Dreamforce News: Pardot, Einstein and Lightning Are Joining Forces

The news from the B2B Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce this year can more or less be summed up in three

3 min. read

The news from the B2B Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce this year can more or less be summed up in three words: Pardot, Einstein and Lightning. That’s right, Salesforce's layer of artificial intelligence is coming to its B2B marketing automation solution — which, in turn, will finally be available in the company’s next-generation user experience. Together, these tools will power marketers to be more productive, reach new audiences and better collaborate with sales reps.

For those who are too busy to watch the whole recording, here are our key takeaways.

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Pardot Einstein

In the past, we’ve covered Einstein's ability to prioritize opportunities that are most likely to convert and predict consumer engagement with email and web campaigns. Pardot Einstein will allow you to do similar things for your marketing automation efforts, while also bringing some cool new features.

Chat Bots

Here’s a sample workflow that will probably get you pretty excited. Using Ad Studio, your business delivers ads for a new product across LinkedIn. An interested user clicks one and is taken to a Pardot landing page that features a chat bot powered by Einstein. Because this bot was immediately fed a ton of information by Ad Studio, it already knows who this user is, who she works for and what she’s interested in. The bot uses this information to unearth her particular business needs, capture her contact info and automatically follow up with an email. Voilà! A new lead.

And this is a bit of a sidebar, but totally awesome: If you’re using Engagement Studio to nurture your leads, you won’t have to build out programs any longer. Instead, you’ll be able to draw a quick sketch of your buyer’s ideal journey and upload a picture of it — Einstein will build the program for you.

Behavior Scoring and Insights

With Einstein behavior scoring and insights in Pardot, you’ll be able to see which of your audiences are interacting with which kinds of content. For instance, you might learn that IT leaders in the manufacturing industry open your emails at a much higher rate than you would have expected — especially in your Western region. Their behavior score, in fact, ranks almost as high as any other segment. Knowing this, you can create hyper-targeted content designed to further engage these people in your business and its offerings.

Also worth noting is the fact that behavior scores will update automatically: “Previously, marketers would need to write new rules to increase potential prospects’ scores based on the actions they take. Now, when a prospect interacts with one of your campaigns, Einstein will update their score for you.”

Voice

Einstein Voice will allow Pardot users to ask their platform questions and immediately receive the answers they’re looking for. In the keynote, for example, the presenter asked a demo version of a customer’s org, “What are the top three marketing channels for the cloud and on-premise business units?” and got a visual breakdown of the data in return. For those who spend a lot of time digging through reports and dashboards, this feature is going to be a game changer.

Pardot in Lightning

The main advantages of Pardot in Lightning? You can now do 100% of your B2B marketing in Salesforce, leading to greater productivity. You can configure Lightning’s navigation based on what’s most important to you, things like marketing pipeline health and revenue by segment. And you can create custom campaign dashboards and reports that are are also visible to your sales reps — which means they’ll better understand what your team brings to the table. In fact, that was a key theme throughout the keynote: Pardot in Lightning will enable greater alignment between sales and marketing.

It makes sense though, right? You’ve got a ton of great data available in Pardot — everything from the content that a given persona is most likely to interact with to the most common journeys prospects take on their way to becoming a lead. That data could prove very valuable to your salespeople, so of course you want them to have it. Pardot in Lightning makes it possible.

Whenever you do find the time, we recommend watching the full keynote — the demos alone make it worthwhile. And if you’re curious to learn more about what Pardot could do for your business, let us know. We’d love to help you think through some of these new features.

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Danielle Sutton