Making sense of the B2B marketing space is hard. New vendors, new technologies, and new services are constantly popping up. The one thing that we do know is the adoption of account-based marketing (ABM) continues to rise. 

But what we don’t know are the answers to questions like where should ABM budget come from, who should be the owner of ABM, what metrics should we be tracking, and how many ABM accounts should we be targeting? 

Though there are no definitive answers, we can gain valuable insights by looking at what the most successful ABM companies are doing. That’s why we’re excited to release 2019 ABM Market Research Report.

Engagio teamed up with Salesforce Pardot to engage 500 business leaders in an in-depth, original research study. The resulting report distills the stats you need to know to understand the current state of ABM in 2019, and where your peers are succeeding or falling short. We’ve identified the top challenges related to ABM, what companies are investing in, and where those budget dollars are going. 

Before we get into the findings, it’s important to define what account-based marketing is. There are a ton of ways to look at ABM, but here’s how we define it: 

Account-based marketing is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand target accounts.

So, let’s be clear – ABM is not a tactic or a campaign, it’s a GTM strategy. It’s not just something marketing does, it requires cross-functional collaboration. It’s not just focused on net-new accounts, it also focuses on bookings from existing customers. That’s what we’re talking about when we say “account-based marketing.” 

Now to the exciting stuff! Here are some of the most notable findings from the 2019 ABM Market Research Report. 

New This Year: What Drives Strong ABM ROI?

This research uncovered the tactics and behaviors of those organizations who report seeing a positive return on their investment in ABM initiatives: 

• 72% have good alignment between sales and marketing
• 62% are sophisticated in their use of content, web personalization, and ads
• 50% have become more sophisticated with their measurement of ABM
• 58% are sophisticated with ABM plays

What percent of your budget is dedicated to ABM?

When we ran our 2018 survey, companies reported an average of 21% of their marketing budget going toward ABM initiative. Overall, the average percentage of marketing budget dedicated to ABM in 2019 is set to increase to 29%.

ABM means different things at different price points, and this reflects that. But, over time, as we see more organizations viewing ABM not as a stand-alone function, but part of the overall GTM, my prediction is that this number will increase. 

Now, let’s dig one level deeper into this stat. We asked where all that budget is going? Our survey respondents indicated that content is still king, as half of B2B marketers plan to invest more in content for ABM this year, followed closely by an increased investment in Sales and Marketing Alignment (47%) and Target Account Selection (46%). 

Where are you in your ABM journey?

Though organizations are varied in their state of adoption, 93% of those surveyed are either using ABM today or planning to soon. The majority of organizations surveyed are either doing a pilot program with ABM (26%) or have fully rolled out an ABM program in the last six months (26%). 

What percent of your marketing team is involved in ABM?

As marketing teams get more specialized, so do their roles and responsibilities. However, ABM is too important to leave it up to a few people. On average, organizations surveyed report 40% of their marketing team to be involved in the company’s ABM initiative. 

Note: ABM doesn’t require a wholesale change to your marketing team. The truth is, you can get started with ABM right away and increase your team’s involvement over time. 

Who owns ABM?

Naturally, the next question is who should own ABM? Like any project, without a clear owner, ABM is doomed to fail. In our survey, 28% of respondents indicated the CMO or VP of Marketing currently owns the ABM initiative at their organization. 

At 24% of companies, the Head of Demand Generation is tasked with ownership of ABM. This makes sense, as the ultimate goal of this initiative is to drive revenue and demand within key accounts. We also found that more organizations are starting to have a full time, dedicated person focused on ABM. 

This is one finding that I’m going to be keeping my eye on as I think it will shift, and we’ll begin to see the ownership of ABM not be dominantly owned by marketing. Why? Let’s go back to our definition – it’s a cross-functional strategy. 

A quick LinkedIn search finds over 2,000 open job positions across the U.S. related to ABM, and this number only continues to climb. 

One result that surprised a few people is that demand gen owns ABM, and if that surprises you, I have a few thoughts as to why that might be in this video.

What ROI are you getting from ABM?

When asked to report the ROI of their ABM efforts, the majority of respondents (53%) reveal they haven’t started to measure it. Only 5% say they are “awesome” regarding their measurement of ABM. 

The most common challenge in 2019, however, is poor data quality with 19% of respondents reporting this to be their #1 challenge for executing ABM. This piece is critical because if you can’t measure and prove ABM, then you’re not going to budget, headcount, resources, etc. for your ABM initiatives in the future. It’s so critical that we’ve written an entire 158-page ebook on ABM measurement.

What were your biggest challenges to ABM success last year?

I love this question because it will help set you up for success in the future.

Good news: While last year the #1 risk of failure for ABM was lack of ability to execute (25% of respondents), this year that risk was reported by only 12% of respondents as their top barrier to success. As training skills and industry education improves, execution should be a reasonable hurdle to overcome. 

Much More In The Full Report

Download the entire research study which answers more pressing ABM questions, including:

• Whether companies expect existing or net-new customers to drive most revenue/bookings in 2019
• What ABM metrics are currently being tracked 
• Tools (including specific vendors) essential to an ABM strategy
• Average number of target accounts across tiers 1, 2, and 3
• Where marketers go to learn about ABM

Melbourne Tractors Group is a family-owned and managed business with more than 30 years in the earthmoving, construction, and agriculture industries. Over the last several years, the company has seen significant growth and now competes with the Caterpillar’s and John Deere’s of the World.

To achieve this level of success, Melbourne Tractors had to find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Similarly to how automation was changing the factory floor, Melbourne Tractors knew they needed to leverage this technology to transform the way they engaged with buyers.

A Small Team with A Big Dream

Fifteen years ago, Melbourne Tractors was just a small mining and agricultural business operating out of a single location with no formal structure. As business began to pick up, the team realized they were quickly outgrowing the informal processes they had in place.

For starters, there was no single source of truth when it came to customer data. Important information such as customer contact information, contract details, or service reminder agreements weren’t kept in a central location and the team could never find the information they needed when they needed it. This created huge challenges across their 50 person workforce, who interacted with over 100 customers on a weekly basis.

This lack of data also created forecasting issues. Because the lead time on their machine orders could take anywhere from 4-12 months, the team needed a reliable way to predict demand and anticipate customer needs. But with disjoined systems and unorganized data, there was no way to create accurate forecasting models.

Lastly, they needed to evolve their marketing strategy. Historically, their marketing had been very traditional and included TV and radio ads, magazines, and leaflets. But because they sold very specific products to a limited addressable market, they needed to be efficient with their marketing dollars and leverage channels that would help them target the right buyer.

Still, Melbourne Tractors knew they had a secret advantage over their competition: They weren’t as big as some of their competitors, so they had the ability to be flexible, agile, and innovative. They wanted to build on that advantage to differentiate their brand, help scale their business, and create a seamless customer experiences.

They just needed a solution that would help them succeed.

Putting the “Customer” in Customer Relationship Management

When the team at Melbourne Tractors began considering a CRM platform, they knew it would be a huge change for their company. But they also knew that moving from paper-based selling to a customer relationship management platform was the first step in their journey towards scaling their business.

After researching several solutions, the team at Melbourne Tractors chose Salesforce Sales Cloud as their CRM. Sales Cloud was a flexible platform, meaning it could be customized to fit their existing workflows. This would allow them to continue being agile while limiting the amount of process changes they would need to undergo.

“By transitioning our business over to a connected CRM platform, we were able to keep a close eye on our inventory by monitoring open opportunities and ensure we weren’t double selling any products,” said Lillie Holcombe, Marketing Manager at Melbourne Tractors. “It also brought our sales team closer together because everyone had a better idea of what was happening across the company — who they were talking to and where our customers were in the buying cycle.”

Sales Cloud also allowed sales reps to increase efficiency. Holcombe explained, “Our reps could improve on multi-tasking because everything was logged and easily accessible, rather than recorded on paper in their diaries or notebooks.”

Once the team was up and running with Sales Cloud, Melbourne Tractors still needed a way to leverage their customer data to create meaningful and personalized experiences.

That challenge opened the door for marketing automation.

Building a Better Customer Experience with Marketing Automation

Enter: Pardot. With Pardot, Melbourne Tractors was able to capitalize on all of their customer data in Sales Cloud to create personalized customer experiences.

As Melbourne Tractors began segmenting their customer database, they were able to create robust marketing campaigns that spoke to the needs of their individual buyers. As these prospects interacted with their marketing content, they could track prospect activity, score behavior patters, and qualify sales-ready leads. They could also report on their marketing campaigns to learn which channels were driving the most revenue for the business and improve campaign effectiveness over time.

The final step was taking the power of Pardot and putting it in the hands of their sales reps.

The Melbourne Tractors team deployed Salesforce Engage which revolutionized the way their sales team managed quotes and service agreement reminders. By being able to track email-opens and page views, sales reps could see when a customer was engaging with their content or reviewing their quote. Real-time activity alerts enabled reps to quickly pick up the phone whenever a customer was reviewing a quote, allowing Melbourne Tractors to stay top of mind, shorten their sales cycles, and close more deals.

Melbourne Tractors is a Trailblazer

Salesforce has given Melbourne Tractors the ability to connect with their customers across the entire customer lifecycle. Their team now has a complete 360-degree view of their customer and can leverage these insights to make data-driven decisions. Since implementing Salesforce, Melbourne Tractors has seen incredible results:

• 2.5x increase in leads generated within the first year of deploying Pardot
• Centralized database with segmented customer lists and targeted campaigns
• Easily tracked sales trends to forecast more accurately

Kane Bennett, General Manager at Melbourne Tractors, says “We are able to differentiate our brand against larger competitors by being more agile. Pardot makes our connection to our customers easier and easier.“

Learn more about how Pardot helps manufacturing companies find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI.

Years ago, healthcare marketing interactions were limited to face-to-face communication. Personal meetings in hospital offices and lunches in fancy restaurants were the order of the day. But all of that has changed recently, as you’re likely aware. 

Access to doctors is now highly restricted, and they no longer meet with most salespeople or marketers. More than 53% of physician outreach now takes place digitally or indirectly — through email, mobile alerts, direct mail, and other mediums. This creates an opportunity for healthcare marketers to create conversations and deliver high-impact engagement with physicians across multiple channels.

Even with a robust digital marketing plan in place, many healthcare marketers still struggle with the question of scale. How do you grow your physician customer base and evolve your marketing along with them? The answer is marketing automation. 

Buying cycles in the healthcare and life sciences industry are long, which means customer relationships need to be long-term. Marketing automation allows marketers to continually send content to prospects and customers while measuring and adjusting campaigns based on data — giving you everything you need to find success as you scale. 

Follow these five steps to make the most of marketing automation for healthcare and scale your physician outreach:

MAKE YOUR CRM YOUR SOURCE OF TRUTH

You may already be using customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage your databases of physicians and other healthcare clients. To effectively scale your audience, it’s essential for your marketing technology to be able to sync with your CRM quickly and effortlessly, no matter the size or amount of data being moved around. 

Syncing to your CRM provides you with real-time data that feeds into a single aligned data set, which is what you need in order to scale. If you’re working with multiple separate data sets across multiple platforms that aren’t synced, it’s impossible for sales and marketing to be fully aligned. 

When all of your data connected, it becomes simple for you to manage all of your account information and easy for your sales reps to follow up with correct information and relevant offers.

TAKE A PERSONALIZED, ACCOUNT-BASED APPROACH

When you take an account-based marketing (ABM) approach, you treat your highest-value accounts as markets of their own. A successful ABM approach starts with being account-first, building your strategy around the account information in your CRM.

In healthcare marketing, your highest-value accounts likely include individual healthcare professionals (HCPs) as well as members of value analysis committees (VACs) at healthcare organizations. Often, VAC members are the gatekeepers to one-on-one access to physicians and other HCPs. It’s essential for marketers to build strong relationships with VAC members in order to earn their buy-in.

That’s where ABM comes in. To develop an ABM strategy for physician outreach, begin by identifying the top accounts you’d like to go after and analyzing the information you already have about these accounts in your CRM. From there, research the key influencers at your targeted healthcare organizations and segment these influencers based on the characteristics you want to target. 

After you’ve identified the accounts you want to focus your marketing on, you can tailor campaign content to them throughout their customer journeys.

SCALE YOUR OUTREACH WITH AUTOMATION

To get the most out of your account-based marketing strategy, you will need marketing automation technology. To handle an ever-increasing number of physician prospects and customer relationships, it’s important to use a platform with substantial computing power and an intuitive user interface. 

As you scale, you’ll need to store many different records and content assets, and manage various automation settings that tailor messaging to your audiences. User-friendly UI is a must when it comes to organizing and handling all of this digital material. You’ll need to be able to trust that your team can easily navigate your marketing automation platform and that all automations will run reliably.

Automation can engage your audiences with ongoing nurture campaigns, which allow you to continuously educate physicians and keep your brand top-of-mind with them. Intelligent lead nurturing adapts to your audience based who they are and the actions they take. For example, if one of your leads is a cardiologist at Scripps Health in San Diego, your marketing automation platform can send them down a nurture path customized for cardiology in that area. 

EMPOWER YOUR SALES TEAM WITH ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Whether you’re a pharma rep, medical device rep, or physician liaison, you need actionable insights that let you know when to engage with leads, and with what content. Artificial intelligence can predictively score leads, track their activity history, and give you alerts that tell you the right time to reach out — as well as the right messages to reach out with. 

Through advanced reporting and analytics, AI can also tell your team which physicians are engaged with your outreach, what could be changed about current campaigns, and how to reach out to new leads next. This data can help you deliver increasingly connected customer journeys, which 71% of healthcare marketing leaders say positively impact revenue growth. 

UNLOCK SCALE WITH MARKETING AUTOMATION AND ABM

With industry-leading processing power, speed, and reliability — as well as complete integration with other Salesforce technologies — Pardot is an easy-to-use marketing automation platform that can scale with any B2B enterprise, healthcare or otherwise. 

For more ways to scale your healthcare marketing and physician outreach, read our e-book The Healthcare and Life Sciences Guide to Account-Based Marketing: A Prescription for Successful Client Relationships.

Real-time customer experiences are the ultimate form of personalized marketing. When you engage with your customers in real time, you can solve their problems and address their needs the moment they arise. Not only are you communicating with the right person through the right channel, but you are also doing so at the right time — which is right when they’re on your website.

B2B marketers are just beginning to discover the benefits of real-time customer experiences, which are made possible through artificial intelligence (AI) and can be delivered in a number of ways. One of the most popular use cases for communicating with customers in real time is AI-powered chatbots, which simulate human communication live on brand websites and social media accounts.

Chatbots are already a hit with the general public, as 69% of consumers already prefer chatbots to quickly communicate with brands, compared with live representatives.  

Chatbots were first theorized about in the 1950s by early computer scientist Alan Turing, and they have been in development for decades. Now this form of AI marketing is an everyday reality, and the golden age of the chatbot is nearly upon us. Here are three of the best ways to use chatbots to deliver real-time customer experiences and personalized marketing. 

FINDING ANSWERS AND IDENTIFYING SOLUTIONS QUICKLY

Speed is perhaps the greatest benefit of chatbots. While the human associates behind the online help chat tools of the past decade were often helpful, it often took them a fair amount of time to find answers to questions. When customers open a chat with a chatbot, they know they will not have to wait around for the attention of a human associate, who may be busy fielding dozens of questions from different chats all at once. 

Using the power of AI, chatbots can access information databases across your entire company to find relevant answers to customers’ most urgent questions, all within seconds. This can help set the minds of B2B buyers immediately at ease and help them make purchasing decisions without the need to wait for a formal reply from a human associate. 

TRANSFERRING QUESTIONS TO HUMAN ASSOCIATES

Sometimes, however, it can still be difficult for chatbots to handle an entire query all on their own. While they can access virtually unlimited numbers of digital records and analyze the information incredibly quickly and accurately, their responses to very complex or detailed questions may not paint a complete picture for customers. Also, some customers may never fully be on board with the idea of using chatbots, preferring to communicate with a human associate. Certain questions will always need human input — but chatbots can still be helpful in identifying which human should give their input. 

By accessing personnel databases at your company and measuring the function of your team members against customer requests, chatbots can easily find the best person to answer each question that requires personal attention. For example, a lead or prospect might have questions best suited for a sales rep, while existing customers might need technical support or assistance from your customer success team. Using chatbots to triage customer questions ensures customers’ most complicated and important questions are sent to the right person.

PERFORMING TRANSACTIONS

One of the most exciting and innovative uses for chatbots is performing transactions. Customers can perform almost any kind of transaction through chatbots, including making simple purchases, signing up for paid subscriptions, and paying bills. Chatbots — such as the LEGO Facebook bot, Ralph — can even suggest options for customers looking to make a purchase, but who may be unsure about what that purchase should be. 

Performing transactions through a chatbot instead of an online form makes the process interactive and allows customers to ask questions that can be answered in real time, right in the middle of the purchase process. However, as 30% of customers currently worry about chatbots making mistakes, marketers need to communicate that chatbot transactions are just as secure as regular transactions — the bonus is that they are more interactive.

SIGNING UP FOR LISTS

Chatbots can also be used as a more engaging version of the classic mailing list sign-up form. Instead of presenting customers with static fields, chatbots can make ‘forms’ part of the conversation, asking for customer names and email addresses in a casual and informal manner, while engaging them in real time with relevant content and answers to their questions. This eliminates the sometimes-awkward and interruptive process of presenting customers with website forms, creating a more cohesive and seamless experience. 

To learn more about how chatbots can impact your AI marketing and help create real-time customer experiences, read the State of Chatbots Report. 

Your company just added a marketing automation platform to your martech stack — yay!! 

If you’re like me when I first implemented a marketing automation platform, you’re probably really excited. You’re ready to start generating qualified leads on your website, building engaging and dynamic nurture programs, tracking campaign ROI, and becoming an all-around B2B marketing rockstar. 

But with all of this possibility and decision-making comes the inevitable nervousness. You might not know what you want your email cadence to be, what form fields you should start collecting, or how to determine when to use “gated” vs. “ungated” content. 

As marketers, we tend to be perfectionists who want to go big right away. We want the best brand image, the most qualified leads for the lowest cost, and we want to create award-winning campaigns that support our sales goals and help our company grow. Easy, right? 

But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the perfect marketing campaign. As you grow in your career as a marketer and you continue learning about the latest and greatest marketing technologies, soon realize that it’s impossible to have it all figured out on day one. And that’s okay!

Take Baby Steps with Agile

You probably heard about how development teams are increasingly using the Agile approach for software development. This method focuses on completing smaller, iterative tasks on a regular (weekly or biweekly) schedule – instead of trying to deliver one big task all at once. 

This allows teams to build incrementally and iterate as the needs of the business evolve. More simply, it can be described as a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach. 

Agile is a perfect methodology to adopt as you begin your journey with marketing automation. With this framework, you can tackle important tasks at a pace that makes sense for your business, and you can learn and adapt as you go. 

Let’s look at an example for how you can apply Agile to marketing automation.

Leverage Agile with Marketing Automation

We know that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Nurture programs allow marketers to create personalized journeys that reach buyers at the right time in the buying cycle and increase customer engagement. But building a nurture program can be a very iterative process, continually optimized based on content and performance — making it the perfect place to apply Agile. 

Let’s say you want to nurture anyone who has filled out a “Contact Us” form on your website with a follow up “About Us” narrative about your company and its culture.

First, you would create a dynamic list of everyone who has filled out your “Contact Us” form (if you’re new to marketing automation, this list will likely be a small list). Next, you would create a suppression list with anyone you wouldn’t want to include on this nurture program. Finally, you would create a simple nurture program that sends anyone added to your dynamic list who’s NOT on your suppression list an “About Us” email one day after the “Contact Us” form is submitted. 

Iterate and Optimize Nurture Programs

I bet you’re probably wondering “That’s just one email!” And you’d be right. Once a prospect completes the flow and receive the “About Us” email, they remain at the last step in the nurture program. But here’s the best part — you can add more steps to your nurture programs and send more content as you develop it! This means you don’t have to have everything figured out before you begin creating personalized journeys for your customers and prospects, you can get started with a simple form, two dynamic lists, and one email. 

With this approach, you are practicing the Agile methodology of iteration with B2B marketing automation, and nurturing your leads and customers with personalized content — a win win!

As you continue developing marketing content and building more robust nurture programs to create and refine your customer experience, you can segment your prospect database with meaningful demographics and data points.

Start Small, Dream Big 

Because marketing automation platforms are so powerful, it can be overwhelming to get started. If you start simple (“Crawl, Walk, Run”) and keep the Agile methodology in mind, you’ll build confidence while understanding more about the power of the tool you’ve chosen – all while bringing value to your stakeholders right away.

This post contains new features that will be released at the end of August 2019.

An integral function of marketing automation is the ability to deliver a personalized message at scale. This is difficult to accomplish when elements of your messaging are generic. But with Multiple Tracker Domains, Pardot allows you to apply different tracker domains on an asset by asset basis!

Long gone are the days of selecting a primary tracker domain and serving all of your links from that domain. Moving forward, Pardot customers can maintain consistency by associating a specific tracker domain with one or many assets to stay on brand and make your messaging more personalized.

Where Can You Use Multiple Tracker Domains

Multiple Tracker Domains can be applied to most Pardot asset types, including:

• Email templates
• Landing pages
• Forms
• Email preference centers
• Custom Redirects
• Files

Who are Multiple Tracker Domains For?

With the August Release, Multiple Tracker Domains will now be available for all Pardot customers, with the number of tracker domains available being based on your account edition. There are a multitude of reasons why customers may want to use variable domains:

• Companies who operate and market in different regions
• Companies who have a separate domain for each of their product lines
• Enterprises that are comprised of many companies multiple subsidiaries
• Pardot Business Unit customers who require multiple tracker domains per business unit
• Companies who operate more than 1 website

How do You Use multiple tracker domains?

There is no change in setting up your tracker domains, simply go through the standard domain validation process and for each domain that is validated, you will have the ability to apply it to an asset.

Let’s discuss an easy scenario to help understand the benefits of this feature.

Lenoxsoft is an energy management software company and has validated 3 different domains for the regions that it operates in: the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, respectively: www.lenoxsoft.uk, www.lenoxsoft.com and www.lenoxsoft.ca.

In the past, Lenoxsoft would have had to use the same primary domain across all three regions, which isn’t the best brand or customer experience. But that has all changed!

With our recent update, LenoxSoft can now assign new assets and campaigns to region-specific tracker domains to maintain brand consistency.

To apply different tracker domains to different email templates, the Lenoxsoft marketing team begins by creating their first email Template for the UK. This template will use language and images that have tested best in that region. In order to maintain the region specific consistency within that email template, the team chooses the www.lenoxsoft.uk domain in the new “Tracker Domain” field found on the email template creation screen.

When emails based off of this template are delivered to prospects, all links within the email are re-written using the www.lenoxsoft.uk domain. This means that the receiving prospects see a link that they are familiar with and trust.

The United States marketing team follows suit, using the www.lennoxsoft.com and the Canadian team does the same using www.lenoxsoft.ca.

Each marketing team sees spike in their email opens and clicks because their prospects are more engaged with links specific to their region. To reiterate, the ability to get messages out at scale, while keeping them personalized is paramount.

Learn More About Pardot New Features

These exciting updates will be released the last week of August. To learn more about the latest and greatest Pardot features, make sure to register for our upcoming webinar, Pardot Product Release: Grow Customer Relationships with Pardot.

When you’re in the business of money, you know the value of a dollar. And as a marketer, it’s always important to maximize your budget — big or small. But it can be tough to know exactly where your marketing spend will be most effective. Should you be pushing more paid search, social media promotion, or email marketing?

We’ve got good news. Advanced reporting can help you quit the guessing game and start putting your spend where it matters most for your financial services brand.

Reporting has proven to be an essential step in any marketing program. Advanced reporting techniques help you see what you’re doing and how it’s going, so you can do more of what works.

Learn how financial services marketers can make the most of their dollars and cents with advanced reporting techniques.

1. Take advantage of AI

Reporting all goes back to data. And if data is like oil, artificial intelligence (AI) is like a refinery. For marketers who manage multiple data sources, it may feel like you have data coming at you from all directions. It can be difficult to keep it all straight, let alone glean insights from it!

AI helps you mine through all of your data from a number of sources and bring it together into easily digestible, actionable insights. AI can help you see what content performs well for your different audiences, which campaigns are driving the most customer engagement across the funnel, and surface buying intent signals along the way.

For example, you may notice that over time, prospects who engage with three or more assets associated with your mortgage financing campaign are more likely to purchase your mortgage services. With this insight, you can create a strategic nurture program for mortgage financing that engages your target audience with three pieces of content within the first week of them entering your database. By engaging buyers earlier on in their buyer journey, you can identify qualified leads faster, ensure your sales team reaches out at the right time, and shorten deal cycles.

Whether it’s information about your investment services, financial planning resources, or even the types of services that buyers ultimately purchase, AI helps you make sense of it all so you can put those insights into action through your marketing spend.

2. Optimize in real time

With advanced reporting, you can be always on and make smart adjustments in real time during a campaign. Gone are the days of pulling reports two weeks after a campaign ends, and having that awkward coulda-woulda-shoulda post-mortem meeting with management team.

Advanced reporting lets you see what’s happening in real time with your campaigns. For example, if you’re running a promotional campaign surrounding a new hedge fund offering and you find one landing page to be significantly underperforming, you can reroute your marketing spend immediately to promote the landing pages that are performing highly — as the campaign is happening.

And by leveraging an analytics platform that’s integrated with your marketing automation and CRM, you can share these insights in real time with your sales and marketing stakeholders, eliminating data silos and ensuring that everyone is aligned.

3. Analyze that attribution

Attribution analysis is all about determining which touch points drive sales. With advanced reporting, you can analyze what content or promotion brought customers to your site, what made them purchase, and more.

Whether you’re trying to determine the campaign that turned an unidentified visitor into a known prospect (first-touch), the campaign that convinced them to make a purchase (last-touch), or a combination of touch points and campaigns along their entire customer journey (multi-touch), you’ll be able to see what kind of marketing is compelling to your buyers.

If you’re an investment firm, maybe you’ll find that your top-of-funnel thought leadership pieces are a more effective first touchpoint, rather than a detailed service-specific promotional email. With this insight, you can delegate more marketing spend into helpful, product-agnostic thought leadership pieces, knowing that they’ll create more marketing pipeline and drive more sales in the end.

4. Get yourself some well-deserved praise

Simply put, reporting shows you what’s going on in the marketing ecosystem you’ve created. When things are going great, you want proof of a job well done! Reporting can prove that your leads are qualified and that your marketing tactics are actually driving sales.

With advanced reporting in your marketing toolbox, you can take your financial services brand to the next level and make the most of your marketing spend, no matter the size of your budget. Learn more about Pardot for Financial Services.

This post contains new features that will be released at the end of August 2019.

Marketers today have to be personal, timely and relevant to connect with an ever changing, competitive space. It can be challenging to identify C-suite decision makers who fit the target account criteria, and also have a score that indicates high engagement.

In Engagement Studio, identifying these leads would require building at least three rule steps to narrow down each criteria. With the Pardot August release, Complex Rules make disjointed rule criteria a thing of the past!

Marketers can group multiple rules into a single step within an Engagement Studio program, which will not only save time when building a new program, it will also save steps and make reporting more concise.

Easily build complex rule criteria in Engagement Studio programs.

Let’s review a complex set of rule criteria and how you can fold the criteria into a single rule step in an Engagement program. A common use case for Engagement Studio is nurturing prospects that came by your booth at a trade show to help identify who was swinging by for your swag versus who was really a good lead for your sales team.

In this example, the program begins with a series of emails that include specific calls to action. If a prospect successfully completes the call to action, you will then qualify the prospect and determine whether or not they should be sent over to your sales team.

The qualification criteria includes:

1. Prospect score is greater than 50
2. Grade is greater than a C-
3. Job title contains “Marketing“
4. Industry is Technology
5. Territory is Southeast

Previously, checking five different criteria to qualify a prospect would require five unique rule steps. Now, all of these qualifying criteria can be included in a single step!

With Complex Rules:

Select any type of rule step on the Engagement Studio canvas. Each rule in Engagement Studio now contains a new button “+ Add Condition” that allows you to create up to 5 total rule conditions on each Complex Rule step. You will also be able to use the selector at the top of the Complex Rule to decide if this rule should take the action to assess the rule criteria when “All Conditions Are Met” or when “Any Conditions Are Met.”

Once the Score criteria is set, click the “+ Add Condition” button and start building out the second condition, Grade that is greater than C-. When the “+ Add Condition” button is selected and the rule contains multiple conditions, the rule type changes to be a “Complex Rule”.

Continue to build in additional criteria until all 5 are built as unique conditions on the rule step. Note that once you have built 5 conditions the “+ Add Condition” button will become inactive and you will no longer be able to add new conditions to the rule step.

What really makes complex Rules so great?

With Complex Rules, marketers can increase productivity by turning this….

…into this!

Engagement Studio Complex Rules are going to save time and effort when building programs, require fewer steps in the program to implement Rule conditions and will make reporting more concise and easier to read.

To learn more about the newest features included in our August Release, register for our upcoming webinar: Pardot Product Release Webinar: Grow Customer Relationships with Pardot.

Every night, while some sales leaders dream happily in dollar signs, others are haunted by impending quotas, misaligned teams, and big data lurking in the distance.

If your brain at night is on a spreadsheet instead of counting sheep, rest easy. Marketers are here to help sales leaders meet goals, close deals, and make sales like never before.

Here are 10 things that keep sales leaders up at night, and how marketing can help you get some rest.

1. The Funnel

While the sales process has evolved from traditional “funnel” model to more complex, individualized customer journeys, sales leaders still struggle to move prospects from the top-of-funnel “awareness” to bottom-of-funnel “consideration” in the customer journey.

Strategic marketing, from paid ads to organic content, can help guide prospects along their journey to conversion. Marketing helps tell your brand’s story and educate customers as they become aware of your brand and products, traveling down the funnel and toward a purchase.

2. Bad leads

Trying to sell to a bad lead is like trying to harvest apples from a dead tree — frustrating and not very fruitful. Sales teams will have a hard time closing deals and meeting quotas if your prospects aren’t a good match for what you have to offer.

Through advanced segmentation and automation, marketing has the potential to find the best, most qualified leads who want what you’re selling. That way, you can stop sorting through the bad apples and focus on closing deals.

3. Good leads

With great leads comes great responsibility. Once you have great leads from your marketing team, the pressure is on! Will they slip through the cracks, get lost in the shuffle, or receive conflicting messages from different departments at your company?

Fear not! With an integrated marketing and sales platform, you can create seamless experiences and rest assured that your marketing and sales teams have the same 360-degree view of your customer. Your friendly neighborhood marketer will take care of your leads until they’re ripe for sales conversations.

4. Big data

Big data can give anyone a big headache. The term itself is intimidating, making data seem like King Kong ready to take down your Empire State Building of a sales strategy.

But don’t worry. Unlike King Kong, big data comes in peace, and doesn’t want to snatch up your girlfriend. Marketers can help you harness its power for good. With the help of strong analytics and some savvy marketers, big data can help you find new leads, grow customer relationships, upsell existing customers, and even predict future sales trends.

5. Personalization

So many leads, so little time! When your marketing team is turning over great leads by the handful, how are you supposed to individually nurture all of them, create unique customer experiences, accommodate for their individual needs, keep the sales conversation going, and get enough sleep at night?

You don’t have to go it alone! Your marketing team, along with marketing automation, can do a lot to help. Marketing tools like Pardot can automatically create and deliver marketing so custom that customers will get that warm fuzzy feeling, even from a banner ad.

6. Automation anxiety

It’s easy to get nervous about the impact automation might have on your day-to-day job and how you run your business. But marketing automation can actually enhance how you do your job, and free up your sales team’s valuable time to work on more important, high-level tasks.

No robot can replace the human conversations you have with your customers. But with the power of marketing automation, you can get more prospects ready to have high-quality conversations with your sales reps. When you embrace automation, get ready to sell more and better.

7. Misalignment

Misalignment can quickly turn malignant if your sales and marketing teams have a strained relationship. If your teams aren’t in sync with their goals, strategies, or data sources, you may be on the fast track to failure.

Help marketing help you by bringing them along for the ride — it’s all about communication. When you keep the conversation open and share lead qualifiers, sync data, and work towards the same goal, you’ll find that marketing and sales can be more than the sum of their parts.

8. Chilly leads

We all need to chill out every now and then, but as a sales leader, you want your leads to stay piping hot. If your sales team doesn’t have the time to be constantly following up or communicating with prospects, you run the risk of leads getting cold and falling off.

Marketing can be an incubator for leads in the consideration phase and beyond. While your sales teams are busy, marketing keeps the conversation going — delivering high-quality, personalized messages straight to leads’ inboxes, social feeds, and more. Proper alignment will take your marketing-sales handoff from a snowball fight to a game of hot potato.

9. Unpredictable forecasts

Rain or shine, you’re responsible for closing deals and meeting quotas. When targets aren’t hit, the sales team is often the first to get the blame. Lucky for you, you’ve got marketers on your side, ready to take action and help you meet projections.

With today’s technology, your marketing team can pivot at a moment’s notice to help you get back on course. Customers spending less than expected per transaction? Target larger accounts with bigger budgets and buying committees. Sales for a new product lagging? Refocus your product messaging and enable sales with an updated play and pitch that aligns accordingly . Keep a good relationship with your marketing team, and they’ll help you get back on course.

10. Too much coffee

Next time, split that afternoon latte with a new friend in marketing, and rest easy knowing that your sales and marketing teams are better together. Ready to take your relationship to the next level? Learn more about how Pardot connects sales and marketing teams.

The majority of marketers have taken a visual approach to describing the way a buyer interacts with a brand and goes from being an unidentified prospect to a converted customer. The two most common visuals of the customer journey are the funnel and the circle. 

The funnel maps prospects moving from the wide awareness phase to the narrow customer phase, whereas the circle visual maps an ongoing series of customer touch points.

While both of these models are helpful when it comes to picturing the buyer’s journey, neither fully considers the way our customers are now engaging with us across multiple channels and devices before purchasing our product or service. In the Age of Intelligent Marketing, how do we bring a model based on customer experience into the B2B sales cycle?

Understanding the Customer Experience

Let’s start by understanding the missing data points within the funnel and the circle.

When it comes to the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel, social experiences like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, are blurring the lines between the discovery and purchase phases. Forbes takes that one step further and states that 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before the customer even engages with a sales rep. Prospects are building awareness and converting simultaneously. 

The circle visual of the customer journey is also unable to fully capture current customer behaviors. The Harvard Business Review writes, “The Customer Decision Journey might be circular, but if the focus is still on the transaction, it is just a funnel eating its own tail.”

New styles of media have shifted the focus from transaction to customer experience. Now, prospects consume content with multiple opportunities to purchase or complete a transaction. These potential transactions are embedded within a prospect’s experience. 

The way prospects make decisions has changed, and because of this, our understanding of how to market needs to change, too. Marketers cannot just persuade customers to move through phases to purchase. Instead, we have to enable and empower prospects to make decisions by delivering a unified experience. 

Catering to Specific Behaviors through a Lead Nurture Series

To empower your prospects to convert, marketers need to personalize a customer journey built around specific behaviors.

One way to ensure that your marketing strategy is operating within the customer experience is by segmenting and understanding the last touch point a customer has with your brand before they become a known lead in your database. From there, marketers can create specific nurture campaigns around this first action. For example, if your lead converted on a google ad, quizzes, videos, and introductory blog posts are pieces of content you can share to help the customer discover more about your product. 

On the other hand, if a lead signs up for a free trial or a demo, you know that they have some knowledge on your product and are ready for a test drive. Put them in a more advanced nurture series, featuring case studies, hands-on training webinars, and product events that would be applicable to the customer’s needs. 

Similarly, do you have prospects or accounts you want to target? A vertical that you’re looking to get into? Create and promote content that is personalized and speaks to those key stakeholders and influencers. Retargeting, sponsored posts on social media, and dynamic website content will allow you to  engage these audiences with the right message at the right time in their buyer journey. 

Continue the Customer Relationship Post-Purchase

Lead nurturing does not end with a purchase. Continue to reach out to your successful customers in order to strengthen and develop the relationship. A thank you email and a welcome journey go a long way! You can also periodically provide more educational content to help them grow their engagement with your brand, along with CSAT and NPS surveys to understand customer sentiment.

If leads or customers go cold, re-engagement campaigns are another way to cater to customer behavior. Why did the customer go cold? Did they find another solution to their problem? Just get busy? Budget? Your re-engagement campaign can address the myriad of reasons that cause customers to ice you out. Share customer stories, update them on new releases, and make sure you are staying top of mind with relevant offers. 

Ready to dive in? Learn how to get started with your lead nurturing strategy.

There’s no doubt big data has hit B2B marketing, with brands using (and generating) more customer information than ever. And yet, compare your last B2B experience with the kind of personalisation you see as a consumer in your personal life, and it’s clear B2B has a long way to go.

After all, as one Salesforce customer said, “If Amazon can send a relevant recommendation about something relatively trivial like an item of clothing you might like, why can’t a business selling something as important as IT services understand what you need?”

That customer is Backbone Connect, a UK-based managed IT services provider. At Sales Innovation Expo 2019, I caught up with James Golding, (now former) Marketing and Business Change Manager, and he shed some light on what businesses can do to thrive in the Age of Connectivity.

Turn your marketing into a machine

“It’s not enough to make a lot of noise – you need to be strategic. You need to really define your USP (unique selling point), find the right audience and go after them. And then that’s where tech comes in,” said Golding.

“As a marketer, you have a few different options. You can grow your team in-house, you can outsource – or you can give a couple of really skilled in-house guys the right tools to scale up.” Equipping the right people with the right software means you can scale your marketing and your message without having to massively grow your team – or increase your cost base.

But to implement new technologies – whether it’s marketing automation software like Pardot or anything else, you need alignment. You need to get sales on board.

“The us vs. them mentality is really detrimental,” notes Golding. “But if marketing understand what’s important to sales, and sales understand what’s important to marketing, it eventually all comes together. Sales might not care what’s in the campaign, but if it’s working, they’ll definitely want to know how many of them you can run.”

Get buy-in across all your stakeholders

When you’re implementing a new marketing automation platform like Pardot, adoption is key – not just across the marketing team so they can use it to the best of their ability, but across sales and any other departments involved, too.

This is the human requirement of adoption that’s often overlooked, and one of the main reasons new software deployments – that are meant to change the way teams work – end up in failure.

But how do you get that buy-in?

“Always understand the software you are bringing on board. Scope it out, get to know it inside out, and work out exactly how you’re going to measure impact, report on results, and so on. Be critical, because other people will be. Your investment in software like this is naturally tied up in the results that it delivers, so you’ve got to be able to show them.”

Marketing and sales should share the same vision – growth – but they also need to speak the same language.

“Establish what you need to prove and maintain to the business to justify your investment. Is it the number of opportunities generated? Is it revenue pipeline contribution? Is it the scale of the campaigns you can deliver with the resources you have? Identify that at the beginning of your search, understand how you will measure it and stick to it.”

How Backbone Connect did it

“Pardot allowed us to effectively match a variety of value propositions to the right customer profile, then use that built, templated infrastructure to scale the number of campaigns running,” explains Golding.

“Additionally, we were able to combine our automated digital touch points to match with the personal pipeline management of the sales team. We then used Pardot to create campaigns that matched individuals’ or teams’ industries and verticals – and showed them exactly how we were contributing to their pipeline.”

Effective reporting is essential when it comes to demonstrating your value to others.

“Pardot and Salesforce reporting allows me to link campaign output to pipeline growth quickly and easily. All campaigns are uniquely segmented, and their individual and cumulative impact can be measured.”

The software has been key in helping Golding achieve his goals for the business: “It’s allowed us to deliver smarter demand generation without simply growing a large in-house team.”

Iterate, iterate, iterate

Golding isn’t resting on his laurels. His team are always looking at how they can improve – and at the tools and tactics that could help them achieve those incremental gains.

“We want to take CRM to the next level by leveraging the data on customers to personalise our communications. We’re also keeping an eye out for the new features on existing tools that will deliver the incremental 1% improvement that will still make an impact. Einstein AI is of interest, for example – can it serve up actionable campaign analytics to me?”

Whatever they choose to use, it’s all about how to optimise the experience across marketing and sales – and ultimately delivering a better experience to their customers.

And none of it would be possible without sales and marketing alignment.

Find out how Salesforce can help you transform your sales and marketing alignment.

Automation has often been the realm of big business but today, it is possible for smaller organisations to harness its power. 

Often you see small to medium enterprises and charities being stuck in the past when it comes to technology, with many relying on confusing and complex excel spreadsheets that just “work” to get things done.

Cure Cancer is an Australian charity who are dedicated entirely to funding early-career cancer researchers. We identify, assess and fund the research we believe has the best possible chance of finding a cure. We have been on the journey with Salesforce for three years and counting!

In this blog post, I’m going to outline the journey that we took in developing our automation capabilities through Salesforce Pardot — where we started from, initial learnings and how we are setting ourselves up for the future.

Life Before Automation

When I joined Cure Cancer as their Digital Coordinator, we had just transitioned away from our older data server and were beginning to use Salesforce as the primary CRM. While this was a great improvement, many of the staff were still stuck in the mentality of “push and pull” with exporting information and having to manually manipulate data for email sends, which was adding a heavy strain on resources.

At the time, Cure Cancer had a separate mail platform to handle our electronic direct mail (EDM, or email) for fundraisers. In order to facilitate EDM sends, staff were pulling reports from Salesforce and then importing  them into the separate mail provider.

This made tracking customer touch points as a single source of truth difficult, limiting the reporting and segmentation that we could as a result of our EDMs and on our contacts in the database.

Starting the Journey with Pardot

The decision was made to implement Pardot, as it would address the issues that we had been having with sending and reporting on email results and introduce marketing automation into the business. It also helped that it was built on the Salesforce platform, providing a unified experience for our team. To get started, we reached out to Destined, a Pardot implementation partner, to guide us through our set up of Pardot and in less than a month, we were up and running.

By introducing Pardot, the whole company sat down and re-examined our touch points with the consumer, their current customer lifecycle with us and re-imagined what this would look like in the future through Pardot.

This empowered the Marketing and Fundraising teams to take ownership of their data, become more proactive as opposed to reactive, and make sure our customer data was clean and up-to-date.

We decided to launch our new campaign, BarbeCURE , calling for people to host a BBQ to raise money for cancer research, and harnessed the power of Pardot to launch our campaign through email nurture and automation.

Quick Wins and Early Learnings

By focusing on launching a single campaign as the first use case for Pardot, it enabled us to test many of the features in a controlled manner before rolling it out to the wider business. 

Our initial approach to Pardot and marketing automation started with automating the little tasks.

Firstly, we looked internally at the target demographics in our database who would be interested in our new campaign and segmented them into lists using Pardot dynamic rules, setting a criteria for a contact to appear in the list automatically. This helped facilitate a more targeted approach to acquisition through our database and enabled us to track the response rate and optimise.

We then started to build Pardot forms into our website, which would capture people who might be interested in hosting a BarbeCURE and automatically add them to our database for a follow-up EDM or call (the capture form is shown below).

We found that by implementing these little automations early, it was an easy hands-on learning experience for the team and showcased the power of Pardot to the business.

Setting up our first campaign: BarbeCURE

Before getting started, we sat down and wrote down all the different interactions that the customer could make with us throughout the three-month campaign and what our communication journey would look like.

We decided to set up an automated nurture email program called an Engagement Studio for the campaign. This program would send automated emails to fundraisers at pre-determined times or based off their engagements with us. 

For Cure Cancer, this meant that the fundraising team could focus on the fundraisers themselves, rather than making sure emails were sent manually.  

One of the challenges that we faced in designing their journey was that the fundraiser could choose to have their event date be any date over the three month summer period and our email journey needed to take this into account and be flexible enough to maintain their personalised communications.

As a result of these use requirements, the first drip we created looked like this:

This drip split up the campaign into 12 different weeks and had them running from right to left, with week 12 (12 weeks out from their event date) on the far right, cascading down to week 1.

We found it beneficial to roll out our Pardot implementation through the business with the launch of a new campaign. In our experience, it allowed multiple teams in our organisation the ability to get hands-on with the platform and really focus in on creating the best experience possible for fundraisers and donors. And by having just the BarbeCURE campaign to focus on, we could respond to issues quickly and in a thorough manner to ensure that when we introduced Pardot into all our business streams, all the little issues would be ironed out.

We recommend that other organisations give themselves the time to explore, make mistakes and be flexible in your strategy when you bring Pardot onboard.

The Future of CRM and personalisation

The future is exciting at Cure Cancer. 

In building on our early learnings and success, we have optimised our nurture programs and have rolled them out successfully across the business.

By utilising Pardot, we have maintained our focus on improving the fundraising experience for our donors through personalisation, without worrying that they haven’t received communications.

We have implemented personalised communication journeys for both our old and new supporters, recognising if they have donated or fundraised with us before and enabling a custom communication journey tailored to their interests.

In doing so, we have seen a 421% increase in donations through all email sources in the past financial year compared to last year.

We are also tracking more consumer touch points now than ever, recognising that our website is a key tool in the fundraiser’s journey with us and tagging key page visits on their record to further assist personalisation and fundraiser outreach.

The next frontier for Cure Cancer is adding more channels into our communication mix and automating them through Salesforce Pardot. A new focus for us is the use of automated and personalised SMS which opens new possibilities and further customises the fundraiser and donor’s journey with us.

As we continue to work with Salesforce, we are always open to any exciting opportunities that come our way. If you want to reach out to us or get involved in the work that we do, please email Tech@curecancer.com.au.

Every time I get an email with an obvious blank field or junk data such as “Hi First Name,” I can’t help but try to figure out where things went wrong for the sending marketer. As the product manager for email at Pardot, I am obsessed with great, personalized marketing and I’m committed to ensuring that these mistakes don’t happen for our customers and recipients get the right message every time.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce Handlebars Merge Language (HML) for Pardot. HML is a new merge language for personalizing email in Pardot. It’s easy to upgrade your content, search for the fields you need and the language is shared by Salesforce Lightning Templates, laying the foundation for more email compatibility down the road.

HML improves personalization by adding a new tool to your arsenal for delivering tailored content to your prospects: the #if statement. Using an #if statement allows you to check whether a field has data directly in the email. When you know whether the data is present, you can then provide the optimal content for both cases.

Let’s take a look at how HML is helping marketers create better customer experiences with perfect personalization and relevant offers.

Avoid Personalization and Grammar Mistakes

Let’s say you want to use your recipient’s first name in your email greeting, like “We’ve got good news for you, Heather!”

If you don’t know your recipient’s first name, it’s hard to avoid the all-too-common personalization and punctuation fail, “We’ve got good news for you, !” 

One option could be to use a global default like “Friend” or “Customer,” but that might feel too unnatural. What if we just left it out completely, but made sure the punctuation looked right?

Here’s how you can solve this with #if:

{{#if Recipient.FirstName}}! // First we’ll check for the first name
We’ve got good news for you, {{Recipient.FirstName}}! // Here’s the content if we have a First Name
{{else}} // What to do if there is no first name?
We’ve got good news for you!
{{/if}} // End the #if statement

This will produce two versions of your email, personalized and formatted correctly:

Provide Engaging and Relevant Calls-to-Action

But what about a scenario that’s a little more complex? 

For example, nearing the end of a quarter is a great time to send email to generate interest and drive leads from Marketing to Sales for cross selling opportunities. A great way to ensure that handoff is smooth and seamless is to include the contact information for the recipient to reach out if they’re enticed by your call to action.

This is easy to do if the recipient already has an account owner with a phone number. But if that’s not the case, you’d like to provide more generic contact information. 

By having different content in each case, you can provide the most specific and relevant information to those who have it, while having a great back-up for those who don’t.

Here’s how you can solve this with #if:

Have questions about your account?

{{#if Recipient.Owner.Phone}} // We’ll check if the owner’s phone number is populated
Contact {{Recipient.Owner.Name}} at {{Recipient.Owner.Phone}}. // We’ll include the name and phone number if there is a phone number.
{{else}} // And if there isn’t a phone number?
Contact us at accountquestions@lenoxsoft.com // We’ll provide a generic email address so recipients can still reach out
{{/if}} // end the if statement

What I love about this approach is that it provides contact information for all of the email’s recipients, including highly specific information when available, but still provides a call to action when it’s not available.

Get Started with HML Today

While the examples here are spaced out for clarity, be sure to preview emails as you’re getting familiar with HML to catch things like line breaks. Also, if you do have a default mail merge value set for a field, it will always use that default if the field is empty.

Make sure an empty or awkward personalization doesn’t happen to you! Upgrade your Pardot account to HML today and give it a try in your email!

Search and AI-driven analytics company ThoughtSpot has been called a Silicon Valley unicorn, a title given to an elite group of startups valued at over $1B. They serve some of the world’s biggest brands, including Chevron, Petco, and De Beers. Given their large enterprise account-based marketing strategy and big deal sizes, they need to focus their sales attention on the right buyers.

ThoughtSpot is using Pardot to power their marketing automation efforts, and was excited about folding Conversational Marketing into their marketing strategy to engage with prospects in real time and generate even more pipeline for their sales team.

Here’s how ThoughtSpot uses Pardot and Conversational Marketing to connect with their hottest prospects and convert more leads.

THOUGHTSPOT WANTED TO GET MORE PROSPECTS INTO THEIR SALES CYCLE

ThoughtSpot was using a chat solution to engage in sales conversations with website visitors. After they struggled to setup the tool, they encountered some additional speed bumps. 

The tool quickly became “noisy”. Their inside sales team was chatting with everyone who visited the website and therefore had low conversion rates. There was no way to prioritize conversations with website visitors who displayed intent to buy. Sales reps quickly dismissed the tool and retreated to their old way of selling. 

Additionally, conversation data was siloed from Salesforce and Pardot, making it impossible to track conversations through to leads, opportunities, and pipeline. 

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING + PARDOT POWERS REAL-TIME ENGAGEMENT

ThoughtSpot selected Qualified as their new Conversational Marketing solution because of the ability to identify their hottest prospects as well as its strong integration with Salesforce and Pardot. Before diving into the application, ThoughtSpot outlined their conversational marketing goals:

• Provide an exceptional sales experience when top-tier, diamond accounts land on the website
• Uncover new selling opportunities by connecting with website visitors who display buying intent but haven’t actually filled out a form 
• Speed up the sales cycle for qualified visitors who did submit a form

Throughout the entire program, they had to deliver ThoughtSpot’s brand promise of a seamless website experience. ThoughtSpot first identified the subset of website visitors that they consider “qualified”, or sales-ready. This is the group of visitors they prioritize for real-time sales conversations:

• Visitors who engage with “diamond” or ABM account campaigns, powered by Pardot
• Visitors exploring webpages that convert well, like their product and pricing pages
• Visitors who submitted forms and match a specific job title criteria

Once their qualification rules were outlined and their experiences were built, the ThoughtSpot team was off to the races. 

The inside sales team watched LiveView like a hawk—a feature that gives sales reps a view into exactly how visitors are browsing their site. When the moment was right, sales reps could engage with website visitors using a full suite of meeting tools, including chat, screen-share, and voice-calls. 

The best part? The ThoughtSpot team can leverage Pardot prospect data to make their qualification engine even smarter and give sales reps a 360-degree view of the visitors that they’re talking to, fueling high-quality, contextual sales conversations. Sales reps can then create Pardot prospects or Salesforce leads with one click, and move on to the next qualified visitor.

We asked Haley Romstad, ThoughtSpot Sales Development Rep, why she values using Conversational Marketing to engage with qualified prospects: 

THOUGHTSPOT IS A CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING TRAILBLAZER

Since launching their new Conversational Marketing program, the ThoughtSpot team has increased online sales conversations by 10X—with the right prospects at the right time—and generated 70% more marketing qualified leads. They have a fast path to their most qualified prospects and have significantly moved the needle on pipeline. The marketing team has confidence that their hard-earned website visitors are receiving a white-gloved sales experience and the sales team is crushing their numbers. It’s a win-win.

QUALIFIED IS CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING FOR PARDOT

Qualified helps companies like ThoughtSpot engage and convert their most important prospects, right from their website. Learn more about how you can use Qualified for Salesforce Pardot. 

Here at Salesforce, we’re continuously inspired by the incredible ways our customers and Trailblazers are using Pardot to power their B2B marketing strategy. Throughout the month of August, we invited our Trailblazers in B2B marketing to showcase their expertise by posting their best B2B marketing tips and tricks to Twitter & LinkedIn with the hashtag #TrailblazerTipTuesdays.

As usual, our Trailblazers blew us away with some incredible marketing advice! So every Tuesday in September, we’re rounding up the best #TrailblazerTipTuesday takeaways to help you supercharge your marketing strategy for the rest of 2019 and beyond.

How to Boost Email Engagement

Customer engagement is a goal for every B2B marketer. When it comes to email, Jenna Molby, Global Marketing Automation manager at Galvanize, shares her tip for how to boost engagement and increase open rates. To learn more, check out her blog.

How to Reach your Audience

B2B marketers know that our customers are now engaging with us across multiple channels and devices before purchasing a product or service. So how can we get in front of the right audience with the right message at the right time? Mike Creuzer, CRM & Marketing Automation Solution Architect at Sercante and Samantha Safin, Senior Project Manager at Arkus, share their advice.

Read Samantha’s blog to learn more about best practices for email segmentation.

How to Align with Your Sales Team

Marketing and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly, Beyonce and Jay Z, and fall weather and pumpkin spice lattes. And as Christina Collins, Marketing Coordinator at Cheshire Impact, points out, driving revenue and closing deals falls on both teams. Read on to learn her advice for how marketers can leverage marketing automation to align marketing and sales and close more deals.

How to Create an Inclusive Marketing Strategy

Equality is a core value at Salesforce, and we strive to ensure that our marketing reflects and elevates the diverse communities we serve. We call this “inclusive marketing.” This means that we are elevating diverse voices and role models, decreasing cultural bias, and leading positive social change through thoughtful and respectful content.

Part of our path to Equality includes prioritizing accessibility and thoughtfully designing content with everyone in mind, including people with disabilities. That’s why we loved this accessibility tip, brought to you Jacqueline Fassett, Non-profit Practice Lead and CRM & Marketing Automation Specialist at Sercante.

How to Find Your Next Passion

One of the best things about the Salesforce ecosystem is that the opportunities are truly endless. According to IDC, the Salesforce Economy will add 3.3M new jobs by 2022! Brian Roff, Lead Salesforce Consultant at eightCloud and co-leader of the NH Pardot User Group shares his expert advice for how to build a successful career in the Salesforce Economy.

How to Get Involved with the Trailblazer Community

One of the best ways to continue learning from fellow Trailblazers is to leverage the Trailblazer Community. This is a group of smart, kind, and passionate individuals who simply love learning and helping others.

Unsure where to start? Morgan Wiedmann, Content Specialist at Weichert Workforce Mobility, shares her list of ways to get involved with the Trailblazer Community.

Feeling inspired? We know we are! Join us next Tuesday for Part 2 as we continue sharing our top takeaways from #TrailblazerTipTuesdays.

Today’s healthcare professionals prefer to be marketed to through digital channels. As a result, the most effective healthcare and life sciences (HLS) marketing is now digital marketing. This has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for HLS marketers, who used to rely on in-person meetings to build relationships with clients. 

Now, HLS marketers can attract new leads with digital tactics like outbound and inbound marketing, engage them in real time with relevant content, and use data to build personalized journeys for prospects and customers over time — leading to long-term sales relationships with high-value clients.

Here are some of the best ways to do just that.

Attract New Leads with Inbound Marketing

Healthcare professionals are out there, right now, searching for the solutions that your brand provides. How do you make sure that they discover your brand, and remember you once they find you? While it’s not the entire solution to every digital marketing problem, inbound marketing is part of the answer here. 

If you aren’t familiar with the concept, inbound marketing is all about creating valuable content that aligns with your target audiences’ needs. It’s not about marketing directly to an audience — that’s outbound marketing. Inbound marketing content can include blog posts, videos, webinars, or anything that provides real value to your audience.

To create inbound marketing content for your healthcare target audience, you need to consider what problems your audience has and how you can provide answers for free. You can identify these problems using data gathered by your marketing automation platform. According to the Salesforce Marketing Trends Across HLS report, only 15-31% of HLS marketers currently produce content that evolves in response to actions taken by leads and customers. If you create compelling and relevant inbound marketing content, you’ll be far ahead of most of the rest of the industry. 

Get Chatty About Your Content

Traditionally, inbound marketing relied on creating compelling calls-to-action on your website that encouraged prospects to submit forms and wait for a sales rep to follow up. But with the latest innovations in chatbots, you can now engage these prospects in real time, right as they’re on your page. Chatbots have come a long way since the days of fruitless conversations with bots that could only respond to a limited set of queries. Now, with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots are experts on your brand and your industry, and they’re ready to help healthcare professionals navigate your products and solutions. 

When you feed a chatbot data from your marketing automation platform and company databases, you can transform the experiences healthcare leads have on your website. Inbound marketing usually attracts a single lead to a single piece of content that they’re interested in — perhaps a cardiologist is interested in your white paper on blood pressure medicine. By integrating a chatbot onto all the pages of your website, including landing pages for your inbound marketing content, you can engage visitors and offer ideas for journeys they can take across your website.

Chatbots can use real-time data your website gathers about visitors to provide relevant suggestions for content and information they may be interested in. If data suggests that your visitor is an oncologist and they strike up a conversation with your chatbot, the bot can share all of your brand’s cancer-related content with them. They can also transfer the healthcare professional to a human associate if any of their questions are too in-depth. Since chatbot AI is always learning, the opportunities for relevant and engaging real-time prospect interactions are endless. 

Make Signup Swift and Seamless

One of the greatest things about chatbots is that they can actually make signing up for lists a relatively pleasant and personal experience. Instead of filling out a form to join your brand’s email list, healthcare professionals chatting with a bot can respond to a series of friendly questions. 

This way, they can also potentially be used to gather more detailed information than is possible with traditional forms. Healthcare leads seeking in-depth solutions to their problems can share detailed specifics with chatbots, and this data can be used both to solve the issue at hand and personalize future marketing for that lead.

To learn more about how inbound marketing and chatbots help you attract healthcare leads and deliver compelling digital experiences in real time, read How to Scale Your Healthcare Marketing and Physician Outreach in 5 Steps and the State of Chatbots Report. 

Last month, Pardot hosted #TrailblazerTipTuesday, a weekly social media takeover where Trailblazers in B2B Marketing shared their tips, tricks, advice, and best practices for how to be a B2B marketing super star across Twitter & LinkedIn with the hashtag #TrailblazerTipTuesdays.

Our Trailblazers wow’d us with their expertise, which is why throughout the month of September, we’re rounding up the best #TrailblazerTipTuesday takeaways to help you supercharge your marketing strategy for the rest of 2019 and beyond (click here if you missed Part 1).

How to Get Started with Marketing Automation

Sometimes, the hardest part about starting something new is… getting started. That’s why Brent Healy, Salesforce Consultant at Valintry, wrote a blog, “How to Get Started with Marketing Automation,” where he shares the secret to implementation success: the Agile Methodology.

Similarly, Robert Gassmayr, Digital Marketing Specialist at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, echos the “step-by-step” mentality, especially when it comes to Engagement Studio.

How to Learn More about Pardot

As you’re getting started with marketing automation, the next step is to learn more about lead generation strategies, benchmarks for success, and in-depth product knowledge.

Along with our community of smart, supportive Trailblazers, the Pardot team is here to help! That’s why we’ve compiled a library of B2B Marketing Resources, endorsed by Stacey Cogswell, Salesforce Marketing Architect at Invado Solutions.

How to Set up a Pardot Training Environment

As Mike Creuzer advised in last week’s blog, TEST ALL THE THINGS. As you begin learning more about marketing automation, this is especially important. One easy way to “test all the things” is by setting up a Pardot Training Environment. Andrew Cook, Salesforce Admin at the Financial Times, shares the importance of training environments and where to go to get yours.

How to Keep Your Data Clean

Clean data is the lifeblood of good, personalized marketing. That’s why it’s so important to keep your data in tip-top shape, especially if you’re just getting started with marketing automation.

Take advantage of a clean slate by implementing form requirements that prevent junk emails. Erin Duncan, CRM and Marketing Automation Strategist at Sercante, shares how.

How to Trust Yourself and Celebrate Accomplishments

Here at Pardot, we love taking time to celebrate the amazing things that our customers and Trailblazers are accomplishing. It’s amazing to see how these leaders are shaping the future of B2B marketing and paving the way for where the industry is headed.

If you haven’t taken time to appreciate yourself in a while, check out this blog post by Andrea Tarrell, Principal and Founder of Sercante, to learn how to tackle imposter syndrome and celebrate your wins.

That wraps up another great week of #TrailblazerTipTuesdays on the Pardot blog. Tune in next week for Part 3!

When you choose a marketing automation platform for your business, your go-to comparison criteria will usually be the list of features each potential platform has. These features must solve known business problems and, if you write your business case well, justify the investment in a first-time or replacement marketing automation platform.

The problem is, there are a lot of premium automation solutions on the market. Each of these automation platforms will promote dozens of features, some necessary for you, some not. 

Honestly, I’ve lost count of the times clients have come to me to understand what half of their automation features actually are and how they can best use them.

So how do you know which features you actually need? Not just now but in the years to come.

Producing content, creating lead capture forms, writing emails, planning the best follow up approach, getting the relevant colleagues on-board, and being given approval to go live with new marketing activity, are just a few of the hurdles marketers need to overcome daily.

You don’t want to reach two years’ down the line and find all your efforts to become more sophisticated with lead generation and nurture are now halted because your automation platform doesn’t have the features to allow you to continue growing.

When you’re just getting started

Grading 

Grading is how you tell your marketing automation platform what your ideal buyer looks like, so that when new prospects are added to the database you have instant visibility on how likely these people are to buy from you. It’s basically a quality score so you can easily see your key prospects.

Grading ordinarily works on a scale of A+ – F and you use criteria that a prospect will have in their profile to tell your software how to score them. 

A good software will enable you to set up automation rules to take care of this, as well as allowing you to update a prospect’s profile manually. 

The best thing about grading? That instant visibility and being able to quickly report on good quality leads as a result of your marketing.

Campaign tagging

Structuring your automation account using campaign tagging means that all of your marketing assets are associated with a single campaign. This allows you to track which marketing assets prospects first interacted with, even if they weren’t a known prospect at that time, as well as giving you transparency over individual campaign performance and ROI. 

For marketing attribution (and your time spent reporting), this is a win! 

Quick tip: A great marketing automation software will also sync seamlessly with your CRM so information about campaign interactions is passed straight to the lead’s profile.

Dynamic lists

All marketers are familiar with static lists, but the holy grail of list types is dynamic lists. 

In comparison, static lists are intended for when your prospect data is not likely to need removing from a list. But if the prospect becomes a customer for life, dynamic lists allow prospects and leads to move in and out of your list depending on the criteria you set.

They are rule-based, meaning a prospect can be added or removed from the list at any time that their profile matches or does not match the rule. 

Let’s say you want to build a list of highly engaged prospects. You can use a dynamic list for this which will update automatically throughout the day to ensure that all those in the list meet your rule for classifying highly engaged prospects (i.e. opens more than 1 email per week, visits the website 2+ times). 

Emails – A/B tests

A/B testing emails is a common feature in many email marketing platforms but I’ll make a point of including it here because actually using A/B testing to get the best email performance is an additional step that many don’t allow for during planning but is essential to great marketing results.

As you become more sophisticated with automation

Scoring categories

While lead grading allows you to tell your software what your ideal customer looks like using their demographic information, scoring enables you to assess your prospects based on their actual engagement with your brand. 

When prospects interact with your marketing assets, whether it’s visiting your website, downloading content, clicking an email, or attending a webinar, you can use scoring to give a number value to that interaction. 

When you combine your grading with scoring, you know exactly how many prospects in your database are not only likely to convert based on who they are but are likely to convert based on their behaviour. This information is invaluable for predicting sales and reporting on the quality of your leads.

Dynamic content

This powerful feature is the one that allows you to really personalise your content for each prospect and engage them on a whole new level. A marketing automation platform that has this feature will give you huge flexibility and an advantage in resonating with your audience.

Using the information you have stored in a prospect’s profile, you can use dynamic content to insert different text or images into an email or landing page that reflects this information. For example, an email headline that you think will resonate with them because of their job function, or is only relevant to their specific location.

For you, this means a lot of time saved by not having to segment and create multiple email variants. For the prospect, it means you offer more relevant content that shows you understand them.

Advanced Automation rules

Automation rules sounds fairly straightforward, and you might be thinking surely this is a given feature of an automation platform? As far as basic automation rules go, yes, naturally all platforms will have this.

However, when you and your team are comfortable with using your chosen marketing automation software, you might want to up-level to advanced automation rules

An example of an advanced automation rule is when you specify criteria you want your prospects to match and then an action that should happen for those that either do, or don’t. 

You can use this feature to update your database, for example, if you want to insert a missing field like a job function, or to add scoring, or assign the prospects to particular users for follow up, among other use cases!

When you want the ultimate in automation features

Predictive analytics

In a nutshell, predictive analytics means your software uses previous customer behaviour and performance to predict which of your leads are most likely to become buyers.

The system will calculate a buyer intent score which can be used by salespeople to prioritise leads that are more likely to close. 

It’s usually based off activity, (factors in email opens & clicks for example) and gives a score out of 100 to suggest how ready to buy a lead is. 

Absolute integration with your CRM

One of the biggest challenges when using both a CRM and a marketing automation software is that for the most part, you have to access each of these separately, even if they are integrated to talk to each other.

A marketing automation platform that is natively integrated with CRM will save you the time switching between the two platforms and manage everything using a single login. Not only this, engagement history by prospect is much easier to view and interpret. This feature really bridges the gap between marketing and sales!

So there you have it, the above features should enable you to research, compare and decide on a marketing automation platform that is right for your business now, and in the years to come.

Think there’s something I’ve missed? Leave a comment and let me know about other features you look for in a great marketing automation platform.

The traditional view of marketing is flawed. Most organisations view their marketing department as a cost center or a necessity to direct potential customers to the real gem: the product. Luckily for us in the marketing world, companies are starting to realize the value we can bring through revenue marketing. As the Marketing Director at Hexagon, a global leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions, I’ve lived through this process and learned some vital lessons that I’ll share with you.

Over the years I have worked for several organisations in different fields, but marketing always seemed to operate the same way: demand for double-digit growth, incessant talk about the “customer” but product was king, and marketing was viewed as a cost center but expected to show revenue results. Unsurprisingly, we delivered mediocre results and we struggled to move the dial. 

At first, I thought I was just unlucky, but after attending numerous marketing conferences and talking with immensely talented marketers, I realized we were all sharing similar experiences and challenges. I realized I was not alone! You probably aren’t either. Unless you belong to the lucky few that work in amazingly advanced, deeply-pocketed, and heavily-resourced marketing teams, you’re in the same predicament as us. Don’t believe me? I have the stats to back it up!

According to B2B Marketing Trends, only 55% of marketers feel empowered to collaborate with sales, 53% feel they share goals, and another 51% feel they have adequate data flow between sales and marketing. With sales and marketing being the two key functions in any organisation tasked with generating revenue, it’s evident that marketers are struggling to align with sales and demonstrate that they are more than just a cost-center.

So, what came of my story, you ask? In this all-too-common scenario of being dumped in the cost-center basket, we started searching for a way to get out of this vicious cycle. We had to re-invent our approach to marketing and look at what we can do to meet customer needs profitably.

Enter revenue marketing!

Revenue marketing can be an immensely useful tool, but only when used correctly. In my experience, marketing organisations love to use new technologies, like marketing automation. However, they rarely get the full benefits of such technologies because the changes only relate to training of operations or campaign teams. To create the profound transformation necessary to realize true business value from marketing, you need to combine dedication, technology, and skills. So, where do you start?

Revenue Marketing Maturity

While there are many different approaches to revenue marketing, I’m a big fan of the Pedowitz Group’s definition that revenue marketing is the development of repeatable prospecting programs that drive customer acquisition and measurable sales. The key to revenue marketing is to forecast the results and impact of your activities predictably. 

As a rookie revenue marketing team, we needed a benchmark to guide us through the process of moving from a cost center to becoming more customer-focused and achieving better alignment with sales. The Growth Engine’s Revenue Generation Maturity Framework is an excellent guide for senior leaders on their path to attaining revenue marketing maturity. It examines the four stages organisations will go through as they move from a traditional and tactical set up to a sophisticated revenue generation engine:

• The Crawl stage is the traditional view and mode of operations where marketing is viewed as a service provider to sales and the business, with few established processes and limited or no use of marketing technology. Marketing efforts are focused on creating awareness and advertising. Performance is measured based on cost and number of activities.
• In the Walk stage, marketing is not aligned with revenue goals, but there is an awareness of customer demographics, CRM is in place but not used as a mandate by sales, and email marketing is used to push out single email campaigns. At this stage, performance is measured based on the number of leads supplied to sales.
• At the Run stage, marketing plans are aligned to business goals with annual and quarterly campaign plans. The marketing organisation is well designed with CRM and automation tools in place, but team compensation is not aligned to revenue targets. Performance is measured by cost per lead, percentage and value of leads provided to sales.
• Finally, in the Leap stage, annual plans are aligned with business plans and quarterly campaigns are aligned with revenue objectives and ROI expectations. There is a CMO at the helm with a well-defined and optimized team comprised of demand generation, program managers, and digital and content operations. Processes are well defined and the adoption of marketing technology is beyond just automation, with a more sophisticated stack enabling extensive data collection and predictive analytics.  Compensation is based on revenue and marketing performance. Performance is measured based on CLV, ROI, conversion rate, and other advanced metrics.

Lessons in Building the Revenue Marketing Engine

In applying revenue marketing practices, my team was able to achieve significant growth into double digits! However, this didn’t occur overnight. It was an ongoing process that took years to reach the Leap stage fully. Here are the key lessons learned:

• Executive buy-in is crucial, and marketing is part of everyone’s role. We are in the age of the customer, and everyone has a role to play.
• Creating the revenue engine is a change management process that’s not for the faint-hearted. It can take years to get all the gears moving correctly.
• A holistic view of the organisation that goes beyond people, process, and technology is critical.
• It’s all about people! People make and break any organisation and marketing engine. Ensure the best talent is in place to support future vision and goals. Resilience and innovation are essential.
• Revenue marketing is not the sole purpose of marketing – we cannot neglect the brand. Having said that, revenue marketing is a priority for a lot of businesses and marketing needs to speak the language of revenue.
• Although the principles of revenue marketing are universal, there are different contexts and scenarios. Be willing to adapt!

Take the Next Step

Transforming a marketing organisation from a cost center to a revenue engine takes significant investment, but the payback is substantial. It is essential to start with an overall assessment of your sales and marketing organisation and develop a comprehensive change management program. Even if you have achieved revenue marketing maturity, it can be beneficial to step back and revisit the foundation so that you can leap forward.

To see how Salesforce can meet your marketing automation needs and get your business on the path towards revenue market maturity, read more about marketing automation or take a guided tour.

We’re recapping all of the great tips and tricks our Trailblazers in B2B Marketing shared during last month’s #TrailblazerTipTuesday campaign.

If you haven’t been following along, Pardot hosted a weekly social media takeover every Tuesday in August where B2B marketing geniuses shared their tips, tricks, advice, and best practices for how to be a B2B marketing super star across Twitter & LinkedIn with the hashtag #TrailblazerTipTuesdays.

The knowledge and insights shared were too good to exist only on social media, which is why we’re memorializing them forever on the Pardot blog every Tuesday during the month of September! Let’s look at a few of our favorites.

How to Track Marketing Channel Performance

One of the top priorities for any marketer is analyzing performance and maximizing ROI. An important metric is top-of-funnel lead generation, or understanding which channels are driving the most new leads to your database. Marcos Duran, CRM and Marketing Automation Strategist at Sercante, shares his tip for how create dynamic lists that will tell you just that.

How to Prioritize What Matters Most

With any robust Engagement Studio program, it might be tempting to get carried away building out every single action, trigger, or rule you can think of. But to make sure you’re prioritizing the details that matter most, Tigh Loughead, Salesforce MVP and NYC Pardot User Group Leader, recommends starting with the actions or metrics that are most important to the overall success of your campaign. From there, you can easily add on and build out the rest of the program, resting assured that success has already been accounted for.

How to Clean Up Your Data

Ah, clean data. As marketers, we know we need clean data to ensure our programs run correctly, but when things get crazy and life gets busy, taking the time to actually maintain data cleanliness falls on the back burner. But as Tyler Tuttle, Digital Marketing Manager at InCrowd, points out, whether you love it or hate it, data cleanliness is important. Check out his tip for how to efficiently clean your data with one-time use automation rules.

How to Restore Deleted Information

Have you ever accidentally deleted something that was super important and had that heart-stopping moment of panic where you thought you messed everything up forever? If that sounds familiar, have we got good news for you! Stephen Stouffer, Sr. Manager of Marketing Automation & Infrastructure at FireMon, highlights the incredible life-saving nature of the Pardot Recycle Bin and how it can help you undelete that super important thing.

How to Track Off-Line Customer Engagement

According to B2B Marketing Trends, 61% of marketers are looking for ways to facilitate online customer experiences with offline customer data. Lillie Beiting, Director of Data and Marketing Analytics at The Impact Partnership, shares a great tip for how marketers can connect offline conversion points with digital activities using Pardot campaigns, custom redirects, landing pages, call tracking numbers, segmentation rules, and Engagement Studio.

How to Up-level Your ABM

One of the most challenging things about account-based marketing is building out accurate representations of an account and ensuring that all of the company stakeholders are mapped appropriately. But with lead-to-account mapping, Salesforce can intelligently match leads to their correct accounts by leveraging email domain data and other criteria. Read more from Julie Edminster, Salesforce and Pardot Solutions Architect at Simplified Solutions.

That’s it for our 3rd roundup of #TrailblazerTipTuesdays! Tune in next week for the finale event.