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Pardot Roadmap & Dreamforce

 

I recently attended Dreamforce (with 170,000 others)  – the Salesforce annual conference in San Francisco.  They booked a band…  a small Irish group called U2 that kicked off about 40 years ago. While this was clearly a highlight of the conference, I also picked up a few key things from the sessions worth sharing.

If I worked for Salesforce, this is the moment I would put the Safe Harbour statement up.  They are talking about a lot of great things described below.  Some will come quickly, some little bit slower and some may not turn up.

Einstein

The theme running through the whole conference is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the Salesforce platform.  This will emerge through all aspects of salesforce from the Sales Cloud (CRM),  Service Cloud and everything else.  Pardot will also reap the benefits.

To get a greater understand of Einstein and its potential  – Click Here.

Here are some of the key items identified on the Pardot Roadmap.

Engagement Studio

Have you built your first Engagement Studio programs yet?  

Some of the enhancements coming include:

  • Chatter within engagement studio
  • Einstein. There will be a blue ring appearing in your nurtures.  This is Einstein grabbing your attention with an insight. The insight could be around an underperforming asset. In this case it not only identifies the poorly performing asset, but also suggests an option for improvement which you can put in place with a few clicks
  • Program versioning (winter release) –  start new version and add comments identifying the change.
  • Program looping – this could be ideal for a renewal process
  • Scheduling – pick a particular date you want an email to be sent on
  • Reduced wait times (less than a day)

Campaign Alignment

Pardot campaigns are to become aligned with Salesforce campaigns. This change is still at least six months away (it seems from reading between the lines) but will be welcome when it comes.  

This will allow for far better communication as well as opening up a whole lot more reporting and analytics options via Salesforce including stronger campaign influence and multi touch attribution.

Wave for B2B Marketing

This is coming any day now and will add a whole lot more functionality to your reporting (often asked for in Pardot) and enable to you to take third party data and run it against your Pardot data for even greater insights.

When Wave meets Einstein it will strengthen your ability to:

  • Discover insights (identify top campaigns)
  • Predict outcomes (which channels will bring the most pipeline)
  • Recommend next best actions (audience and content)
  • Automate tasks (execute right away)

You can read more about this here:  Click Here

Salesforce Engage

No doubt you have already heard about Engage.  It allows sales reps to send personalised emails at scale within Salesforce using marketing curated templates. Reps get real time alerts and so can get in touch faster.  It has Salesforce1 and Gmail integration.

Enhancements to Engage on the way include:

  • Outlook and Office 365 integration
  • Email template region locking (allowing you to maintain branding and legal disclaimer etc)
  • Engage fully supported in lightening.
  • Improved process building emails with easier swapping in and out templates etc
  • Engage reports for sales teams including alerts geared for team selling so team members can get updates.

And More..

Other enhancements coming include:

  • Email opt in and opt out options
  • Simplified email navigation
  • Dynamic content in subject lines
  • Greater control in dynamic messaging when coming from a general user
  • Reposting of social posts

Pardot is getting stronger and stronger.  Let us know if we can help you to get more out of it.