. This will inevitably lead to better reporting inside and across business units.
To stay up-to-date on Dreamforce 2015, read more on our Salesforce blog.
