Marketing Automation: Salesforce.com and Marketing Automation Episode 2

Marketing automation has been around for a few years now, but only until recently has other companies understood the true value of it. ExactTarget saw this value when it acquired Pardot in 2012 and Salesforce subsequently bought ExactTarget in 2013.

Alone, marketing automation is a great

tool to keep prospective leads thinking about your company, but the integration with Salesforce is what forges actionable data. Let me explain what I mean by “actionable data.”

Firstly, it is important to know that ExactTarget is designed for B2C/marketing-centric organizations and Pardot is for B2B/Sales-centric organizations. While they do similar things, they are done differently. For instance, with Pardot lead scoring is a feature that assigns a number value based on the quantity and type of interactions a prospect has (email opens, email clicks, form submissions, webpage visits). This feature is helpful for a B2B organization’s marketing team to automate the qualification of a lead and send it to sales. In a B2C organization, a traditional sales team does not typically exist. Instead, ExactTarget would be used to drive action to a website for a purchase/donation, a store, an event, etc.

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Having that said, ExactTarget, Pardot and most marketing automation platforms will update Salesforce with actions such as specific page views, email clicks and opens, form submissions with multiple fields, downloads, and other data. This actionable data allows sales and marketing to understand the prospect’s role within a company and their interest level. From there, the platform can then add automatically add the prospect to a campaign or notify sales and marketing.

Many great marketing automation platforms exist, but ExactTarget and Pardot are the only two that are owned by Salesforce. This makes the combination of Salesforce with either ExactTarget or Pardot a powerful platform. Since data will funnel into a single source, you can report on everything out of Salesforce.

Key Takeaways

• Reporting: create reports and dashboards that combine Salesforce and marketing automation data.
• Sales Enablement: arm sales with tools to track prospects and automate their qualification.
• Sales and marketing alignment: Automate the escalation of qualified leads to sales.

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Read the other episodes:

Episode 1: Auto What?
Episode 2: Salesforce.com + Marketing Automation
Episode 3: Pardot + Gmail
Episode 4: How to Nurture Leads