Customer expectations are changing. Business buyers now expect personalized, real-time marketing that’s just as seamless as what they experience as regular consumers. This means B2B marketers must keep on the cutting edge of marketing trends. Luckily, there are innovative tools, tactics, and measurement B2B marketers can use to keep up with what today’s buyers want.

We’ve gathered some key insights from Salesforce’s Trends and Tactics Driving Marketing ROI report to identify four ways marketers can see success and drive greater ROI than ever.

1. Let customer expectations guide priorities.

Customer expectations should be your guiding light when it comes to setting priorities for your B2B marketing program. The most successful marketers base their strategies and tactics on their customers’ priorities.

Real-time engagement has become par for the course in successful B2B marketing, as 71% of customers now expect real-time communication from brands. To keep up with expectations, marketers are focusing their efforts accordingly — 89% of marketers identify real-time engagement as a priority.

Success goes beyond just goal-setting: marketers are modernizing their toolboxes in order to execute personalization and other in-demand strategies. In fact, 89% of marketers list modernizing their tools and technology as a priority, and 88% have prioritized unifying their customer data sources. 

Your B2B marketing program is only as good as the tools and the data that feeds it. Be sure to keep your technology stack on the cutting edge.

2. Collaborate across teams.

Full-funnel marketing is in, and silos are out. 78% of customers, including business buyers, now expect consistent interactions across departments. That means your marketing, sales, and service teams can no longer operate in their own separate universes.

Ninety-three percent of high performing marketing teams have integrated their marketing and advertising stacks to make sure all communications are synced across all departments. Kiss silos goodbye — marketing, sales, commerce, and service teams must share common goals and metrics to ensure B2B marketing success.

3. Use channels strategically across the customer journey.

In B2B marketing, channels aren’t one-size-fits-all. Buyers in the consideration phase have different preferences for communication than longtime customers engaged in upsell. According to the Trends & Tactics Driving Marketing ROI report, B2B marketers fine-tune their marketing mix to play to each channel’s strength at different points in the complex customer journey.

4. Harness the power of artificial intelligence.

As marketers refine their technology tools, the use of artificial intelligence is on the rise. AI use among marketers has grown grown 44% since 2017, and has a projected growth rate of 157% over the next two years.

Marketers have been quick to adopt AI because it drives ROI throughout the entire customer lifecycle. From data analysis to personalization, marketers are getting it done with AI. Among marketers surveyed, 88% report major or moderate ROI from analyzing and applying customer data with AI, and 82% report the same from digital advertising personalization. With AI, the possibilities — and your potential ROI — are endless.

To learn more about how today’s marketers are driving more return than ever, check out Trends and Tactics Driving Marketing ROI from Salesforce Research.

With the shift in the digital buyers journey, marketing and sales have become more intertwined than ever before. Because of that shift, digital aptitude has become vital for modern sales reps.

Let’s set some ground rules first: Sales and Marketing need to agree on a common ground when it comes to customer data. This common ground should be your CRM platform, an integrated system for Sales to manage their customer relationships and for Marketing to automate campaigns and customer journeys. This means you can collect data from both sales and marketing, getting a complete picture of a prospect.

Once the common ground is agreed upon, Sales can take advantage of these three digital marketing tactics that can be extremely beneficial in maintaining relationships with customers to close more sales.

LEARN FROM THE CUSTOMERS DIGITAL BODY LANGUAGE

Have you ever gone on an interview without having researched the company or position beforehand? If you did, I bet you didn’t get very far. Landing a sale is very similar in that sense. A good sales rep does their research beforehand, effectively placing the product or service into the customer’s pain points. Modern selling has changed the expectations of today’s customers from what their sales relationships needs are.

Today’s buyers have access to a vast amount of information at their fingertips, which empowers them to be the drivers of the sale. They are able to compare features and prices from various companies without ever talking to a sales rep. When someone does decide to talk to a rep, they most likely have already engaged with your company’s content.

No one likes cold calls and the expectations for the sales rep have changed. A sales rep is expected to call with knowledge about the company and what the desired needs are. Any type of engagement such as attending a webinar, downloading a case study or seeing the rep at an event should be content the sales rep knows. This allows the sales rep to get straight to the point instead of “following up” or “checking in”.

Customers expect that you are “listening for signals” to make their experience flawless. So, take the few seconds to do your research and wow your customers with a personalized sales message showing them you understand their interest.

This digital body language, available in your CRM and is collected from your marketing automation software, is that valuable research that better prepares a sales rep for a call with a potential buyer or current customer. The exciting part about this, is that you don’t have to do anything but take a second to look at your customer’s data.

Knowing what the customer has been interacting with will:

• Allow you to have a more meaningful conversation
• Give you the ability to prioritize your leads and call schedule
• Eliminate those painful cold calls
• Save time otherwise wasted in educating someone on something they already know
• Help your bottom line
• Close more sales!

COLLECTING FEEDBACK CAN BE YOUR BEST SELLING POINT

Sending surveys is super simple and yields a tremendous amount of benefits. Collecting data on your performance can be extremely useful in understanding what you did well or what you can do to improve. Either way you win because you now understand how to close the next sale.

Taking this a step further, you can run a Net Promoter Score against yourself. A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a framework with the intent to predict business growth and customer satisfaction. Satmetrix found a correlation between promoters with a higher score and spend. They also found that customers who are satisfied tend to spend more money because they believe they are getting a good value. These customers are also more likely to become repeat customers. On the other hand, if customers are in the middle, they can be swayed either to you or your competitor.  This powerful information helps you prioritize.

Having an excellent NPS, is a selling point to new buyers. Informing them your score is a 9.8 means they will get the best possible service. It shows confidence and sets the scene from the beginning that you care about providing the best in class service.

Overall, there is a lot of useful information to gain from surveys which are easy to implement. It may the selling point as to why someone choose to go with you.

Questions to ask on your survey should be simple and straight forward. Stick to 2-3 question such as:

• Was I able to solve your problem?
• Were you satisfied with the service I provided?
• Was I able to answer all your questions?
• What could I have done better?

KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING

Staying in touch with your customers is easier than ever. LinkedIn is a great  place to continue the conversation. A simple like or comment on their posts, keeps you at the top of their mind. Likewise, you can continue talking about your products and service using LinkedIn while reaching a much wider audience.

Before you start sharing content on LinkedIn, make sure your profile is optimized. It’s also important to make sure you aren’t just sending sales pitches via LinkedIn. Take the time to understand what would add value for your customers before making a post. Most people on LinkedIn are looking to grow their knowledge and network. If you post a link to look at your case study but fail to tell followers what makes that case study special, they will probably not click on it.

At the end of the day, the single most important part of social media posting is to ensure your content is valuable and informative!

Take a look at this step by step example of how to compose a good social media message:

1. Start with telling the reader what this post is about and how it’s going to improve their life.
2. Insert a killer image to capture the reader’s attention.
3. Introduce your service or product and how it accomplished the above.
4. Quick and simple pitch. Keep it short!
5. Tell them what to do next.
6. Bonus: if possible, add a personalized message to contact you.

Win and Grow Customer Relationships

The best news is that the above tips are easy to implement. Salesforce CRM and Pardot sync between in each other every two minutes, which means you can get your customer engagement data in real time. Most survey tools can also be configured to sync with your CRM, this will allow you to have all your data in one place.

The only new window you need to open is LinkedIn, and Pardot makes it easy to connect you’re your customers via social media because it helps map your customer to a LinkedIn or Twitter account. This feature enables you to connect to you customers from your CRM, saving you time. Once connected on LinkedIn, you’re ready to continue the conversation via your regular social media posting. Learn how you can get started with Salesforce Pardot today!

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 and LinkedIn with the hashtag #TrailblazerTipTuesdays. We were amazed at all of the great marketing advice, so we decided to collect some of the best takeaways on the Pardot blog throughout the month of September.

Our blog recap of #TrailblazerTipTuesdays is winding down, but we still have a few more expert tips and tricks to share. And in case you missed it, make sure you check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.

How to Maximize Your Content Creation

We’ve all heard the saying “Content is King.” And when it comes to attracting qualified leads to your website and creating a point of conversion, content is crucial to your demand generation strategy. But creating a content strategy that’s both relevant and engaging can be overwhelming, especially if you’re a small marketing team. If this sounds familiar, you’re in luck! Susan Nellson Baird, Senior Business Consultant at Cheshire Impact, is bringing you all of her tips on content creation in her blog, Seven Tips to Fight the Overwhelm of Content Creation.

How to Keep the Bots Out

With all of that hard work you’re putting into keeping your database clean, there’s nothing more irritating than when bots fill out your forms and start muddying the waters. Is form completion the first step in the robot takeover? Hard to say. But what we can say is this: there’s a way to keep the bots out! Jordan Renwick, Senior Salesforce Consultant and Instructor at Bluewave, shares his tip on how to leverage Honeypots to keep the bots at bay.

How to Optimize Email Performance

If you’re in email marketing, odds are you’ve done your research to learn about peak email send times to ensure the most opens and clicks. But this research makes a lot of assumptions and isn’t unique to your specific business. That’s why Jill Carpenter, VP of Marketing at Cirrus Insight, encourages marketers to experiment on optimal email send times and test email performance to learn what works best for you.

How to Minimize Email Opt-Outs

Speaking of email, part of optimizing your email program includes minimizing email opt-outs and retaining your current list of email subscribers. Jacqueline Fassett, Nonprofit Practice Lead/ CRM & Marketing Automation Strategist at Sercante, shares her wisdom on how to keep email opt-outs low: tell people why they’re getting your email in the first place.

How to Take Personalization to the Next Level

Shakespeare said, “A rose by any another name would smell as sweet.” While that may be true for a flower, we all know how crucial it is to be addressed properly by the companies trying to gain our trust and business. Lara Black, Salesforce MVP and co-leader of the Austin Pardot User Group, shows you how to take personalization to the next level in her post, Personalize the First Name in your Pardot Emails.

How to Create Cross-Functional Collaboration

Some of the best songs are collabs of our favorite artists coming together to make musical magic. Why would that be any different for Salesforce and Pardot admins? Jaspreet Sidhu, Director of Salesforce.com Practice at LearningCurv and Salesforce Analytics Champion, talks about eliminating the admin silo to in tap into improved lead quality and accelerated sales velocity.

As the curtain closes on our #TrailblazerTipTuesday recap series, we hope you feel inspired and empowered to take your B2B marketing strategy to new heights. Thank you to all of our customers and Trailblazers for sharing your marketing knowledge and contributing to the success of the Trailblazer Community!

The dynamics of customer-brand relationships have changed dramatically in recent years. If you’re a marketer in the financial industry, you already know this. Your clients have greater access to information, more options (read “competitors”) to choose from, and more channels where they can engage with brands. While this opens to door to new opportunities for marketers, many financial brands have struggled to keep up with constantly changing customer expectations.  

Sometimes, this can be chalked up to the regulatory nature of the financial industry. Other times, it’s because the industry is slow to adopt new technologies and approaches to their relationships with customers.

Some financial brands are changing this, though. Read on to learn how one financial brand is leveraging Pardot to align their internal teams, create world-class customer experiences, and attract and grow client relationships at scale. 

Customer Relationships are Changing

In the good ol’ days, banks could differentiate themselves based on the personal relationships built overtime with individual customers. Today, however, the digital world has changed how we manage our money. Instead of meeting with a broker, businesses can get a loan online in minutes. Rather than visiting a branch, customers can deposit checks on their phones.

More than ever, customers today expect brands — including banks — to engage with them when they want, where they want, and how they want. According to Integrated Marketing & Sales for Banking, 46% of Millenials say their bank does not send relevant marketing materials. When sales and marketing can come together under the same goals — and same actionable data — they can grow revenue and improve the customer experience at the same time.

Pardot Customer Story: ALI Group

ALI Group is an Australia-based insurance company that has provided loan and mortgage protection for more than 200,000 Australian home and property buyers since 2003.  

With the adoption of Salesforce CRM in 2014 and Pardot in 2016, ALI Group has gained a deeper understanding of their audiences with greater visibility into contacts, journeys, and data — and built personalized customer experiences as a result. 

For example, once they identified their key target audience of brokers, they were able to track new leads through their entire journey — from the moment a broker expressed interest, as they went through product training, and finally to becoming an authorized partner able to offer ALI products to their customers. Along these journeys, ALI personalized the experience at every touchpoint with the help of marketing automation, leading to a 50% increase in conversion rate for broker leads. 

With the introduction of Salesforce Engage, the ALI Group sales team could send marketing-approved templates to drive a consistent and timely message while retaining the flexibility to make real-time changes in order to deliver the most relevant and personalized experience.

With the help of Pardot, ALI Group was even able to easily test a direct-to-consumer approach that drove property buyers to the website to request a quote through B2C nurture journeys. 

Getting Started with Strategies for Success 

Jane Booth, Digital Marketing Manager at ALI Group, joined us for a webinar to share how ALI Group is using Salesforce Pardot to improve their customer experience and deepen client relationships. 

Check out the full webinar to learn about four strategies financial brands can use to attract and grow customer relationships with the help of marketing automation, plus tips on getting started with building content for personalized customer experiences. 

Pardot for Financial Brands

From lead gen to retention, Pardot helps financial brands manage the entire client relationship. On average, Pardot financial customers see:

• 38% increase in prospect engagement
• 24% increase in lead conversion
• 34% increase in marketing ROI

Learn how Pardot can help your financial brand connect with your audience and grow long-lasting customer relationships.

Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise company — or somewhere in between — there’s simply no “one-size-fits-all” approach to managing leads. But as a B2B marketing automation platform focused on aligning sales and marketing to engage buyers, close more deals, and grow relationships with prospects, Pardot is primed to help companies of all sizes create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals.

For the second year in a row, Gartner positioned Salesforce as a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management — and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

“One of our main goals has always been to empower marketing and sales teams to work better together,” said Michael Kostow, SVP and GM of Salesforce Pardot. “One way Pardot does this is through AI-powered features like Einstein Lead Scoring, which enables marketers to automatically identify leads who are most likely to become customers. They can then route those leads to the sales team.”

We believe that we have been named a Leader in this space because of our latest product innovations, helping our customers deliver world-class experiences across a single unified platform. Pardot integrates with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Advertising Studio, Social Studio, and more, which allows marketers to engage with leads across any channel at every stage in the buying journey.

On top of that, Salesforce AppExchange offers over 4,000 apps and 1,000 service providers, helping extend the functionality of the Pardot platform.

“We’re continuing to invest in our product innovations and partner integrations to really push the boundaries of marketing automation and help our customers be successful,” said Nate Skinner, VP of Product Marketing. “At the end of the day, we owe all of our success to our customers and Trailblazers, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without them.”

Want to learn more about how Pardot can help your sales and marketing teams? Watch our demo or see how Pardot can streamline lead management.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, 23 September 2019, Ilona Hansen, Julian Poulter, Noah Elkin, Christy Ferguson

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Working for a heavily sales-driven company, I guess you could say account-based marketing (ABM) was always in our destiny.

Sure enough, it’s emerging as a crucial strategy as we seek to expand outside of our core customer base, uncover new growth channels and forge deeper, higher-yielding relationships with our largest accounts.

For marketing, not only has ABM allowed us to undertake some of the most personalised, advanced automation tactics we’ve run to date, it’s also fostered an extremely collaborative rhythm between sales and marketing. 

Before I elaborate on those tactics and our new best friends in sales, let’s provide a bit of context on who “we” are.

SilverChef provide equipment finance to hospitality businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. The total installed value of commercial hospitality equipment in Australia is $5b and as much as $50b in the US. Suffice to say there’s a lot of opportunity for us!

Our core customer is an independent, start-up café or restaurant, and the majority of our marketing automation is tailored to this audience. A key growth channel for us however is large franchise groups.

Needless to say, our value proposition to a 300-store franchise network is very different to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. So with a huge opportunity across our franchise accounts yet all our marketing messages focused on other channels, what were we to do? The answer for us was an ABM strategy.

Somewhat contrary to the title of this article, it is my belief that ABM isn’t a defined checklist in terms of “things to do” in Pardot. ABM is more of a philosophy in terms of finding a way to target, engage and draw revenue from key accounts.

In that way, it encourages marketers to think like salespeople, in turn bringing the two departments closer together. For that reason, ABM has been a fantastic exercise in terms of showcasing the value of Pardot to our sales team, not to mention our C-Suite who want to see revenue as a direct result of our marketing initiatives.

Here’s five ABM initiatives we’ve employed using Salesforce Pardot.

Identifying franchise prospects

We worked with sales to understand how they ultimately acquire revenue from the franchise sector. Their first step is “accrediting” a franchise group, which instills SilverChef as an approved supplier to their network of stores.

Our sales team then have a license to approach franchisees to sell our product. For marketing, this meant when we accredited a new franchise group, we could immediately start building a program for each of their franchisees as and when they enter our system.

We used the relevant fields in Sales Cloud (mapped to Pardot), as well as a series of automation rules and dynamic lists to categorise prospects belonging to each franchise group. This formed the basis of our dynamic content and nurture programs.

Website experience

Our website only has one page dedicated to franchise. If we know the visitor is a franchise prospect however, our franchise product becomes front-and-centre, almost as if it were our core product. This includes such updates as transitioning the finance calculator on our homepage to reflect our franchise interest rate. All of this is done through the use of dynamic content.

We take it a step further by tailoring our website content to the type of franchise. If it’s a Subway franchise prospect, we’ll showcase the cost to finance sandwich prep equipment and display cabinets. If it’s a prospect from Baskin-Robbins, it would relate to the cost to finance refrigeration equipment.

We’re also beginning to dip our toes into Salesforce Engage, which we see as a particularly effective initiative within our ABM-strategy. What I’m most excited about is real-time alerts. For example, if a known franchise prospect is interacting with our interactive finance calculator, why wait for a lead? We can send an alert to the franchise sales team and have them take action right away.

Email and lead nurture programs

It can’t just be our website where our franchise prospects see franchise-centric content, otherwise it would be a disjointed experience.

We have dedicated Engagement Studio programs for franchise prospects. These drip feed various franchise resources including ebooks relevant to franchises, testimonials and case studies from franchisees (from the same franchise group as the recipient when we can), and special offers across our franchise products. 

We use dynamics lists to suppress franchise prospects from receiving all of our non-franchise automated programs.

Similar to our website, we use dynamic content to change the type of equipment we promote. If it’s a prospect from Noodle Box, the emails will promote equipment such as wok burners, and feature lifestyle imagery relating to noodle shops. We also co-brand the email templates with the logo of their franchise. It seems like a minor detail, but it demonstrates a level of partnership and authenticity to the email as compared to something they may otherwise view as spam upon first glance.

Digital advertising

We’re currently uploading our franchise prospects into our ad platforms to serve franchise-specific ads, and suppress them from receiving non-franchise related ads, which makes up the bulk of our spend.

The next stage for us is exploring Advertising Studio so we can advertise specifically to franchise prospects through Google Search, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube automatically.

This would bring our communication full circle. When we identify a franchisee from Pizza Hut, they’ll see content on our website relating to our franchise product and pizza equipment. This will match what’s being received in their inbox, with email templates featuring pizza lifestyle imagery, the Pizza Hut logo and the most common types of pizza equipment we finance. Then when they go online they’ll see YouTube videos, Google Ads and product ads on their Facebook timeline with the cost to finance pizza equipment assets.

Reporting

Of course, it’s all about the revenue, so we work with the sales team to regularly report on engagement, leads and settlements. What’s working, what’s not, which franchisees are responding and which aren’t. For the ones who aren’t, we change the messaging, offers or products featured. Sales also pass on qualitative feedback from franchisees.

In summary, beyond all the technical wizardry that goes into making ABM happen, in my experience the strategy consistently returns to a single fundamental; the relationship with sales.

It’s been refreshing to feel like we have a degree of equal investment and ownership in our sales strategy relating to franchise, rather than the norm of a focus on driving high-quality leads, then letting sales do the rest somewhat out of sight of marketing until we see the final opportunity status.

Our acquisitions from franchise this year are past $5.5m. That’s certainly testament to the fantastic work our sales teams do in this space. We though, as the marketing team, can definitely say we’ve played a meaningful part in that through our ABM strategy.

And this time, sales would agree.

Learn more about how Pardot can help you engage buyers, close deals, and grow relationships with ABM.

If you work in manufacturing marketing, you know it’s different than any other type of marketing. Lots of manufacturers primarily sell through third parties like dealers and distributors. Your own company’s success is directly tied to the success of these channel sales teams.

Your channel sales team is your connection to the buyer. Did you know that 69% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs? To better engage customers and see consistent sales growth, you need to really connect with your channel sales teams. When you are highly engaged with your channel, and their sales teams have the tools they need to deliver great customer experiences, everyone wins.  

Here are three ways manufacturing brands empower their channel sales teams: 

1. Know Your Customer by Knowing your Channel Partner

As a manufacturer selling through 3rd party reps or distributors, you want to be connected to the end customer. However, it can be difficult to know what’s going on with your leads and customers when the relationships are owned by your channel sales partners. Often, the tactic has been to “pull” that information from your channels through portals or spreadsheets but enforcing usage and uniformity can be a tall task. 

If you find yourself here, start with a “push” approach by utilizing marketing campaigns to push relevant content based on order history, or sending an alert to the specific channel manager if one of your 3rd party reps is looking at a new product on your website. You can learn a lot about how your channels are selling to customers just by understanding how they are interacting with your digital assets. 

2. Continuous Education and Onboarding

Working with channel sales partners is like managing a group of outside sales teams, each with their own unique strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Whether your goal is to increase share of wallet by being top of mind in your channels,  launch a new product line, or find new channels to sell through, education and awareness is key. 

Take the sellers in your channels through enablement journeys to learn product specs and applications. You can also help them stay up-to-date on competitive intelligence to keep your products the easiest to “grab out of their bag.”  You can segment your campaigns based on geography, tenure, current spend, product interest and many other firmographic data points. 

3. GIVE MARKETING SUPPORT TO CHANNEL SALES TEAMS

If you’ve built strong alignment and understand how your channels are selling to their customers, you can begin to extend the same support you’d give your own sales teams. 

A great way to empower channel sales partners is to put the power of marketing and advertising in their hands. Once you’re sure a partner has a strong understanding of and adherence to your brand standards and messaging approach, you can give them the ability to send approved mini-campaigns to their customers. 

With the right technology, this can include dynamic content in emails and other marketing collateral, allowing your channel partners to leverage data to engage with leads and customers in more personalized ways. When this is connected through your CRM, PRM, and marketing automation platform, you and your channel partners can both track every email interaction with leads and customers, and maintain shared visibility of all sales pipelines. 

To learn more about how the right technology can help you empower your channel sales partners and achieve B2B marketing success, explore Pardot for Manufacturing.

Dreamforce is just around the corner, and we’re already counting down the days and getting ready for the best event of the year. In case you missed the Road to Dreamforce for Marketers, our team covered all of the essentials to help get you Dreamforce-ready with must-attend sessions and events tailored just for you!

Speaking of the Road to Dreamforce, what’s the one thing that every great road trip needs?

An epic playlist!

That’s why the Pardot marketing team put together The B2B Marketer’s Road to Dreamforce Playlist. So whether you’re scrolling Agenda Builder to plan your perfect session lineup, setting aside time to dial in to the Dreamforce Live Stream from your desk, or packing your bags for San Francisco, we’re bringing you all of the best B2B bops for Trailblazers in B2B Marketing.

1. “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift

Sometimes, that marketing campaign or product launch doesn’t go as planned, but that’s okay! Learn from the experience, shake it off, and keep moving forward.

2. “Magic” by B.o.B. (feat. Rivers Cuomo)

When your message is perfectly tailored to each and every individual prospect by leveraging dynamic content and variable tags… almost as if by magic

3. “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child

Because B2B marketers know that the best customer experiences are personalized.

4. “Don’t Stop Me” Now by Queen

When you’re on a roll after that fourth double-shot Pumpkin Spice Latte (or is that just us?).

5. “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

The Road to Dreamforce leads to that ‘Frisco Bay.

6. “The Greatest” by Sia and Kendrick Lamar

Make sure to take time to celebrate your accomplishments. You, after all, are one of the greatest B2B marketers in the game!

7. “Good Feeling” by Flo Rida

When you crush those pipeline targets

8. “Better Together” by Jack Johnson

Marketing and sales, always better together!

9. “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips

When you’re midway through an event, losing your voice, but you stick it out during booth duty to collect all those hot leads for your sales team. Hold on for one more day!

10. “Alright” by Darius Rucker

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that it’s the simple things in life, like GIFs and playlists about Dreamforce

11. “Focus” by Ariana Grande

Whether you’re focusing on that target account or that next promotion, you got this!

12. “Dangerous” by Big Data

With all that personalized prospect tracking, you’ll be “dangerous”when building out that next marketing campaign.

13. “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepson

When you send that qualified lead over to your sales team.

14. “Everybody” by The Backstreet Boys

When you break out your classic Backstreet Boys dance moves for everybody at that Dreamforce after-party

15. “Down” by Jay Sean and Lil Wayne

Hey Mr. Prospect! Are you down.. to talk to my sales team?

16. “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez

There’s a lot of “noise” out there, and as marketers, we have to create a message that cuts through and reaches our target audience. What better way than to listen to JLo and get loud!

17. “All the Small Things” by Blink182

Whether you’re adding the finishing details to your yearly user conference, or putting together a complex Engagement Studio program, it’s the little things that make the biggest impact.

18. “This is What You Came For” by Calvin Harris and Rihanna

When you embrace your inner Rihanna and you absolutely crush your presentation at Dreamforce!

19. “Oops! I Did It Again” by Britney Spears

Oops, did I just close another deal?! Yes, because I’m awesome.

20. “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

When its the last week of the month, and your only 50% to goal.. but you know just passed a bunch of spicy leads to your sales team!

While you’re jammin’ to this playlist, stay tuned for more information about all of the great keynotes, sessions, and activities that we have planned for B2B marketers at #DF19. Trust us — you won’t want to miss it!

Having been the VP of Marketing for Car Loans Canada for over a year now, I’ve spent the majority of that time studying the automotive industry and learning about our customers. 

When I started at Car Loans Canada, I brought with me a vast amount of digital marketing knowledge, but zero automotive knowledge. There was a reason for this — as a fintech company, our leaders were looking to disrupt the market with innovation and a beginner’s mind. They brought me in to be that fresh perspective, someone unbiased who could research the market from the ground up and reinvent our marketing strategy. 

Thankfully, I had the Salesforce platform to guide me as I began my learning journey. With Social Studio, I was able to identify some substantial industry trends and opportunities that would be critical to our companies branding and overall success.

Discovering Industry Sentiment

After integrating Social Studio with Car Loans Canada’s various social media handles, we were able to monitor car loan-related topics. Having multiple topic profiles allowed us to segment and monitor different phrases used in our industry. 

Before getting started, we had a feeling that most Canadians were somewhat negative towards the automotive industry, and we figured that sentiment would carry across to car loan companies, too. But the data showed us how big the problem really was. The average sentiment towards the industry was more negative than positive by a long shot!

Knowing the industry sentiment was one thing, but finding out exactly why it was so negative was another. It was our mission to determine why this was the case. Using Social Studio’s social listening functionality, we were able to locate conversations occurring in Canada real-time around auto financing and car loans to help us hone in on the underlying issues.

The Conversations

Our next step was using Social Studio to actively engage with the conversations from our company profile. If a person on social media said “I need a new car,” or “my car broke down,” we would respond to those comments with something clever like, “getting a new car is easier than you think”. If someone was asking questions about financing, we would provide answers to those questions. When people brought up car loans being a scam, we showed them what things to be on the lookout for.

People started interacting with our comments and asking questions. As more and more people joined, we noticed that there were consistent issues people were facing: while the market was often motivated for vehicle financing, their perceived ability of getting an approval was low. People were full of questions and doubt, and being able to identify and engage so easily with these potential customers on social media was a huge competitive advantage for us.

As a financing aggregator, it is our job to save Canadians hours of time. Rather than going to a dealership, finding the car they love just to be turned down for financing, we reverse the process like a Mortgage. We take the applicants information and our portal connects them with the best suited dealership. This helps ensure they go to someone who can serve their unique financial situation. The problem with this was a lacking feedback loop, dealerships didn’t always tell us when they sold a vehicle to an applicant of ours. 

Because of this, we implemented a new Customer Success Representative (CSR) process. We would have CSR’s follow up with our applicants to determine if they got a vehicle. Believe it or not, this was not a common practice in the car loan business. People were more than happy to share their experience with our team. Even the people who did not end up getting the vehicle expressed how refreshing this follow up approach was. We then began creating tools such as our car loan calculator to support these people in their car buying journey every way we could. 

The Brand Change   

After listening to our customers on social media and understanding the challenges they were facing, we made the decision to change our marketing strategy.

Our competitors were sacrificing their integrity just to capture a prospect’s information, and appeared to have a very short-term mentality to the customer relationship. We were going for something much more: a loyal applicant database. We knew that our customers were sick of seeing 100% approval rates, or being shown a Mercedes-Benz when it was out of their price range. This was the root of why Canadians were so negative towards car loan companies, and the automotive sector in general. Companies were over promising and under delivering. 

We saw this as an opportunity to innovate and re-brand. We wanted to be the transparent, white-knight figure the industry needed, and that’s exactly what we did. We produced educational content and advice people could count on from a non-biased perspective. We began developing marketing content around the conversations we saw, thanks to Social Studio, and could deliver this content to prospects by creating personalized journeys in Pardot Engagement Studio. We set expectations straight with our new material and it was well-received. People were glad to finally see an honest company!

Creating Loyal Brand Advocates

By having all of these integrated and trackable conversations, Car Loans Canada was able to offer a real-time customer experience centered on trust and a personalized customer experience. It allowed us to see the much larger picture and specifically the exact needs and wants of our average applicant.

If you’re looking for ways to better understand your customers’ pain points, begin leveraging these platforms to start listening to your existing customers and potential customers. By unifying our data, we discovered how to create loyal brand advocates.

Pardot is going bigger than ever for B2B marketers at #DF19. From the Salesforce for Marketing Keynote, our sessions and hands-on workshops, and the always cute and cuddly Pawdot Puppies, there’s no shortage of things to do at the biggest Salesforce event of the year.

If you’re preparing to set out on the Road to Dreamforce, here are the 5 can’t-miss stops for B2B marketers.

1. Get Inspired at the Salesforce for Marketing Keynote

Marketers are navigating unprecedented change with new intelligent technologies, and managing customers’ trust needs to be at the center. Innovative marketers and brands are collaborating with Salesforce to solve for today’s biggest challenges; unifying data, modernizing infrastructure and organizations, and delivering trusted, personalized experiences.

At this year’s Salesforce for Marketing Keynote, attendees will hear from Trailblazers like Berluti, Zoom, and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to talk about how they’re building connected customer experiences at scale with Salesforce for Marketing across B2B and B2C.

Register here.

2. Witness a Trailblazer Takeover at the Salesforce Pardot Keynote

This year, Trailblazers in B2B Marketing are taking over the Salesforce Pardot Keynote!

Marketing is evolving at a rapid pace and so are the expectations of your customers. In this new age of intelligent marketing, marketers want to drive revenue growth by delivering connected customer engagement. But, with disparate tools and disconnected data, it’s difficult to power that kind of engagement at scale.

Join us to learn how Trailblazers like InsideView and New England Biolabs are using Salesforce for B2B Marketing to engage buyers, close deals, and grow relationships at scale. You’ll also get a sneak peek at our latest innovations for B2B marketers.

3. Explore the Marketing, Retail, and Commerce Lodge at the Palace Hotel

The home for Marketing, Commerce, and Retail is the Palace Hotel! Here, you can continue to learn more through deep-dive sessions, get hands-on with Salesforce technology, dive into how-to and thought leadership content, and attend workshops specific to solving your businesses’ problems.

Your day will be jam-packed with sessions that focus on account-based marketing, artificial intelligence, analytics, sales and marketing alignment, and much more. We’ll have both Salesforce experts and Trailblazer speakers sharing stories of success throughout the week.

Agenda Builder launches later this month, so stay tuned for more info coming soon!

4. Book a 1:1 Consultation and Ask the Experts

We love making sure that Dreamforce is all about learning! So at the Marketing, Retail, and Commerce Lodge, attendees will be able to schedule time with a B2B Marketing Genius to ask any question that comes to mind. You can get answers to questions like:

• How can I find more high quality leads?
• How can I drive customer engagement with personalization?
• How can I more effectively align my marketing and sales teams?

Our experts are Pardot geniuses that can help you understand strategy, specific use cases, or how to use different parts of the product. Make sure to stop by and schedule your appointment.

5. Press “Paws” with the Pawdot Puppies

We couldn’t be more excited to announce that the lovable Pawdot Puppies are returning to #DF19!

Need a break from the action of a packed Dreamforce schedule? Puppies are here to help you press “paws” and get through those long days! Stop by Pawdot Puppies where Pardot customer SPCA International will bring friendly faces and wagging tails with the hopes of pets, hugs, and treats. Not only will you have the chance to play with adorable puppies, but the dogs participating in this exciting event are all available for adoption. They are looking for loving homes and we encourage you to continue the tradition of Dreamforce attendees bringing home a new best friend!

Where: Amber India, 25 Yerba Buena Ln, San Francisco, CA
When: Tuesday, November 19 and Wednesday, November 20th | 11:00am – 2:00pm

Looking for more Dreamforce updates? We’ll be bringing you more Dreamforce goodness throughout the months of October and November, so subscribe to the Pardot blog to stay up-to-date on all things #DF19!

Winter is finally here. Grab a cup of hot cocoa and gather around around the innovation” fire to learn about what we’ve been up to!

We’ve added a dataset to B2B Marketing Analytics that features prospect demographic and engagement activity data together. The new Snippets feature offers reusable content for emails and email templates. This release also brings updates to the Pardot Einstein features Behavior Scoring and Campaign Insights, and improvements to asset handling in the Object Manager.

Ready to learn about all the new features? Let’s dive in!

B2B ANALYTICS ENHANCEMENTS

Explore Combined Prospect and Activity Data in B2B Marketing Analytics

Encourage users to add the Prospect and Activity Dataset to their lenses and dashboards to help them further understand prospect engagement. The dataset includes three years of engagement information tied to the default and custom prospect fields in the Pardot Prospect dataset. With this super dataset, you can unearth valuable connections without heavy report customization.

Dig into Account Records with Engagement History Dashboards

Research suggests that people develop better insights when they manipulate their own data. Give your sales and marketing users the power of data exploration by adding Engagement History Dashboards to a tab on account records. Use account dashboards together with dashboards on campaign records to see a bigger picture of prospect engagement.

ENHANCED MARKETING PRODUCTIVITY IN SALESFORCE LIGHTNING

Reuse Content Across Campaign Emails with Snippets

Snippets give your users the power of content reuse. When your company promotes a series of webinars or other recurring events, your marketers probably have to create many similar promotional emails. With Snippets, they can create a robust block of text, images, and links and pull it into email or email templates. Next time they make changes, they only have to update the snippet, and the email and email templates inherit the changes.

Where: This change applies to all Pardot editions with the Pardot Lightning app.

Why: After you create a snippet, you can use it over and over. To create a snippet, open a connected campaign. From the Snippet Assignments related list, create a snippet assignment and the new snippet record. From there, use the editor to enter the new snippet content.

After you save a snippet, it becomes available on the Snippets tab where it can be edited or deleted. Then use Handlebars Merge Language (HML) to pull the snippet into an email or email template. Snippets are available in the HML merge field picker.

How: To let users create and manage snippets, add the Snippet tab and related lists to record pages. Add the Assignments related list to snippet records and the Snippet Assignments related list to campaigns.

ADDED INSIGHTS WITHIN EINSTEIN BEHAVIOR SCORE

Find Out Which Assets Resonate Best with Prospects

Einstein Behavior Scoring can now tell you which specific marketing assets typically have a role in sealing new deals. These new insights explain how a prospect engaged with an asset, such as the email Fall Promotion or the landing page Signup for New Classes. Einstein brings these data points together to determine which assets’ engagement activities are most likely to generate opportunities.

What does the New Behavior Score Enhancements Look Like

• New Key Factors based on engagement with specific assets (ie. “Pricing Page”).
• New Key Factor based on multiple engaged prospects from the same company (ie. “saleforce.com”).

Looking to learn more?

• Get the full scoop on what’s coming to Pardot this winter by checking out the full Pardot Winter ’20 release notes.
• Watch our latest release webinar (FF to 50mins) to watch how B2B marketers can now explore customer engagement metrics across their marketing efforts and create personalized experiences for both marketing and sales.
• Learn about all of the great things we have planned for B2B marketers at #DF19.

At Salesforce Pardot, our goal is to help marketing and sales teams work better together. We’re laser-focused on equipping these teams with the technology they need to engage buyers, close deals, and grow relationships with their customers.

With that in mind, we’re always asking ourselves “What’s next? How can B2B companies market and sell better than ever before?” We’ve had our eyes wide open and we believe that Conversational Marketing is the next big thing.

Conversational Marketing: A Key Pillar in the Future of B2B Marketing 

For well over a decade, B2B companies have followed the traditional demand generation model: the marketing team identifies qualified buyers, engages them with well-crafted campaigns, and drives them to their corporate website. If buyers are interested in learning more, they fill out a form, and then sales begins the chase to schedule a meeting. 

If qualified buyers are on your site, knocking at your door, why not meet with them right then and there? Conversational Marketing opens the door for real-time, personalized sales conversations with your most important buyers, right on your website. It gives sales teams a platform to have high-fidelity conversations with VIPs at the exact moment your product is top of mind, which translates to higher conversions and more pipeline. 

Salesforce Ventures invests in Qualified: Conversational Marketing for Salesforce Pardot

Earlier this year Salesforce Ventures announced its investment in Qualified, a Conversational Marketing platform founded by former Salesforce executives and purpose-built for Salesforce. With Qualified for Salesforce Pardot, sales reps are given a complete picture of their website visitors, fueled by data from Pardot and Sales Cloud. Sales teams can leverage that information to determine buying intent and deliver personalized conversations.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Qualified’s Board of Directors

Since Qualified’s launch the reception from you, our Pardot customers, has been remarkable. We want to help even more companies realize the power of Conversational Marketing and the impact it can have on your B2B marketing organization. 

With that, I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Qualified’s Board of Directors. Qualified shares Pardot’s vision of helping marketing and sales teams work better together, and I’m confident that Conversational Marketing is a game-changer for B2B companies. As part of their Board, I will help shape their strategy and support their team in delivering the best possible products for Pardot customers.

I’m looking forward to working with Qualified’s co-founders, Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, who have been part of the Salesforce family for a long time. This is the third company they’ve built on the Salesforce Platform, and they both served on Salesforce’s leadership team, so they have a unique vision for how Salesforce companies can succeed with Conversational Marketing.

Pardot Customers are Blazing New Trails with Conversational Marketing

The Conversational Marketing movement is in full swing. Pardot customers around the world are using Qualified to meet with high-value buyers and move the needle on pipeline. 

• $1B “Tech Unicorn Company” ThoughtSpot increased sales conversations by 10X and marketing qualified leads by 70% with Qualified for Salesforce Pardot. Read ThoughtSpot’s customer story here.
• The UK’s leading communications platform Gamma increased website conversions by 33% and marketing qualified leads by 22% with Qualified for Salesforce Pardot. Read Gamma’s customer story here.
• Payzer is using Qualified for Salesforce Pardot to help deliver 10X more sales qualified leads. Read Payzer’s full customer story here.

Are you ready to join the Conversational Marketing revolution? Visit Qualified website to learn more about Qualified for Salesforce Pardot and talk live with their team.

We’ve all been there – mindlessly copying emails, trying to comb through the content to find the small details for a recurring event to change, ticking away boxes on the mental checklist: “Event date, event time, speaker name, speaker bio, registration link.”

The average event you’re promoting likely has at least three emails (initial invite, reminder, follow up), but maybe even more if you’re cross-promoting with other content. These small, tedious changes can start to take a time tax on your day, one that can be so repetitive it starts to increase the risk of user error. The next thing you know, you’ve gotten a message from your Sales team letting you know that one of their key accounts is complaining that the registration link is for the previous event. Face, meet palm.

With the Winter ’20 release, we’re making face palms and small, tedious content changes a thing of the past with Snippets. Snippets can be used in Pardot Email and Email Templates that are associated to your connected campaigns and that have been upgraded to HML.

At it’s most simple, you can think of Snippets as merge fields for your Pardot marketing emails that are not specific to the prospect. This means you do not need to create custom fields prospect records to change reusable content, you simply create a Snippet, assign it to your campaign and start using it.

Getting Started

Snippets are available to all editions of Pardot that are using the Pardot Lightning App, Connected Campaigns and HML.

To start getting immediate value out of Snippets, there are a few steps that a Salesforce Admin will need to complete.

Once Snippets are available on the Campaign page layout(s) and through the tab in the Pardot Lightning App, the next steps will be to create Snippets to use across Pardot Emails and Email Templates. While it’s possible to create Snippets for existing campaigns, let’s look at an example for how to build out a brand new campaign.

Creating Snippets

LenoxSoft hosts an annual customer conference, which just wrapped up. The marketing team is putting together a follow up campaign to stay top of mind with customers who attended the keynote and concert.

The order of operations for the marketing team are as follows:

• Create Campaign
• Create Snippets & Assignments
• Create Email Templates
• Create Engagement Studio program for follow up

After creating the “Annual Customer Conference – Follow Up Campaign,“ the marketing team creates Snippets directly from the Snippet Assignments related list on the Campaign record.

After creating Snippets, the marketing team takes a quick lunch break and wait to receive a few approvals on the actual content of the emails – no tedious tasks means an actual lunch away from their desks! When they’re back from lunch, they start working on the follow up emails with approved content.

Using Snippets in email

The Email Templates are associated to the same Campaign that the Snippets are assigned to. The Campaign relationship is key, as this is what determines what Snippets are available to use in the Pardot Email and Email Templates. In the event one Snippet is relevant to more than one Campaign, as in this case (Conference Date, Keynote Speaker, Conference Location) it is possible to have one Snippet assigned to more than one Campaign.

When the marketing team begins building the email, opening the Merge Field selector will display Snippets when Snippets are assigned to the same Campaign as the Email Template.

The marketing team can then start pulling Snippets into the body content of the email, as well as the subject line!

Before building the rest of the emails for the follow up program, the marketing team previews the email to get an idea of how this email will look to recipients. They can also see that the “Annual Customer Conference – CTA” Snippet pulls in a personalization HML tag (industry) so that Snippets can be personalized as much as other components of their email. Additionally, the call to action link that is embedded within the Snippet is tracked and will count towards reporting metrics.

Updating Content with Snippets

The Marketing team wraps up creating the rest of their follow up emails and builds the program, which ends up being a huge success! So much so, that the following year the Corporate Marketing team requests the same follow up effort following the event. The marketing team quickly navigates to their Snippets tab, and filters by their ‘Annual Event’ list view.

Now, instead of manually editing every single one of these values across several emails, the marketing team makes one change each – each Snippet is updated, and those changes cascade everywhere that Snippet is used. They even use Chatter to keep track of what, who and when a value was changed!

The LenoxSoft team is now saving themselves hundreds of clicks, hours of tedious repetitive tasks and becoming more efficient as a team. This allows the team to spend more time on their most important tasks and remove manual overhead from their day.

To get started with Snippets today, learn more in the Winter ’20 release notes and check out our Winter Release Round-up blog. We look forward to hearing how Snippets are saving you time and energy on your Pardot marketing efforts!

In Part 1 of this Blog Post Series, Three Trends Affecting Payer Group Sales, we broke down 3 trends that highlight why the importance of differentiate your communication strategy to employers: 1.) highly saturated market, 2.) new entrants, & 3.) increasing customer expectations. These trends means two things if you are selling into a new business:

1. The business likely already offers their employees health care from one of your competitors
2. The evaluation will be highly competitive, both from traditional players as well as new entrants

So how should payer marketing teams respond to these trends? By delivering a differentiated customer experience across the entire customer life cycle.

Let’s look at 3 scenarios at how trailblazers in the payer market are doing this today and leveraging Salesforce Pardot to help.

scenario 1: New Customer ACQUISITION

Whether you are leveraging a broad-based marketing strategy (focus = lead gen) or if you are leveraging an account-based marketing strategy (focus = grow key accounts), your ability to personalize the buyer experience is paramount. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 69% of business buyers expect Amazon-like buying experiences. So how are payers getting this “Amazon-like” level of personalization when engaging with employers?

Let’s walk through a few examples how payer organizations are personalizing their new client acquisition journey. In this scenario, let’s say that you’ve identified high tech businesses in the Bay Area as being a top target market. Based on your experience, you know that high tech companies are looking to offer premium benefits to their employees to attract top-tier talent. You want to position your premium coverage plans specifically to this audience.

• Targeted Digital Advertising: After you build an ad campaign that positions your premium health plans to tech companies, you can leverage digital advertising platform to target your specific buyers. You can target specific high tech accounts you are going after across search, display, and social media. Then you can leverage lookalike audiences to target businesses and individuals that look like your best accounts.
• Progressive Profiling: Every digital ad, social post, and web engagement in general, should drive to a call-to-action that encourages a customer to fill out a form to access compelling content or speak with a rep. As customers fill out new forms to access additional content, leverage progressive profiling to continuously learn more. Instead of asking the same questions over and over a gain, collect new information about a prospect each time they fill out a form.
• Dynamic Lists: Dynamic lists allow you automatically segment your current customers and new incoming leads by creating a set pre-determined rules. For example, if a customer selects “high tech” as the industry on a form they fill out, you can dynamically add that customer to targeted “high tech” new lead engagement campaign v. your standard new lead campaign.
• Dynamic Content: Dynamic content allows you to personalize the images or copy you send customers via email or what they see when they visit your website based on predeter mined criteria. For example when a high tech company lead comes to your website, you can have your website automatically render an image of millennials walking through downtown San Francisco rather than displaying your standard welcome image of a family at a park in a midwestern suburb.

Scenario 2: Sales Engagement

In top performing payer organizations, marketing and sales are aligned – aligned metrics, aligned processes, and unified data. Let’s walk through an example of how marketing can empower sales to have more relevant, personalized conversations. As marketing is running a campaign targeting tech companies in San Fransisco, they can expose all the data they are collecting to sales in meaningful ways.

Small Group Sales Teams frequently manage a large number of broker relationships and even more prospect and customer accounts. Account Executives can leverage AI based lead scoring to identify their best “fit” leads, leads that are showing the highest “intent-to-purchase,” and understand key engagement insights. This allows account executives to prioritize the hottest leads and share valuable insights to their broker partners that will help close deals.

With Salesforce Engage Alerts, account executives gets real-time alerts the moment a prospect goes to your website, opens an email, clicks on link, or downloads a data sheet on your health plans. Imagine you’ve been having trouble getting in front of a strategic target account, and you get an alert showing they are on your website researching the types of plan you offer – amazing! Now your account executives can align with your broker sales team to reach out reach out to the prospect at the moment of interest.

To help sales manage broker relationships, marketing can enable account executives with marketing curated email templates to educate, share new plan information, and stay top of mind with their broker channels. Sales has the ability to send these emails 1:1, 1:many, or through automated nurture – saving account executives save time managing, drafting, and sending emails.

By aligning sales and marketing, sales can better manage broker relationships, and ensure the right accounts are being engaged at the right time with the right message. In competitive deals, having the the ability to to deliver real-time, personalized touch points can be the differentiating factor in winning a new account or the business continuing to work with their existing health plan.

Scenario 3: retention and growth

Marketing’s roles evolving from focusing on demand generation to partnering with sales and service to help drive customer success, retention, and growth. In terms of growing your business, ensuring you retain your existing customer is just as important new customer acquisition. Marketing is uniquely positioned to solve for both.

Payers are leveraging marketing automation to build personalized post-sale journeys. First, we recommend starting off with a new employer on-boarding journey. Send your new employer’s HR team down a personalized journeys educating them about the plans and services you offer. Along the way you are tracking their engagement, you can see if they opened your email on the services you will offer their employees during open enrollment and see if they are actually clicking on links in your emails to learn more. You can leverage these engagement insights as early indicators on how a potential roll out of new health services will go at the organization.

Then, after the employer is onboarded, you can leverage marketing automation to manage ongoing education and provide updates on changes to your existing services and make your customers aware of new service offerings. By leveraging lead nurturing capabilities, marketing can now help drive ongoing employer engagement, keep employers up to date, and grow those relationships through targeted upsell campaigns.

What to do next?

The first step to driving more personalization and differentiation across your customer experience is some deep self reflection. Try white-boarding your current employer customer experience as it stands today. Map out each touch point employers have with you across the entire customer lifecycle. Get marketing, sales, and service involved.

From there map out what the ideal state would look like – whiteboard what would your customer experience look like in an ideal world. Then, identify where there are gaps, identify what are the quickest wins to improving the customer experience, and determine what are the most impactful long term changes you will need to make to get to your ideal state.

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to build your “ideal state” strategy, check out our e-book, The Healthcare and Life Sciences Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

How does a fancy resort getaway sound to you right now? Our customer, Inspirato, is a luxury hospitality company
 with over 400 branded and staffed luxury vacation homes. 

Inspirato has a membership business model that gains members access to an exclusive collection of luxury vacation homes, hotels, and resorts. At these locations, they experience one-of-a-kind luxury experiences, five-star personalized attention, and more. 

Growth is key to Inspirato’s success. From acquisition through retention, they’ve been able to innovate people, processes, and technology — all while maintaining their authentic brand experience. 

Whether or not a lavish vacation is in your near future, please feel free to imagine you’re sipping champagne poolside while you take in Inspirato’s marketing lessons for luxury and non-luxury brands alike:

Lesson #1: Using Data for Customer Acquisition

Insiprato’s first challenge came at launch in 2011. How would they achieve aggressive growth targets and stay profitable? The solution was to focus on the most fundamental goal for any new company: customer acquisition. To acquire great customers, Inspirato knew they needed to use the best data and most sophisticated data science to create highly-targeted acquisition audiences. 

This meant understanding their entire data asset landscape and pinpointing which data sources were strongest. In managing their data, Inspirato discovered that:

• List brokers are generally stagnant and questionable data sources
• Single-source data is good for segmentation and basic modeling
• Multi-sourced data is strongest and exposes you to virtually all data assets
• First-party data from CRM and previous campaigns yields important insights

Takeaway: Customer acquisition — fueled by data — is key to achieving growth.

Lesson #2: Aligning Marketing and Sales Teams

Inspirato is a luxury brand with an best-in-class service offering. For Inspirato’s B2C customers — vacationing couples and families — membership is a high-consideration purchase that is typically emotionally driven and inspired by awareness and understanding of the brand. For the company’s B2B customers — resorts, vendors, and real estate licensors — purchases tends to be rationally driven and based on sales volume and velocity. 

To succeed with both B2C and B2B audiences, Inspirato’s marketing and sales teams need to be aligned. To coordinate and elevate customer experiences across marketing communications, Inspirato uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. This has allowed the company to create a simplified, intuitive, and measurable process for accelerating volume and velocity. They use acquisition-targeting data science with digital interactions to qualify leads for sales
, and they give sales control over automated communications. They also keep this process consistent for late-stage opportunities.

With marketing and sales aligned, Inspirato saw:

• 300% cost decrease per quality lead acquired
• 4% click rate on emails
• 2x lead to opportunity rate

Takeaway: Marketing and sales alignment is essential for juggling the different needs of B2B and B2C customers.

Lesson #3: Creating a More Consistent Sales Process

Inspirato used to have a manic approach to selling. Sales revenue from new memberships would rise and fall, fluctuating wildly from month to month. 

The company knew they needed a more predictable, sustainable, and organized approach to quarterly sales, so they began launching new membership offers on a quarterly cycle. They also invested in smart, consistent branded lead generation materials with a “try it out!” message. Sales teams were also advised to talk about price integrity and offer a complimentary premium trip to new members. 

As a result of these strategies, Inspirato’s sales evened out and became highly predictable and sustainable. 

Takeaway: A consistent sales process can create a predictable rhythm for your pipeline. 

Lesson #4: Driving Better In-Market Development with Data

There was once a time when Inspirato’s approach to in-market development was fairly inefficient. They were having trouble identifying new market segments and weren’t sure which geographic areas they needed to focus their marketing spend on. 

The answer? Data science and marketing automation. Using these tools, Inspirato was able to zero in on the most potentially lucrative markets for their service offering. Data even allowed them to identify which townships and neighborhoods to focus on. 

For example, once learning that Chicago was a key market, they could pinpoint suburbs like Lake Forest and Hinsdale as areas with top prospects — and then send marketing emails (personalized via variable fields) to those prospects.

This new data-driven in-market development approach yielded a 25% increase in year-over-year net sales revenue and a 25% increase in overall profitability.

Takeaway: Data and marketing automation can help you identify the best potential new customers.

Lesson #5: Delivering Authentic Experiences to Customers

In any industry, the true key to success is knowing your customers. If you really understand your customers and what they want, you’ll be able to deliver branded experiences that are authentic to their identities and values.

As Inspirato is a luxury brand, the expectations of their customer base are extremely high. This customer segment is, in many ways, different than mass-market customers. They demand a higher level of quality and consistency. Brands must be able to match and exceed their expectations, or luxury customers will simply look elsewhere.

In the luxury vacation rental industry, the winning companies are those that invest in fundamentally authentic branded experiences for their customers. It all starts with being able to fully manage and control your services and experiences. 

To provide the most personalized and sophisticated experiences possible, Inspirato made sure to invest in cloud-connected customer service, onsite concierge, hospitality package, branded design, and safety and security systems. All of these different functions are connected throughout Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud, giving Inspirato a 360-degree view of customers and the ability to leverage data to deliver even better customer experiences.

As a result of this investment, Inspirato has reported an average guest satisfaction rating of 68, and a customer retention rate of 85%.

The Takeaway: No matter what your brand does, understanding your customers’ authentic selves will help you market successfully. 

Data Drives Success in Modern Marketing

In all industries and in all marketing, companies’ actions should revolve around customers’ needs and interests. Data can help you find and understand those customers, and today’s technology can help you engage them with authentic, relevant experiences like never before. 

Learn more about how marketers can respond to the changing landscape in this Trends & Tactics Driving Marketing ROI report.

When a customer unsubscribes from our email communications, we lose the ability to market to them, affecting everything from renewal reminders to cross-sell and upsell campaigns. This negatively impact the revenue our companies can generate from the account — potentially draining us of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Customers — especially existing customers — often unsubscribe when companies are sending too many emails, or too many with content that doesn’t resonate.

What if we could identify and remove which templates were triggering prospects to unsubscribe? Then we could eliminate the marketing assets that are putting our revenue at risk.

From email Reports to Unified Marketing Analytics

One of the challenges is that many modern email marketing tools don’t have a simple way to compare performance across multiple emails in a campaign.

However, an engagement studio journey might have eight different emails! Barring reviewing each template, one-by-one, it’s not easy for marketers to identify which templates are driving opt-outs. These report metrics are housed in different tabs, or in different locations, so understanding why some templates are driving opt-outs can be a precarious affair.

Enter B2B Marketing Analytics — a best-of-class analytics solution that allows marketers to get the insight they need to eliminate poorer-performing assets.

Identify revenue-Harming templates with b2B Marketing Analytics

One of the five out-of-the-box dashboards in B2B Marketing Analytics is the Engagement Dashboard. It’s designed to help marketers better track their marketing asset performance across campaigns and time periods.

Let’s say we’re running a campaign promoting the launch of our new expense management product. Rather than look at each of its email template discretely, we can look at the aggregate performance of templates within that campaign.

The opt-out rates for our emails in this campaign seem high. Let’s explore the data templates driving customers to unsubscribe.

Exploring Unsubscribe data

We know that subject lines typically drive unsubscribes, so let’s sort the sum of opt-outs by that.

Sum of opt-outs isn’t the only measure we need. After all, we might have sent 10x more emails with the first subject line compared to the second. We also need a measure of average opt-outs.

But that’s not the best visualization. Using the power of AI, Einstein provides us with recommendations for the best visualization for the data we’re exploring.

The top suggestion is a scatter plot. This is an ideal visualization when two quantitative measures have different scales.

From Analytics to Action

Here, we can identify the templates in the top-rightmost quadrant as being the leading causes for unsubscribes. The data tell us that we’re sending too many reminders for this campaign. So we ask our marketing manager to pull those templates from the engagement journey.

Make Data-Driven Decisions with B2B Marketing Analytics

Unsubscribers are a blight on revenue. Because they can’t be targeted by email, this negatively impacts their ability to be cross-sold, up-sold, or educated on a company’s products and services.

While it’s impossible for B2B marketers to create perfect campaigns, it’s critical for them to understand why their customers are unsubscribing.

Maybe it’s a disharmony between the audience and the offer. Maybe it’s the communication cadence. Maybe it’s the non-responsive HTML template. Maybe it’s because they’ve fallen out of love with a brand.

It’s impossible to know for certain. But with an integrated B2B analytics platform, marketers can start hypothesizing answers to these questions with data. Then — and only then — can they continue building email campaigns that engage, inspire, and drive revenue forward.

The financial sector is in the midst of a digital transformation that has unlocked incredible new opportunities for wealth managers to stand out in the crowded marketplace and build customer loyalty. With the power of marketing automation, wealth managers can nurture client relationships like never before.   

Through lead nurturing, wealth managers can take new leads from the awareness stage all the way through the sales cycle and engage them with relevant, personalized content over time. This capability is key to success in modern wealth management, as close client relationships matter now more than ever. 

Marketers use many different types of nurture programs across a variety of industries. There’s no limit to how many types of nurture programs wealth managers can use, but there are five in particular that every wealth manager should know about. 

1. Welcome Nurture

It’s always important to welcome new prospects with helpful information. In wealth management, audience education is a huge opportunity to both communicate value to your prospective customers and establish your brand as a go-to resource. Forty-nine percent of Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers say they‘re either not very knowledgeable or not knowledgeable at all about investments like bonds or mutual funds.

If someone new enters your database, put them on a targeted nurturing path based on the content they registered to access. This way, you can help them understand your financial products and wealth management business, and then lead them to engage further through CTAs that may be relevant to their interests.

2. Journeys Based on Form Completion

Prospects enter company databases because they’re interested in a specific piece of content — so why not nurture a relationship with them based on that content? If a new prospect seems interested in your branded content or one of your financial products, create an automated nurture path tailored to that content, product, or any related services you offer. 

For example, let’s say you’re sending an email about an e-book on mutual funds. If your audience clicks on the CTA to read the e-book, consider sending automated emails with more resources on mutual funds. This gives them even more information and opens up more pathways for them to engage with you on the topic if they want to. 

3. Thought Leadership

Thought leadership content is a great way for wealth managers to stay engaged with prospects and deliver information they’re likely to be interested in. If you have thoughts on wealth management or advice about investments, this is your opportunity to write blog posts and share your opinions with your audience. But if you don’t have the time or resources for that, you can also use third-party thought leadership articles and blog posts from other financial services organizations you admire. 

Wealth managers can use thought leadership content to instill confidence in clients and build their reputations as trusted strategic advisors during times of market volatility. Clients often get stressed out by financial news, but wealth managers can calm their nerves at scale with thought leadership nurture campaigns. 

4. Event Promotion and Follow-Up

Wealth management organizations can unlock many nurturing opportunities by holding an event, meeting, or webinar. Imagine holding an informative webinar called “All About Bonds.” You can gauge your audience’s interest in the event based on clicks in an early promotional email, and then continue to promote the event with content relevant to topics that will be covered at the event. After the event, you can follow up with more relevant content and gauge interest in future events on related topics. 

5. Client Onboarding and Ongoing Education

One of the great things about modern lead nurturing is that you can change the name of the sender of any given program. If you’re nurturing a prospect for a specific wealth management product or service you offer, you can make any advisor the ‘sender’ of that automated nurture program. This way, your marketing programs can build relationships for your advisors while they spend their time actively reaching out to customers. 

There are many different ways that wealth managers can use nurture programs, and we’ve just barely scratched the surface. When wealth management companies use marketing automation to deliver personalized experiences at scale, they’ll build lasting customer relationships and stand out from the financial services competition.

To learn more about lead nurturing and other marketing automation programs for wealth management, check out Pardot for Financial Services. 

It is often said, “a dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.” We all know a friendly dog can bring a smile to just about anyone, and it wouldn’t be Dreamforce without plenty of smiles.

Thus, back by popular demand, the Pawdot Puppies and our incredible Trailblazers from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International (SPCAI) will return to Dreamforce for a third consecutive year!

Mark your calendar and take a break from an action-packed Dreamforce schedule by stopping by to see the Pawdot Puppies!

When: Tuesday, November 19 and Wednesday, November 20th | 11:00am – 2:00pm
Where: Amber India, 25 Yerba Buena Ln, San Francisco, CA

SPCAI: Blazing Trails from Battlefield to Home

Sadly, there are many countries where animals roam the streets malnourished and mistreated. In these cases, animals are often seen more as a nuisance than a family member. Thanks to the SPCAIs global initiatives, the organization is making a dramatic impact on improving the lives of these animals.

Founded in 2008, the SPCAI’s Operation Baghdad Pups: Worldwide program rescues and reunites patriot pets with United States service members. While overseas in the Middle East, Central Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa, countless service members have befriended local stray animals, from dogs to cats and even a donkey. When a member of the US military’s service abroad is complete, they must leave their newfound friend behind.

The SPCAI’s program aims to eliminate this hardship for both the service member and the animal.

The Operation Baghdad Pups: Worldwide program brings these stray animals home to the United States to live with the service member that they have befriended. This amazing program has led to nearly 1,000 animals being rescued. During 2019 alone, the SPCAI has rescued more than 100 dogs and cats that have befriended US service members in countries including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait, reuniting them back in the United States upon return.

Beyond Operation Baghdad Pups: Worldwide, the SPCAI has several other programs aimed at changing the lives for animals in need. Operation Military Pets is focused on keeping military families together by providing financial assistance to transport a family pet. This helps mitigate extensive costs of relocation when ordered to a new base.

Since 2007 the SPCAI has supported over 350 global animal shelters and rescue groups by issuing grants and donating veterinary aid supplies. The support includes a partnership with multiple organizations providing veterinary care to more than 900 animals inside the Nuclear Exclusion Zone where the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident occurred. Millions of dollars of veterinary supply aid from the SPCAI has enabled organizations in developing countries to provide critical vaccines, pain medication, and antibiotics that save lives.

A Small Team with an Enormous Impact

So how does SPCAI support such important and expansive global animal rescue initiatives? Thanks to their digital fundraising efforts that are powered by Pardot, the SPCAI supports organizations in over 60 countries and is on track to deliver more than $500,000 in grants to shelters worldwide in 2019, their most ever.

Despite a small staff of only 8 employees operating strictly through donations and without government grants, the impact of the SPCAI’s programs is immense. Their staff uses Pardot as a valuable asset in expanding their reach, enabling growth of email marketing revenue in 2019 by 20%. They also leverage Pardot Engagement Studio to optimize segmentation, email targeting, and engagement experiences.

The SPCA’s lifesaving mission, in conjunction with the power of Pardot Engagement Studio, led the non-profit to one of their most successful holiday fundraising campaigns to date in December 2018. By creating an engagement path for their holiday campaign with 36 different touchpoints triggered by user actions, they saw a 42% increase in revenue over December 2017.

The organization continues to blaze trails with Salesforce Pardot, leveraging dynamic lists and engagement studio to build marketing automation programs that produce 120% ROI within 12 months on new lead acquisition targets, which leads to more animals being rescued and lives saved.

How You Can Help Salesforce and the SPCA International Support Animals in Need

This year, we are excited that the SPCAI will be back with plenty of adorable adoptable puppies for Dreamforce 2019.

For this two-day event, SPCAI will bring in dogs from local shelters from which they partner, providing Dreamforce attendees with the opportunity to interact and play with the dogs and learn more about the SPCAI’s programs. For those attendees looking to add a new family member, the animals are also available for adoption.

We already know that #DF19 will be the best one yet. Make sure you schedule time to stop by the Pawdot Puppy play pen so these adorable pups can give you a few licks and show you their tricks!

If you are looking to adopt an animal, please check out the SPCAI’s adoption page where animals living in places around the world can find a new home. If the work of the SPCA International resonates with you, learn more about how you can partner with them on this important, life-saving mission.

Almost two years ago, I sat on an excellent panel on the topic of Revenue Operations with Ben Howell, Head of Demand Generation at Salesforce, and Jason Helk, a Principal Consultant from Inverta at the Sales Hacker Revenue Summit conference in San Francisco. At the time, this was a new idea. What became clear to me as I listened to the audience’s response was profound: The proliferation of both data and sales and marketing technology tools had fundamentally lifted the role of the operations professional in a powerful way.

Marketing and Sales Operations leaders were finally in the driver’s seat and strategically positioned to lead Go-to-Market initiatives to drive growth in their businesses.

Having been a revenue marketer my entire career, and having spent more than 25 years dealing with fast-growing tech and data challenges, this was music to my ears. And so began the Journey to Revenue Operations, the theme of this year’s OpsStars conference. Now in its fourth year, this three-day event has become the largest standalone satellite event taking place alongside Dreamforce, November 19-21 in the beautiful city by the Bay, in San Francisco.

OpsStars: The Journey to Revenue Operations

According to SiriusDecisions (now part of Forrester), Revenue Operations breaks down the barriers between sales and marketing by “bringing the operational work of sales, marketing and customer success together under one roof.”

This new organizational model delivers a more holistic and unified go-to-market approach for business-to-business (B2B) enterprises that improves the buyer experience, accelerates revenue and fuels growth. In fact, SiriusDecisions’ research revealed that businesses with aligned revenue engines typically grow revenue 12 to 15 times faster than their peers and are 34 percent more profitable. Wow, those are impressive stats!

Hosted by LeanData, OpsStars has become the definitive community and conference for B2B sales, marketing, customer and revenue operations professionals. This year will bring together a record-setting 2,500+ operations leaders into one place for sharing best practices, career development and networking. Now in its fourth year, OpsStars continues to be all about the Ops professional, the strategic backbone of any meaningful GTM strategy for the fastest growing companies.

In designing the conference this year, we focused on sessions, keynotes and workshops drilling down on GTM and revenue-focused topics across people, process, technology and data. No surprise, we had to cut it off at 65 sessions. We have assembled best-in-class speakers and, in particular are delighted to welcome back Nate Skinner, VP Product Marketing for Pardot, among other thought leaders and Revenue executives for a not-to-be missed, content-rich program.

Centered around this year’s theme – Journey to Revenue Operations – OpsStars 2019 speakers will include many other executives, luminaries and thought leaders from leading B2B brands such as Verizon, ServiceMax, SiriusDecisions, G2, IBM, Outreach, Zoom, Forrester, RingCentral, GE, Okta, Xactly and Carbon Black (VMware).

OpsStars will also debut its inaugural OpsStars Awards program at this year’s event to celebrate key leaders and contributors in the operations community. Award winners and finalists will be recognized at a private gala the evening of November 20th.

Attendees at OpsStars 2019 will also have the opportunity to join the inaugural class of LeanData Certified Experts.

In addition, attendees are invited to help celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Women in Revenue organization at OpsStars. OpsStars is proud to host the Women in Revenue at OpsStars Reception on November 19th which will feature a panel discussion on “Advancing Your Career in Revenue.”

Be My OpsStars Guest!

Revenue Ops is here and the time is NOW. Dreamforce is an awesome week in November and we want to see you at OpsStars!!

Be my guest at #OpsStars. Sign up now and use the comp code PARDOT to get your free ticket! 

I hope to meet you all there.

#RevenueOps

Autumn’s about more than just pumpkin spice lattes and falling leaves. There’s another side to fall, full of goblins, ghouls, toil, and trouble.

But the terror isn’t limited to spooky season! If you work in sales and marketing, you’re faced with scary situations every day, like cross-functional misalignment. 

Leave the horror to Halloween and get rid of things that go “bump” in your inbox with these tricks — and treats — to boost marketing and sales alignment this spooky season.

Cut the bad blood.

Sales and marketing have been known to feud and compete for attribution and credit. But to achieve true success, both teams need to stop feeding on each other’s energy and learn to lift each other up instead of competing. 

Cultivate a culture of teamwork by aligning goals between sales and marketing — and making sure both departments know they’re on the same team. After all, sales and marketing want the same things: more closed deals and happier customers.

With everyone on the same page, your office will stop feeling like the set of a slasher film and start getting great results like boosted sales and higher customer satisfaction — not to mention happier employees.

Don’t get chills.

Without marketing and sales alignment, it’s easy for hot leads to go cold faster than a howling gale on All Hallow’s Eve. To keep your leads warm, be sure to solidify your process for transferring leads between marketing and sales. 

Clear communication and process are key to keeping a hot lead from falling through the cracks. An integrated, seamless platform makes it easy to manage leads and assign them to sales, marketing, or other associates throughout the lead nurturing process.

Avoid Franken-data.

Data may seem scary sometimes. Trying to piece together different metrics and numbers into actionable insights can be a tall order. But data holds truths about your business and your customers, and it’s an important piece of marketing and sales alignment — it’s all in how you use it and align it. Data helps you keep a close pulse on campaign performance and see what’s really working for both your sales and marketing teams, so you can do more of it.

Unified data is key to useable insights, but it can be hard to come by. In 2019, marketers are projected to use a median of 15 different data sources — yikes! Don’t let your cauldron bubble over with a toxic potions of mismatched data. Aligning your customer insights such as lead score, grade, and activity history will make sure that both sales and marketing have a consistent, 360-degree view of the customer. The best part? You can do it all in one seamless, integrated system with Pardot.

Through teamwork, smart lead management, and data alignment, your marketing and sales teams can make magic together and avoid spooky misalignment situations. 

Learn more about how Pardot can help your business come alive this Halloween and forever after.