Dreamforce 2018 was a whirlwind of technology, innovation, networking and fun! If the week taught us anything, it’s that now, more than ever, is an amazing time to be a B2B marketer.

On Thursday, September 27th, Pardot took the stage with Lyft Business and VMware to discuss what it means to be a B2B marketer in the Age of Intelligent Marketing. We explored challenges that B2B marketers are facing, debuted incredible product innovations across ABM, AI and analytics, and learned how to drive awareness and grow pipeline with Pardot through the eyes of our customer Trailblazers.

Here are the top 5 takeaways from the Pardot Product Keynote at #DF18:

1. Marketing is the “New Quarterback”

We kicked off the Keynote with a video featuring the marketing team from VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology. Nick King, Caitlyn Potter, and Chris Grillone showed us how their team used Pardot to launch 14 new product services in just 90 days.

Nick and his team also told us that their success with Pardot has made marketing the “New Quarterback” at VMware. Their team launched a movement within the company to take the skills and technologies they developed from this launch and apply it to all parts of the business.

Talk about Trailblazers!

2. The Customer Success Platform: A 360° View of the Customer

Mike Kostow, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Pardot, introduced the challenges facing many B2B marketers today: a lack of alignment across sales and marketing.

For many teams, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has led to an increase in the number of sales and marketing channels used to reach customers. But because of siloed data, disconnected apps, and differing KPIs, these teams are working independently without a complete view of their customer.

Enter: The Customer Success Platform. With Salesforce, our customers can get a complete 360° view of their buyer — a single source of truth across sales, marketing and service. This level of alignment is crucial for teams looking to achieve success in the Age of Intelligent Marketing.

3. Pardot in Lightning: Sales and Marketing on a single platform

Maureen Maggioni, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Pardot, talked with Samantha Goldman, Head of Marketing at Lyft Business. Samantha shared how Lyft Business partners with companies to design transportation solutions that create amazing experiences for customers. To do this at scale, they needed a marketing solution that was fast and easy to use.

Samantha’s team uses Pardot to drive awareness, engagement and adoption across all of their different customer segments, industries and personas. With Pardot, they now have a complete view of their customers and can align with their sales team to approach the right customers with the right message at the right time.

Kyle Skibbe, Director of Product Management at Pardot, walked us through how the Lyft team will be able to build on their sales and marketing alignment with our newest product announcement: Pardot in Lighting! Pardot in Lightning is the next step towards efficiency and ease of use for Salesforce customers as marketing and sales teams are united across a single platform experience.

4. Increase productivity with Einstein for B2B marketers

Maureen also spoke with Nick King, VP of Cloud Marketing at VMware. His team needed a way to target the right accounts and boost marketing productivity — after all, they only had 90 days to launch 14 new product lines!

With Salesforce and Pardot, the VMware team saw a 641% ROI after just 3 months! They were able to understand how to engage the right accounts and understand how to successfully introduce these new services to grow pipeline and close deals faster.

Productivity was obviously very important to Nick and his team. And thankfully at Salesforce, we have our own productivity partner, Salesforce Einstein. At Dreamforce, Pardot announced that Einstein is now available for B2B marketers!

Meredith Brown, VP of Product Management at Pardot, showed us how B2B marketers can take their data to new heights with Einstein Lead Scoring, Einstein Campaign Insights and Einstein Voice.

With Einstein Lead Scoring, Einstein surfaces top insights that highlight which leads have a higher propensity to buy. Einstein Campaign Insights helps identify top performing campaigns as well as new target audiences that have been overlooked. And with Einstein Voice, B2B marketers can actually ask Einstein how campaigns are performing and have real-time conversations with their data.

5. Business is a Platform for Change

For us at Salesforce, it’s not just about doing well — it’s about doing good. We believe that business is the platform for change, which is why we invest in our 1:1:1 model and encourage other companies to do the same.

The Trailblazers at Lyft also give back by partnering with the American Cancer Society. They use their business as a platform for change by providing free rides to help cancer patients get to and from treatment. To date, Lyft has given over 30,000 free rides across 13 cities.

During our Keynote, we were thrilled to partner with Lyft to give back to the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people who face cancer. If you would also like to give back to this amazing organization, visit cancer.org/lyft.

Watch to the full Pardot Product Keynote to see our latest product innovations in action. And make sure to register for our upcoming webinar, Trailblazer Takeaways: B2B Marketing Inspiration from Dreamforce 2018!

In today’s digital, connected world, audiences can find virtually anything they want whenever they want it. They have little patience for sifting through irrelevant content to find what they’re looking for.

Brands know that to grab the attention of their audiences, they must meet them where they’re at. This means creating personalized, cross-channel experiences that make it easy to find and engage with your brand.

Grabbing the attention of your audience is only one part of the equation, however. How do you hold that attention once you have it? Here are three ways to be sure you capture and hold attention.

Address the distraction factor.

It’s easier than ever for brands to connect with their customers wherever and whenever, but it also means audiences are more easily distracted. With so many choices at their fingertips, who could blame them? Ninety percent of the world’s data was produced in the last two years alone. That’s more content and data than any of us could ever possibly consume.

It’s no longer enough for brands to generate content, pump it out via all their channels, and hope it makes an impression. What if — instead of vying for that fleeting moment of attention — your brand could hold your audience’s attention, leave a lasting memory, and never have to worry whether they know who you are again?

This is a whole new level of customer experience that marketers today are struggling to figure out. Those that are, though, are cutting through the noise and winning loyal customers.

Brands that want to not only stand out from this distraction environment — or distraction economy — but also stand above it, have to balance it with an experience economy.

“The distraction economy has to be counterbalanced with an experience economy.” – Nate Skinner, Vice President of Product Marketing, Salesforce Pardot

Connect content to experience.

We all know that effective customer experiences begin with meaningful connections. They must be timely, cross-channel, and so relevant to your customer that they feel enticed to engage with your brand, instead of someone else’s.

The ability to foster lasting connections relies on having a meaningful brand as a foundation. This means making sure of two things:

• That the different areas of your business are aligned around a shared voice and set of values, so that the brand you present is seamless, consistent, and recognizable — just like the customer experiences you want to create.
• That the personalized content and experiences you create always connect back to your brand and that each individual interaction feels like part of a larger experience.

A simple way of thinking about this is to imagine your brand as a map where each part of the business and the brand is connected to each other — and by navigating the map, audiences can visit different components without ever leaving the brand as a whole. For example, each year, the Dreamforce campus is laid out in a way that guides people to the areas and events that make most sense for them, but always within a larger experience of Dreamforce as a whole.

Nate Skinner, Vice President of Product Marketing at Pardot, applies this same approach to content. When marketers create personalized journeys, they should create them within the larger context of fostering a relationship between customers and the brand as a whole.

Memorable experiences earn customer loyalty.

Why go through all this careful planning to make sure customer experiences and brand are always connected? From the moment a prospect hits your website to the minute they make a purchase, everything they engage with should be connected, because, according to Nate Skinner, “That ultimately creates an experience which is more memorable, and memories are what create loyalty now.”

If you create experiences your customers will remember, your brand will be better positioned to succeed in today’s experience economy. 

Ask yourself, is the content I offer my customers connected to an experience that leaves a memory?

Dive deeper into this topic with Nate Skinner, Randy Frisch, and Anna Hrach over at The Content Experience Show podcast from Convince & Convert: Listen to their entire conversation to learn more about using memorable experiences to earn customer loyalty.

You want to show your leader the metrics that prove your B2B marketing efforts are going well. But let’s face it, your CEO is a busy person and may not have the time to sift through 30 pages of detailed tables numbers for every social share.

When developing a B2B marketing report, it’s important to include all of the pertinent information without letting it overwhelm the real outcomes. So we’ve created a guide that will help you put together an overview of engagement metrics and comparisons to previous periods. From revenue numbers to PPC campaigns, you’ll have all the right information in one place.

Keep Track of Engagement Numbers

Some of the most important metrics to include in your B2B sales report are your engagement numbers. No matter how big your social presence is, you should always keep track of these statistics. Which means nearly everyone should keep an eye on them: 83 percent of B2B marketers use social media; making it the most common B2B marketing tactic, according to the Content Marketing Institute. Here are a few things to pay attention when tracking your engagement numbers:

• Reach and shares: As long as your social media accounts are business accounts, you’ll have the option of looking deeper into metrics. Some platforms, such as Facebook, have a more comprehensive overview where you can look at reach, shares, organic likes, and even completion of videos. Other platforms, such as Twitter, aren’t as detailed, but provide monthly overviews if you’re looking for a brief summary. To get a more extensive view of social metrics, you can read Sprout Social’s guide.
• Net promoter score (NPS): To find your NPS, ask customers to rate their likelihood of recommending a company to a friend or colleague by from 0 to 10. You can read about how to calculate your NPS here.
• Growth in advocacy: Advocacy marketing is all about listening to customers and turning their concerns into capital. There are many ways to measure advocacy and it may take some time. A few ways to monitor growth are checking the number of leads over time, reading reviews, looking at social media shares, and tracking customer referrals.  

Since keeping track of engagement means you’ll be left with a ton of numbers, be sure to keep each line clear and concise and only include your final calculations. And most marketing automation solutions will let you connect directly to your social media accounts to both publish updates and pull in analytics so you can view your metrics all in one place.

Calculate Marketing-Attributed Revenue Numbers

The marketing-attributed revenue should be straightforward on your B2B report. It’s the dollar value revenue you get from marketing. Once you get this number, you’ll be able to plan more efficiently where future spending should go. But getting this information can be challenging if you aren’t able to detect the moment you brought in sales. To help give you a start, you can also look at the pros and cons of first and last touch attribution:

• First touch attribution: This is the channel, page, or post that causes a lead to make that first engagement with your company. With first touch attribution, you can get a clear understanding of how many people clicked on the ad that brought them to your website. This is great for companies who have a short lead funnel that only requires a few touches, but those with longer pipelines may want to use a different attribution model to better understand what works for them.
• Last touch attribution: Last touch attribution pays attention to the last piece of content, channel, or post that the lead saw just before converting. For example, a last touch attribution would recognize the email that included a discount code, which led to a purchase. The benefits of using last touch is that you see which campaign turned a lead into a customer. The downside is that you’re completely ignoring all of the steps that led to that last touch.
• Multi-touch attribution: Here’s where you can find a balance. Multi-touch assigns a value at each touch point, from the initial social ads to the final checkout. That way, you can see which campaigns were most valuable in the customer journey. You will also be able to adjust this model over time so that each of the campaign’s efforts are maximized. It’s more time consuming, but you get more data to analyze.

Check Marketing Qualified Leads and Conversion Rates

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead who has engaged with marketing content and shown their readiness to become a customer based on that engagement. An MQL designation should look at not only the customer profile, but also his or her engagement levels, such as placing items in a shopping cart or subscribing to a newsletter, which may trigger different lead scores to show readiness to purchase.

MQLs are most often found by looking at who has engaged the most with your content, through views, downloads, or conversation with your team. Every company is different, so you’ll have to figure out which factors determine your lead scores and adjust it based on your campaign. Once you agree on these factors, you’ll be able to find your leads and hopefully nurture them toward a sale. Using a marketing automation tool that brings in data from your website analytics will help you attach scores to your leads, understand where those leads drop out of the funnel, and build nurture campaigns to move those MQLs toward a conversion.

While it might be tempting to focus on the amount of web traffic you get, be sure to note your conversion rates and goal completions. These percentages will tell you how many of your website viewers complete a goal (such as filling out a form or clicking on a link) out of the total number of viewers. A high percent of goal completions generally means your website is accessible and better optimized toward your funnel, and lower rates mean you should work on figuring out what’s stopping leads along the way.  

Analyze Turnout at Individual Initiatives

Your marketing strategy may include more components that extend beyond web views and social media reach. When you plan out your next event in your project management software, be sure to include your follow-up with attendees and measurement of success as tasks. This will help you stay on track and remember to measure before you’re off planning the next awesome event.

Here are important metrics for some common marketing initiatives:

• Webinars: They are effective if you pay attention to the metrics. To determine whether or not your webinar was successful, you should take note of the following:
  • How many viewers tuned in
  • At what point did viewers drop off
  • Which device did viewers use to watch
  • The time and day the webinar aired
  • A brief summary of viewers’ feedback 
• Pay-Per-Click: PPC campaigns can bring in lots of clicks when done right. Essentially, you’re paying for more people to view your online ads. The most common system is Google Ads, where you pay a fee for your ad to show up high in the search results. Multiple factors determine how successful your campaign is, so be sure to take note of your keywords, the content on your landing page, and your quality score.

• Events: While so much engagement takes place online, it’s important to put time into face-to-face interaction. But the time put into organizing the event and selling tickets may not always seem worthwhile if your event isn’t a success. To keep track of whether or not your marketing event was beneficial to sales, here a few things to take note of in your report:
  • Post-event surveys: No matter how big or small the event, always ask attendees how they felt. Make sure your questions are quick, straightforward, and relevant, such as “After this event, would you recommend this product/service to a friend or family member?” Gather the results and put them in your report.
  • Revenue: Be sure to include the amount of money gone into the event and the amount you got out of it. Even if you spent a little more than you had gotten back, you should also note if your anticipated cost and revenue was higher or lower than the actual cost and revenue.
  • Sales post-event: This is pretty simple. Be sure to note if your sales have gone up weeks following the event, how many phone calls and emails you’ve received, and any new sign-ups for services.

Using Marketing Automation to Gather Data

While you’re calculating revenue and engagement numbers on your social platforms, it’s important to note that marketing automation tools will help not only track this data, but increase conversion rates as well. These tools can create personalized campaigns and test the customer experience. One of the biggest benefits is that you’ll also be able to analyze campaign performance and make improvements quickly. Pardot’s marketing automation software includes effortless email marketing, ROI reporting, smarter lead generation, and more.

A lot of data goes into an informative B2B report, so you can see why it’s so important to dig out the pertinent metrics and organize them in a clear and concise manner. Your CEO wants to see the numbers that suggest high engagement is leading to a high number of sales, so pay attention to your customers, social media analytics, and success of individual initiatives.

Gabriela Julia is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com. She is a multimedia journalist and graduate student based in Central New York. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Here at nCino, we are very excited about the Pardot Lightning app! This single platform experience has been a game changer and has helped us streamline our internal processes, further aligning sales, marketing and IT.

Follow me as I highlight some of the benefits of Pardot in Lightning from the perspective of four key roles at nCino.

1. The Marketing User

Prior to the Pardot Lightning app, my marketing team would log in to Pardot to manage marketing objectives, while also logging into Salesforce for reporting, ROI analysis and communication with sales. This created a level of disconnect, as most marketing users primarily lived in Pardot while the majority of our sales users only lived in Salesforce.

Now, our sales and marketing users are fully on the same platform! There is a lot of wonderful functionality that has helped to make our marketers’ lives easier, such as customizable navigation with the Salesforce objects users use most. We’ve also enjoyed seeing  a fully native Pardot experience in Salesforce, as Pardot tabs are now also included in Lightning navigation. But what I’m most excited about is the new campaign functionality.

We have always used Salesforce to track and manage the details of our campaigns, but there was confusion for users around the Pardot campaign versus the Salesforce campaign. Now, in the Pardot Lightning app there are no more siloed Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, they are ONE!

Salesforce campaigns can now be used with Pardot assets and integrated into everyone’s daily workflow. We also love the addition of Campaign Path which takes the stage of the campaign and visually puts it on a “progress bar” with key fields that should be completed and guidelines on best practices that should be thought about during each stage of the campaign lifecycle. This has specifically helped us standardize the campaign creation process, educate on best practices and streamline the onboarding process as we start to expand our company internationally and open new offices around the world.

By leveraging Salesforce campaign functionality, we can also add custom fields for things we’d like to track, such as whether or not we had a booth at a conference, or financial information such as budgeted versus actual spend on a campaign. We can even add our campaigns into hierarchies of related campaigns to see how they are performing when stacked up against the rest.

With the new Lightning App and everything natively in Salesforce from Pardot, we also get a list of all of the related assets directly on the campaign where we can view how each one is performing. This performance data rolls up nicely onto an Engagement Summary tab that shows things like total emails sent, total emails opened, and click through rate, right on the Salesforce campaign! These metrics are also incorporated into the hierarchy view for a quick overview of performance of each campaign and the overall hierarchy of related campaigns.

2. The Sales User

As noted earlier, living in two separate platforms created a disconnect between sales and marketing. The native, seamless app experience has helped align our marketing and sales teams more than ever.

Our sales team uses Salesforce Engage, Pardot’s sales enablement solution. With Salesforce Engage, our sales reps can use marketing-built content to automate a personalized experience with their leads and contacts. They also receive real-time Engage Alerts when prospects interact with our marketing materials so they know which leads to prioritize and follow up with.

On our contact layouts, we have added the “Send Engage Email” button so that our sales reps can immediately send Salesforce Engage emails that marketing has designed and approved. We have also added the “Add to Nurture List” button to our list views and campaigns which allows our reps to easily drop groups of contacts into Engagement Studio programs.

There is also a fancy new Engagement History component that we added to our contact layouts which is similar to the related list of Pardot Activity in Salesforce Classic, but even better. This component pulls in all of that rich engagement data from Pardot directly onto the record in Salesforce. You can see things like form submissions, webinar registrations, email opens, website page views, and more.

What I am most excited about from a sales perspective is the ability to leverage Salesforce’s collaboration solution, Chatter, on Pardot specific functionality! Whether launching a new Engagement Studio program, adding assets to a campaign or creating new templates that can be used in Salesforce Engage, Chatter helps keep everyone on the same page and in the loop. At nCino, we live off of Chatter and many of our sales and marketing users start their day by reviewing what has been posted the day prior. This has been a game changer for us across the board.

3. The Salesforce Administrator

Before the Pardot Lightning App, nCino’s Salesforce administration was completely separate from our Pardot administration. Users could have access to one or both systems independently. We did have single sign-on (SSO) enabled, but Pardot views were iFramed into Salesforce and the experience was less than ideal. For the best experience, our power marketing users would still need to log in to Pardot directly, and our sales reps would bounce between platforms depending on what they were looking at.

With the Pardot Lightning app, everything is managed in Salesforce just like any other Lightning app. No one has to jump between platforms and everything is natively available in a single platform. Salesforce is our source of truth and with Pardot being on the platform, we now have easier access to other Salesforce objects and functionality, such as Process Builder.

From an administration standpoint, one of my favorite new features is User Sync. Now, Salesforce profiles can be mapped to Pardot roles for the proper level of access!

This feature has been really helpful for us at nCino. We enable all of our Salesforce users with some level of Pardot access, as we want everyone to be able to see aspects of our marketing performance. In our previous process, our Salesforce Administrator would enable a user in Salesforce which would trigger an email notification for me to create them in Pardot. Similarly, when a user left, I would receive another notification to  deactivate that user in Pardot. While this might seem small, this process actually took a lot of time and created duplicative efforts across our administrator roles when creating and disabling users. Now, with User Sync, this all happens at one time — seamlessly.

4. The Analytical Executive

Like most companies, our executives are super busy and don’t have time to jump between Pardot to Salesforce to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. We need our campaign efforts to be straight forward, easy to digest, and shareable as needed.  

Now, it’s easier than ever for our executives to view all of the information we have reviewed in this blog, such as assets on campaigns, roll up engagement on a campaign level from those assets, and campaign hierarchy metrics.

What I love most is the out-of-the-box reporting with B2B Marketing Analytics! With the multi-touch dashboard, we can visualize campaign ROI across the funnel to prioritize channels and programs that work best. With first, even, and last-touch attribution, we have insight into which channels drive awareness (at the top of the funnel), perform across all buying stages (across the funnel), and help drive deals to close (at the bottom of the funnel).  Additionally, we can drill into details at the campaign level to see how they are performing against the rest. We can also share these metrics with others directly via Chatter with a note and snapshot of the dashboard.

At the end of the day, Pardot in Lighting enables us to more efficiently align sales and marketing in a single platform experience. Marketing, sales, admins and executives now have a single source of truth, making it possible to drive performance and determine impact on the bottom line as one unified team. If you’d like to see the Pardot Lightning app in action, check out my Dreamforce 2018 session recording and don’t forget to check out the Pardot Lightning App Adoption Guide.

Interested in learning more about all of the great new features included in the Pardot Winter ’19 Release? Join us for tour upcoming webinar, Pardot Product Runway: Winter ’19 Release Webinar.