Salesforce Updates Further Blur The Line Between Marketing And Sales

May 11, 2016
Written by Brian Anderson
Published in News Briefs

The convergence of marketing and sales for a holistic view of the customer was the key theme at Salesforce Connections 2016, where Salesforce executives unveiled that its Marketing Cloud has received the Lightning update to provide a consistent user experience across all of its cloud solutions.

Released last year as an update for the Sales and Service Cloud offerings, Salesforce Lightning provides a simple, drag-and-drop user interface designed to simplify the execution of campaigns, while also providing deeper insight into how customers are engaging with the user’s brand. New Lightning components allow users from every aspect of the business — marketing, sales and service — to view the complete customer journey.

“The always-connected customer doesn't care if they are talking to a marketer, sales or service rep,” said Scott McCorkle, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, during his opening keynote at the event. “They want to make sure their questions and needs are met when and where they want it.”

Salesforce Pardot also launched the new features to its Salesforce Lightning components, enabling B2B sales teams to gain better visibility into their company’s marketing campaigns and better engage with prospective customers in a relevant and contextual way.

To further enable sales reps, prospect engagement data (such as a whitepaper download or email open) will be viewable through a Lightning component to provide deeper insight into what prospective customers have engaged with in the past. This can enhance further engagement by arming sales reps with relevant and contextual information.

The new features also provide prospect engagement alerts that automatically notify a salesperson when one of their prospects is showing interest. This enables sales reps to have more control over the leads they are receiving, while also providing tools to allow sales teams to nurture prospects with marketing-approved content and report on the impact directly within Salesforce or their email client.

“This positions sales reps to control the process of pushing leads into nurture tracks,” said Shannon Duffy, CMO of Salesforce Pardot, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. She added that this can help users “bridge the gaps between marketing and sales to work in tandem to give the ultimate customer experience.”

Other new features announced during the event include:

Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match: A new integration with Google’s Customer Match API designed to help marketers deploy CRM-powered advertising across Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.
Email Studio: This new email marketing solution enables marketers to accelerate email campaign creation and leverage predictive intelligence content blocks to maximize email relevancy and boost ROI.
Multiple-Product Scoring: Companies can now score leads for each individual product they offer, allowing marketing and sales teams to anticipate what the prospect needs next, deliver relevant offers to every prospect and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.