Salesforce launched two new tools for the Salesforce Pardot platform, both designed to help B2B marketers visualize campaign effectiveness and leverage adaptive lead nurturing tools.
Sales Cloud Engage, a mobile marketing tool intended to accelerate sales teams with marketing-approved messaging, is expected to be available by the end of April. Intelligent Engagement Studio, a tool designed to help marketing and sales teams create adaptive nurture campaigns with testing and reporting capabilities, is expected to be in pilot in the second half of 2015.
“It represents a major upgrade to Pardot capabilities, allowing the system to react to much more granular prospect behaviors than is practical using standard campaign flows,” said David Raab, Founder and Principal for Raab Associates. “The challenge is how to manage the added complexity, and Pardot is trying to do this with the visualization and proactive recommendations features.”
Being able to have the insight into what a prospect is interested in, combine that with where they are in the sales funnel and serve up relevant content is always the goal, according to Cari Baldwin, President of BlueBird Strategies. “The key here is it has to be easy for the marketer to set up and test, to make sure that the system is behaving the way it was intended. And of course, companies need to have enough of the right content to be able to accommodate the different scenarios.”
The Sales Cloud Exchange is designed to help get relevant content in front of prospects earlier in the decision process so that sales can have more productive conversations, according to Michael Fauscette, Group VP of Software Business Solutions for IDC.
“At the same time the product tracks the interactions and helps refine the activities to be more successful,” Fauscette added in a recent interview with Demand Gen Report. “It keeps sales and marketing aligned, helps get better leads into the hands of the sales people, and once they have the lead it helps the sales people engage earlier which increases the likelihood of closing a deal.”
Intelligent Engagement Studio will position users to act on both behavioral marketing and sales stage data to enhance nurturing capabilities. The new tool also comes with visualized campaign testing and reporting, intended to give users a holistic viewof campaign performance and post-campaign results.
“With the next generation of Sales Cloud B2B marketing automation, we’re making it easier than ever for marketing and sales to work together and leverage insights about prospect behavior to sell smarter,” said Adam Blitzer, SVP and GM, Salesforce Pardot. “Marketers now have the ability to help sales nurture their own pipelines and engage with prospects in real time, and this is driving the amazing customer momentum we are seeing with B2B marketing automation.”
