The popular and highly anticipated “True to The Core” sessions were transformed into a monthly live broadcast, the first took place in July of this year. I love True to The Core (TTTC), and was looking forward to the first ever Pardot specific session, which took place yesterday.
“True to the Core Live is where we connect you with product teams to hear what they’re working on and to get answers to your roadmap questions” – Scott Allen, Salesforce
TTTC proved a popular concept because it fosters transparency with questions asked live from the audience (meaning the product managers potentially have some tricky topics to answer!)
We got a flavour in the first TTTC Live session – check out the background to TTTC here:
What are the top priorities for the Pardot product management leaders? What obstacles are they trying to overcome? What’s on the roadmap for specific features? This is a summary of what was covered, including the answers to some burning questions!
The speakers this month are all in the driving seat for the Pardot product:
- Meredith Brown – VP, Product Management: oversees the whole Pardot product management,
- Cari Aves – Sr. Director, Product Management: heading up the Orchestration & Personalization product program,
- Nathan Maphet – Director, Product Management: has a background as a developer, so is focused on Pardot as a connected platform, mainly revolving around the Pardot API but also including connectors and security/authentication.
What Are Your Top Priorities?
The first question asked each of the leaders their top priorities for the next year and beyond – a great way to frame the session. Bound by the limitations of time and resources, the product managers have to make some tough prioritization decisions.
Meredith Brown
- ABM: account-based marketing is a core differentiator/value sell for Pardot. Pardot will continue to build out account-level functionality, for example, the pilot for accounts as campaign members will be coming soon (as opposed to the individual prospect level, which has always been the case with Pardot),
- Pardot Einstein at the account level, ie. account trends.
- Builders: working on the builders to improve/orchestrate content building processes.
Cari Aves
- Builders: drag and drop building experience, eg. Lightning email builder. An improved landing page builder coming soon!
- Extensible automations: ie. using external activities within Pardot automation,
- Personalization: improving personalization, particularly with CRM data (making more Salesforce data available in Pardot) and also external data.
Nathan Maphet
- Login/security: eg. user migration effort that has been ongoing with Salesforce user sync and user management moving to Salesforce.
- Pardot Lightning App: making it the single place to use and admin Pardot.
- Pardot API: opening up Pardot to the AppExchange.
- Investments on the core platform (ie. investing time and resource into the shared Lightning platform services).
What do you want to work on, but can’t?
As Pardot moves onto the core Salesforce platform any developments become ‘coupled’ which involves the shared platform services. These efforts involve many teams, and when items are dictated by the joint roadmap, end up taking priority. This can mean Pardot only features sometimes have to be delayed, some you will find are mentioned here:
Nathan Maphet
- The “ankle biters” with the Salesforce-Pardot connector eg. creating state and city picklist in Salesforce and having to recreate in Pardot.
- Handling large volumes of data: how the connector can handle very large amounts of data that customers want to work with.
Cari Aves
- User experience: especially around Engagement Studio.
- Conditional completion actions: yes, they are very aware they’ve put this off and wish they could deliver!
Meredith Brown
Once the builder enhancements are done, the product development can get to the orchestration/user experience enhancements – which she is looking forward to seeing!
Best Questions: roadmaps, future of the prospect object, Pardot Einstein licensing & more drag and drop builders
What’s on the roadmap for campaigns?
The Salesforce campaign object has now become the starting block for all Pardot marketers. There have been several additions to the campaign object in the past few releases (eg. Engagement History Dashboard for Accounts) but Pardot recognise more needs to be done to accounts to make doing ABM with Salesforce feel more natural.
Coming up on the roadmap for accounts we have:
- Add accounts as campaign members,
- Campaign deep clone: when users copy a Salesforce campaign, all related marketing asset (emails, forms, landing pages, marketing links, snippets objects) will be carried across to the new version,
- Campaign as a workspace: enhance the campaign user experience to be a hub for end-to-end campaign creation, eg. setting targets, creating assets with the new integrated builders, reporting.
Pardot Native Connectors – accurate attribution?
What is the future for the Pardot native connectors? I wanted to know if connectors like the Google Ads connector for Pardot will be revamped, and if so, how that would get us closer to accurate attribution.
What’s great to hear is that the recent work on the Pardot API will pave the way for AppExchange (third-party vendors) apps to fulfill these needs. In other words, rather than revamping the native connectors, the vision is to use AppExchange apps instead.
What’s next for the email builder – and other builders?
2020 has been the year of many things, fortunately, one good thing to have happened is the consolidation of email builders across the Salesforce platform.
The drag and drop Lightning email builder has reduced multiple builders across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and of course, Pardot.
‘Packaging’ email templates
There was mention of the ability to ‘package’ email templates, which can then be used across the other Salesforce ‘clouds’ and leveraged in Salesforce automation (Flow, workflow rules).
You may have guessed where this is heading – ‘packaging’ Pardot email templates means they can be used as notifications. There were strong hints at customizable Pardot notifications!
Support for Apple Mail:
There are some Pardot users that have noticed that some aspect of the new email builder doesn’t support Apple Mail. As we know, there are nuances between email clients – the product team have recognised this and are working on it!
Drag-and-drop landing page builder:
The new Pardot landing page builder is in the works, “coming soon”. A new builder that mirrors the Lightning email builder will be celebrated!
Engagement Studio
Sending multiple emails at specific dates/times
In other words, set an email to send at an exact time. While there isn’t anything in the immediate roadmap, there is mention of skipping straight to more sophisticated scheduling – one day, Einstein Send Time Optimisation, currently a Marketing Cloud feature, could be made available to Pardot Einstein customers.
Any A/B testing enhancements?
There are no enhancements are planned in the immediate roadmap, however, it’s a key item in the backlog for Engagement Studio!
What’s the future of the prospect object?
Again, with Pardot moving onto the core Salesforce platform, I was always wondering what would happen to the prospect object. It made sense, when I thought about it initially, to do away with the prospect object and have Pardot work with the lead/contact record.
Luckily, the team could disclose their thought processes, on “where does the prospect object fit into the bigger picture?”, which includes Customer 360 Audiences and external applications. Lots of things to consider in the architecture, no doubt! Some Pardot customers want to maintain a separation between prospect and lead/contact as a ‘holding area’ before sending them to sales. There is no concrete decision on this yet as the team weighs up the options.
Will Pardot Einstein ever be included as standard?
I wanted to find out if Pardot Einstein will be included with other editions (currently only available with Advanced edition) in order to increase adoption of Pardot Einstein. Do they envision it will be the norm to have AI capabilities in all Pardot accounts?
This is what happened with two Sales Cloud Einstein features, with the following becoming free to all Salesforce customers: Einstein Search, Einstein Opportunity Scoring.
The response is that they have discussed it and are considering opening up the earlier Pardot Einstein features (eg. Einstein Behaviour Scoring) to the lower editions, potentially next year. This will be a big boost for Pardot Einstein usage, and could become a key competitive advantage for Pardot. New/future Pardot Einstein features (eg. Einstein Account Identification) will remain in the higher editions, to begin with. None of this is confirmed but is exciting nevertheless!
What’s on the roadmap for the Pardot API?
The Pardot API V5 is on its way which involved a complete rebuilding of the Pardot API using modern best practices. There will be more Pardot objects available via the API (namely the newer marketing asset objects) and will use asynchronous methods, which is best for performing actions such as exporting large amounts of data (because other processes aren’t halted while the process completes, which is the case in synchronous methods).
When will conditional completion actions become available?
Conditional completion actions is one of the most requested idea for the Pardot roadmap. This is wrapped up in ‘extensibility’ for automation, which is why there may be dependencies placed on its delivery. Sadly no timeline to report, but people have started on the technical designs already.
What is the one feature you want everyone to use, but they’re not?
Meredith: Pardot Einstein, especially Einstein Behavior Scoring.
Cari: Connected campaigns – not only do they simplify the user experience, but they are also the building block for new features as Pardot are only building on the Salesforce platform.
Nathan: authenticate API into Salesforce. This update was critical to the Pardot API strategy, ie. to open up the potential for AppExchange apps to Pardot.
Summary
You can see now why I love True to The Core, and why considered this first ever Pardot specific session unmissable!
If you want to hear more about the future of Pardot, make sure you attend the roadmap session at ParDreamin’ this week.
Keep up to date on future TTTC broadcasts by joining the Trailblazer Community group.
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