Marketers

Dreamforce ‘18 Pardot Keynote: A Complete Guide

By Lucy Mazalon

Pardot fans eagerly awaited the B2B Marketing product keynote. The keynote titled: ‘B2B Marketing on the World’s #1 CRM’ took place on day 3 of Dreamforce, and never fails to reveal the future of Pardot; a sneak peek into new features, and how to leverage innovative cross-cloud product within Pardot.

This year, Pardot showcased its cutting-edge future with the help of two flagship customers: Lyft Business and VMware. Both respected brands in their own spaces, and interestingly approached Pardot with different strategic goals – sales support in B2B2C adoption and diversifying existing customer accounts with new services, respectively. This meant Pardot were able to fully pack the two demos with a sweeping selection of Salesforce products.

Overwhelming? Yes. Exciting? Most certainly!

The electric session lasted approximately 50 minutes, with the full recording hosted on Youtube.

Admittedly, it took me a few days to dissect the almost hour-long Keynote, but here is the result – a complete guide to the 6 keynote show-stoppers!

Single View is Everything

I always fancied playing keynote bingo. It would be fun to predict which buzzwords come up and tick them off as part of this game…maybe next year!

I had my bets placed on integration-related phrases coming up, such as: ‘single view of the customer’ or ‘360 degree view’, with the launch of the Customer 360 concept (Salesforce’s ultimate vision for integrated CRM) and Integration Cloud. No wonder this become a key thread of Pardot’s message too.

Why is Customer 360 and system integration is so key for Marketers? It’s crunch time to get systems smoothed out if we have any hope of fully leveraging analytics, AI, or ABM. The core 3 all rely on quality data across integrated platforms.

 

 

The release of Pardot for Lightning ties in nicely. It’s “the single experience aligning sales and marketing like never before”, the presenter said with genuine excitement. This is a pivotal moment for Pardot as a product – even by embedding Pardot in Lightning, and therefore aligning the user experience with Sales Cloud, Pardot is securing its legitimacy as a Salesforce product.

 

Switch from Sales Cloud to Pardot rapidly via the Lightning App Switcher. It’s a win for both sales & marketing teams, for both productivity, visibility and mutual understanding!

Read more: First Look at the Pardot Lightning App: highlights, changes & improvements

Marketing Analytics Avalanche

Every marketer is a sucker for good analytics. Reporting in Pardot has long been criticised as being too simplistic and inflexible. Pardot have responded loud and clear with an Analytics avalanche.

Moving the B2B Marketing Analytics platform mainstream* was a big driver. Pardot chose to show off the best of B2B analytics with ABM use cases, namely:

Marketing Pipeline Health Dashboard

 

‘Account Whitespace’ Dashboard

A geo representation, that maps closed vs. open pipeline (left), and ‘Discover New Opportunities by Account’ predictive analytics, displayed as a heat-map matrix (right).

 


‘Pipeline by Account’ by Intent

Open opportunities, filtered by intent ie. what they are searching for (seen in the dropdown selection in the image below). Intent is an elusive measurement that signals buying behavior – of course, every marketer wants to get their hands on that!

 

This is by no means an extensive list of the featured Analytics – read on for more Analytics!

*B2B Marketing Analytics is available with Plus and Advanced editions.

 

Pick ‘n Mix of AI-Driven Marketing Features (Einstein)

From my counting, there were no less than 9 AI features shown in the demos. It got to the point where I was losing track of what functionality belong to which Einstein product, and further, which Einstein product is Sales Cloud, Pardot, or cloud agnostic. Here is my count:

  • Einstein Campaign Insights (Pardot)
  • Einstein Account Insights (Sales Cloud)
  • Einstein Discovery (Analytics Cloud)
  • Einstein Behavior Score (Pardot)
  • Einstein Predictive Lead Score (Sales Cloud)
  • Einstein Opportunity Score (Sales Cloud)
  • Einstein Canvas (Pardot)
  • Einstein Bots (mainly Service Cloud, but an add-on for others)
  • Einstein Voice (TBD)

I’m not going to go into detail on every one of these, just the two standouts!

Einstein Discovery for Marketers

Einstein Discovery aims to uncover actionable insights from your CRM data, using data modeling to draw correlations and make predictions. Its core ethos is that AI predictions should explain its predictions in a user-friendly way. Up until now, Einstein Discovery was positioned for sales users, now we see it breaking into the marketing team. Marketing next best actions can now be generated based on past key influencing marketing touch points (first, last touch etc.) that have led to success.

The Einstein Discovery component the Account page clearly explains why this account should be targeted, based on a good industry, lead source and country match in this demo account. You’ll see the “How to improve this” section, which shows a very specific next best action – even going as detailed as what persona/content type would stick best eg. IT directors with Thought Leadership Content.

 

Einstein Campaign Insights

As Einstein Discovery is for discovering insights at the account-level, then Einstein Campaign Insights addresses next best action and insights, at the campaign level.
Details insights from campaign results, per audience, for example: “These prospects have an email open rate of 73%, which is 22% higher than average”. It can shed light on personas you had no idea were engaging with content.

We were also treated to seeing the ‘Einstein Insight’ component making a recommendation for which Engagement Studio Program the lead would best be suited for, based on the data pulled in by the Landing Page Chatbot (more on this later!).

 

Conversational Marketing: now we’re talking!

Some time ago, I predicted Conversational / Voice-command Marketing would break into the Salesforce Marketing world and earn its place on the Hype Cycle.

Sure enough, voice as a marketing channel is on it’s way. Even though Einstein Voice was only announced a week prior to Dreamforce, the marketing use cases were shown in full swing. Einstein Voice has a two-sided approach, transforming both how brands communicate with customers, and how users adopt the CRM.

Chatbots: Power to Pardot Landing Pages

The power of Einstein Bots can increase the rate and speed of prospect conversions when placed on Pardot Landing Pages. Here’s why.

The majority of Prospect data was prefilled, thanks to LinkedIn being the referring channel, in this case. A highly engaging interface asks questions, such as “What is your top Business Travel Priority?” – marketing gold when fed straight into the Salesforce lead record! The Presenter pointed out that this prospect did not fill any form fields… could this be the beginning of the end for forms?


As I mentioned in before, thanks to the data pulled in by the Landing Page Chatbot, ‘Einstein Insight’ can take over and recommend which Engagement Studio Program the lead would best be suited for, visible in a component on the lead record.

 

Einstein Voice for Marketing Analytics

The tagline “have a conversation with your data” says it all. A complex question was asked and captured by the Einstein Voice component on the Marketing Analytics Dashboard. After rapidly processing the question, it pulled up relevant charts that answered the question visually.
See demo: 45:00

 

 

Pardot Business Units

I jumped out of my seat in shock when Business Units came up. Up until now, Pardot has lacked a business unit feature, unlike Marketing Cloud, it’s B2C counterpart. This meant data sharing, asset access and other account organisation was a reoccurring challenge for large enterprise customers.

 

Pardot Business Unit was shown as a pop-up in the Salesforce utility bar. When one business unit was selected, the Engagement History activity was filtered within the sidebar component. The presenter did hint at an end to needing duplicate prospect to control visibility across business units.

See demo: 42:00

Salesforce Pardot Dreamforce Keynote - Pardot Business Units

 

Einstein Canvas

In an age of working smart, Einstein Canvas is supercharging Engagement Studio. In short, the ‘picture-to-program’ technology turns your scribbles into an Engagement Studio Program, by simply clicking the “Upload an image of Engagement Studio Logic’ button. I’m not sure what technology this is using, perhaps it’s Einstein Vision image recognition technology.

Nice touch, Pardot.

See demo: 30:00

Pardot Dreamforce 2018 - Einstein Canvas

Content Mentioned in this Post

Announcing Customer 360: Salesforce’s Ultimate Vision for Integrated CRM

First Look at the Pardot Lightning App: highlights, changes & improvements

The Salesforce Marketing Automation Hype Cycle – An Interpretation

Introducing Einstein Voice – now we’re really talking AI!

 

 

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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