Speaker 0: Good morning, afternoon. Good morning, afternoon, evening to everybody on the call. Thanks for joining us on our final day of MarDreamin. I hope folks have had a great past few days. They’ve been insightful and enjoyable to you. Today, I’d like to introduce to you our amazing speaker panel. Um, we will have Erin Duncan from Sercante, Jen Kazan from GreenKey Digital, Natalie Jackson from CBIZ, and Ruth Bolster from Salesforce who will provide some great insights for b to b marketing. And I will kick it over to Jen to start us off.

Speaker 1: Hi. Thanks for the introduction, Gabe. Uh, again, my name is Jen Kazan. I’m a account engagement consultant and really excited to be talking about our topic today. Uh, before we get started, just a special thanks to our sponsors. Lots of companies here that have contributed to make this event possible and, um, wanted to just share the screen before we kick off with introductions. Um, so we have Ruth Bolster, Erin Duncan, and, uh, Natalie Jackson. And so, Ruth, do you wanna just get started introducing yourself?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course. So hi, everyone. Um, I’m Ruth. Um, I’m a product marketing manager at Salesforce, and I work on marketing cloud account engagement powered by Pardot. Um, before joining Salesforce, I actually spent a number of years working in the higher ed, um, publishing space as a demand gen marketer, and I used account engagement every single day. So hopefully I bring an interesting perspective to this panel because not only do I work on the marketing and positioning of account engagement, but I was also a practitioner. So I can speak to a variety of perspectives.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Erin, go ahead.

Speaker 3: Oh, oh, sorry. My mic was having issues. Hey, everyone. I am Erin Duncan. I lead the account engagement, uh, formerly Pardot practice here at Sercante. Um, I am also the Atlanta the Kardashians Slack.

Speaker 1: Awesome.

Speaker 4: I guess, Kathleen. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Can you

Speaker 4: hear me okay? Great. Um, I’m Natalie Jackson. I’m the director of demand generation at CBIZ, And one of the many things that I do is try to look at how we’re using our Salesforce data and, uh, then through marketing cloud account engagement to, um, basically drive up opportunity at any point along the pipeline across our entire business here at CBIZ. Um, I I’ve also got a long storied history of being an email geek. Um, so I’m the cohost slash cofounder of Humans of Email, um, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time, um, in a lot of other platforms prior to marketing marketing cloud account engagement. So, um, it’s been it’s been really fun getting hands on all the way in on this particular platform, and it’s it’s a good platform.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you, Natalie. Hey. Before I get started, I have a quick logistic question. So, Gabe, um, when I’m full screen, uh, all I see is full screen. Is there a way to see the all the panelists as well?

Speaker 0: On my end, the, um, everybody’s along the left hand side, so you should be okay.

Speaker 1: Okay. Just so you know then, if anything comes up in the moderation, I’m not able to see anything because my screen is full screen presenting. So, um, um, I’m happy to get going, but just so you guys know, if you wanna grab me, just let me know.

Speaker 0: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Uh, but let’s get started here. So what are two of your favorite account engagement features, and why should customers use them? Um, so, Ruth, do you wanna maybe get started with us, uh, on that topic?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure. So I think, hands down, my two favorite features or, I guess, group of features are Einstein artificial intelligence. So, again, I spoke to a lot of marketers who, you know, aren’t using AI, and I get the sense from some people that, you know, there’s this misconception that AI is just for enterprise companies or that it’s, like, too complex for what they’re doing. But in reality, Einstein and AI is designed to be your personal assistant. So it takes a lot of the grunt work and manual analysis out of things like scoring and grading so that you can, um, focus on I I just learned this phrase, moving the big rocks up the hill. Um, so if I had to narrow it down, I’d say my two favorite are, um, Einstein send time optimization and Einstein engagement frequency. So send time optimization, basically, it allows you to personalize when someone gets an email. So if you send an email out at, like, 7AM and a prospect only opens and engages at 7PM, Einstein’s gonna hold that email until 7PM so that it’s right at the top of their inbox, which is pretty cool. And, um, Einstein engagement frequency just helps you feel confident that you’re not oversaturating your prospects with messages. So, um, when I was a practitioner, for example, I would use, like, these manual suppression lists in order to ensure that I’m not sending out too many emails to the right person to, um, a particular prospect in one day. And in in the back of my head, I’d always be, like, terrified that, like, people are missing out on messages or that I’m not catching everyone with that suppression list. And Einstein I wish I had Einstein because, basically, the so time optimization would just take that worry away, and I just let the computer do it for me. So

Speaker 1: Yes. Two great features. Fairly new ones too, especially the Einstein frequency just came out, I think, within the last twelve months. So a good one to bring up and remind people that it’s out there. Um, Natalie, what are what are your two favorite features?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Uh, one of them is, uh, relatively new, and, oh my gosh, like, it was a game changer for us. Um, conditional completion actions was, like, the best gift of the year. Um, so if you have a lot of complexity in, like, maybe how your your services are lined up, um, if you have a lot of complexity in terms of, like, who gets what types of leads and under what conditions, Um, if you wanna start, like, prequalifying people by asking them on form completions, how do you want us to follow-up? I mean, complete conditional completion actions just have opened up so much opportunity and and created, um, so much ability for us to be able to customize our follow-up at the moment of conversion for every single lead in a way that’s just, like, phenomenal. And I haven’t seen it in any other platform. So, um, that’s definitely, like, number one on my list. Coolest, best thing. So happy to have it, um, especially for a company as complex as ours. It’s it’s just phenomenal what it can do for us, um, and also for for our buyer. Right? It allows us to customize things for our buyer in a way that that we really couldn’t before. Um, second favorite, and this is just coming out of a lot of other marketing automation platforms prior to using marketing cloud account engagement, um, automation rules. The the amount of things that you can do with an automation rule, whether it’s like a a kind of a back end thing, like, hey. Under the following conditions with the following lists, I wanna improve a score or decrease a score. Um, or if it’s, like, external, like, under the following conditions, if this person with this data point in this particular spot over in Salesforce that has just this one very narrow use, and I don’t wanna apply that to literally everyone in the system, like, I can create a mechanism that’s, like, hyper targeted to very niche business cases in a way that would be extraordinarily difficult to do at any other platform. And, again, we’re a really big company. We have lots of different buyers. We have lots of different sales teams with lots of different people that we’re servicing. So, um, those two features allow us to customize experiences really granularly, both for the buyer, for the sales team, for the service line in a way that’s, like, really difficult to achieve with other platforms.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Good really good features to highlight. I think a lot of people will agree with you on the conditional completion actions. Um, that was so popular. I think anytime we posted that on social, I think it got a lot of hits. So I think you’re not alone on that being a favorite feature. Erin, did they take yours, or do you have some other favorite features of, um, account engagement?

Speaker 3: I mean, they did. My top two were engagement frequency and, um, conditional completion actions. But another one that I’m really getting a lot of use out of is the Slack connector with account engagement, Because so many companies are less email focused and more Slack focused, I feel like this app this addition really lets us automate things a little bit quicker. And the fact that you can use those notifications, you can customize them, so you can throw in those merge tags and just put the fields that are important to that particular notification really helps business move faster.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Good ones. Alright. Let’s try another question. Um, so how is your organization leveraging account engagement in order to maximize operational efficiency? Um, Natalie, do you wanna start with that one?

Speaker 4: Uh, Yeah. I mean, I I kinda touched on it a little bit already. I was a little bit of a spoiler there. Um, you know, I think what it what it is for us is is when you look at CBIZ, we’ve got our benefits and insurance side of our business, then we got our financial services side of our business. And and within each of those two big sides of our business, there’s a lot of complexity happening underneath it. Um, and there’s also a lot of cross pollination in those audiences. Right? But, like, the way that we service those audiences tends to be more like, this is the team working this, and this is the team working this, and maybe this team’s working both. Um, but, you know, for us, um, what we do with account engagement, one is, um, we use the scoring categories, which is huge because that allows us to know when someone is interested in a particular service, but it also allows us to see what other complimentary services they might be engaging with as well. So that’s all kind of based off of the content they’re engaging with, how we’ve tagged that content to our different areas of our business, And then we can, um, get some efficiency there and follow-up because we know, okay. These people are interested in property and casualty, whereas these people are interested in, um, maybe, like, benefits consulting. So, um, much easier for us to be more responsive to our buyer, which allows us to be more efficient. The other number one way is, um, I don’t know how we would survive without having all of this data directly integrated to Salesforce. And I say that only because I have been in other companies where the marketing automation platform is disconnected or, like, moderately connected to the CRM system. And the beauty of what we have with marketing cloud account engagement tied right into Salesforce is that we can use things like automation rules to say, if under the following very specific conditions, you know, uh, assign a task to our sales development team. Or, um, if this person and this condition does this thing, like, create, you know, a flow that, like, essentially allows us to process that without having to get really, um, manually interactive. Um, so for my team, if we had to go, like, manually process, like, every inbound lead that came in, that would be all that we did. Um, so the ability to create those tasks, to create conditions, and to funnel things using automation, um, is huge for us, and and it would be difficult to function without.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. I know I think a lot of us take for granted that integration that account engagement can have with Salesforce. And like you said, once you’ve had experience when it’s a stand alone system, you realize how valuable that is. So really good examples.

Speaker 4: I have been in the business of forwarding emails to salespeople. It is not a fun business to be in. So if you’re out there and that’s the condition that you’re still in, oh, you gotta get that integration. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And if I can also just chime in. Um, so in my previous role, um, I would say that integration was like it’s such bread and butter and excuse me. It’s such bread and butter functionality, but, like, that integration was such a game changer for us because suddenly, I wasn’t having to ping every single sales rep every time someone attended a webinar or responded to an email. Like, the fact that it’s all in one system that everyone could see just made such a difference. And, like, we didn’t have to worry about segmenting anymore. Like, we could trust that the list that we were pulling had real time data and weren’t, you know, days out of date. So it just made a huge difference.

Speaker 1: Very good. Since you have, um, since you’re you’re talking, Erin, do you wanna answer that question for yourself as well?

Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah. Um, I mean, the integration with Salesforce is is a big part of it. We you know, there are tons of processes where we can have a prospect starts in Pardot or account engagement, goes over to Salesforce, something else happens, and they come back to account engagement. And we can we use a lot of engagement studio programs to nurture, um, the follow-up or the stay in touch with prospects that have done something in Salesforce. Um, you know, recently, I helped create a process where when a project closes, um, we automatically pull in those prospects into an into an engagement studio so we can keep in touch with them and see if they need any other support, have any other questions. And it just kind of takes those manual things out of the hands of our marketers and our sales team and does it for them so then they can they can worry about, um, other things.

Speaker 1: Good. Thank you. Ruth, what are your thoughts?

Speaker 2: Um, Yeah. So I as I mentioned before, again, having that integration is probably the key thing, um, especially, you know, when I was working with account engagement every day in my previous role.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Um, let so question three here is, what is your take on external activities? So this is a fun topic. Um, it’s, I think, a fun, uh, subject regard and new very new and fresh with account engagement. And the second part of that is, how do you think customers should use them? So, So, Erin, do you wanna kick off with, uh, your insights?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I am a big fan of external activities. Um, I can’t tell you how many instances in my career with account engagement where there’s there’s been one thing we need to do with a third party tool. We it doesn’t necessitate buying a whole integration or custom building a whole integration. We just need one thing to connect to account engagement. And external activities also paired with external actions allows you to do that where full integration is not necessary. And it’s just going to further allow marketers to integrate their whole, um, tech stack and just do more with all of the tools they have available.

Speaker 1: And then, uh, so do you have any examples to share?

Speaker 3: Um, I mean, the most common one I’m seeing right now is is integrating with Zoom. So, um, either sending information to Zoom or taking in information. So with act activities, it would be sent to Pardot from Zoom. Um, but just so the marketers are not having to do manual imports, manual list updates of who’s registered, who’s attended. You can start sending that information back and forth.

Speaker 1: Right. Yep. Not having to put everybody on the list and then go from there. Yeah. Yeah. Natalie, what’s your take? Is your company using them?

Speaker 4: Uh, I mean, well, there’s a theme here. Right? So so the theme here is, um, integrated tech stack is gonna improve data, follow-up, and personalization. And, like, I feel like that’s what external activities are getting us toward. Right? And I think you see the same thing with Genie, which I was, like, so excited about at Dreamforce.

Speaker 1: I was

Speaker 4: like, oh my god. This is amazing. This solves so many problems. Um, I mean, and and, like, really what what we’re what we’re talking about here is, like, when I look at it from the perspective of demand gen, I’m sure Ruth probably has similar feelings having been in that role too, is, like, the biggest challenge to the demand gen marketer is that things aren’t connected.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so I can only see a microcosm of the things that are connected, and then everything else is speculation. Everything else is like, well, I think that that’s maybe what the point of contact was, but, like, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe they attended the webinar. Maybe they just kinda registered. So, I mean, I think, like, anytime we can empower marketers through things like external activities to be able to see all of the customer journey happening in a singular spot, that’s going to improve our ability to customize, to follow-up, to know what’s what’s really happening, and then to layer on analytics

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: And see what’s working for future state. So it’s not just about, like, retroactively looking and seeing, like, oh, what happened? It’s also saying, like, okay. So this is what happened, and if I liked it, I can try to replicate it. If I didn’t like it, now I know I need to try something a little bit different. But, like, as long as things are happening in different systems and you’re, you know, taking lists from here and uploading them to Salesforce or to marketing cloud account engagement, or if you are, um, you know, trying to type in something manually over here, um, it’s it’s going to create issues. And I think that is, um, this is just the next step in something that that marketing cloud account engagement is already pretty good at, which is, like, recognizing that the point of entry is not always gonna be a form. Sometimes it’s or not always gonna be a marketing cloud account engagement form. Right? So sometimes it’s, like, form handler. So if you’re doing content syndication, you may not be able to drop your own custom form there. And a lot of other platforms would maybe be a hindrance, and you’d have to get, like, a downloadable list, you know, the CSV file, and then do the upload. Right? Mhmm. Um, so I think to me, this is just, like, the next step in the recognition that marketers are using lots of different systems to empower their demand gen programs, and and we have to be able to sync them all together more seamlessly. So I’m really excited about it. I think it’s very cool.

Speaker 1: Excellent. Excellent. Ruth, do you have a perspective from sales Salesforce to share on external activities or actions?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think these are going to be a game changer in the sense that it’s the first step in making account engagement a truly omnichannel platform. So as, uh, as, um, Natalie was saying, I think there’s a stat out there. I think it’s the average b to b marketer uses 13 different third party applications in order to do their marketing. And the fact that you can now hook them up to account engagement, and you can now trigger, um, you know, webinar registrations or even SMS ends. That’s a huge, um, one that we’re seeing interest in through engagement studio. You can truly automate every single part of your process now, and you can keep all of that data within account engagement. So I’m excited to see what other, um, innovations we have in the pipeline for that. So

Speaker 1: I am equally excited, um, for it as well, and I think your point on SMS is, uh, is a good one because I do, um, I see people buzz and talk about that and how do how do you do that within account engagement. So I think that trend specifically around SMS will continue. Uh, let’s go to the next question. And, Natalie, I’m gonna I’ll have you go first this time. But the question is, what is one b two b marketing trend you think we will start to see more of in 2023?

Speaker 4: I mean, I think it’s already happening. It’s, um, it’s interesting. It’s data privacy. Right? So, like, we’re both injecting a lot more, um, data into our into our marketing platforms, into our systems. But I think, like, at the same time um, and it’s interesting because I think the the winter twenty twenty three updates, like, sort of reflect the fact that marketers are being pulled in two different directions. We’re both being pulled at the direction of more data, get more data into your tax systems, be able to, you know, customize a lot more of what you’re doing. But at the same time, data privacy is significantly impacting our ability as b two b marketers to do some of the things that, like, maybe, you know, would have been easy to do five years ago. So, um, one that I’m hearing a lot about in b two b already, and I know that, um, there are some some significant changes for this that just came out in winter twenty twenty three, is, um, you’re starting to see more security bot traffic and emails. Right? And so, like, when you look at b two b email metrics, and this is something that that is hugely impactful, um, we’ve already sort of lost the open rate in a lot of instances. Right? Like, the open rate was like, uh, now you’ve got us in a situation where Outlook is deflating your open rates, but Apple Mail privacy is inflating them. And so, like, it’s not really a reliable stat anymore, which hats off to marketing cloud account engagement that it’ll tell you what the impact is if you look into your email send reports. So at least you could know, right, that that’s, like, not a measurement you should be leading with. Um, but now I think that the the click rate is also getting impacted because you do have situations where security bots are pre clicking every single link in an email. Um, and, again, I think the exciting thing about the winter twenty twenty three updates is, like, there’s more that you can do as a marketer to identify that and to take action against it. Um, but these are the the sorts of things that are, I think, gonna lead b two b email marketers, b two b digital marketers to really continue to look downstream at the impact of campaigns rather than looking at the microcosm of clicks and opens. So it’s gonna force us into a spot where we have to look at the big picture, whether that’s because we’ve got such an integrated tech stack, it’s difficult to track things back to a singular point of engagement, or because we know that security and privacy are impacting some of those, um, vanity metrics that we’ve relied on for so long as b two b marketers that now we’re gonna have to say, okay. Regardless of who clicked and opened this email, what was the downstream revenue impact? Did we see a lift in overall opportunities we could attribute back to this campaign versus, like, hey. I’m gonna look at just the clicks, or I’m just gonna look at the landing page form conversions or something like that. So it’s interesting to see us get pulled in two different directions, but I think it’ll make us better in the long run.

Speaker 1: Good. Good. Um, just kinda looking at time here and then also making sure I’m gonna try to save ten minutes for questions at the end. So I would I’ll throw it up to either one of you. Either Erin or Ruth, do you have something to expand or share on this question here about, um, b to b marketing trends in 2023?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, um, I totally agree with Natalie. I was at, um, Advertising Week a few weeks ago, and the topic of almost every single session was about the cookie less future and how marketers, both b to b and b to c, need to find ways to collect and synthesize that first and zero party data. But, you know, in addition to this, um, I’d say it’s not just about, you know, collecting data. It’s about building trust. So, um, one thing that, um, everyone was kind of circling around but not necessarily expanding on is, like, why, um, customers might feel leery about sharing data in the first place. So it’s it’s about I think the the challenge as marketers is both, like, a hard skill challenge where you need to, you know, find ways to collect this data and synthesize it, but also a soft skill challenge. Like, how do we convey that we’re trustworthy? How do we convey that it’s okay to share your data with us? And what value add can we convey with that data? Um, we know that it helps marketers build out more personalized experiences. So how do we convey that it’s actually beneficial to the customer and that they’re gonna get their problem solved more quickly? So that’s just something that, you know, I’m thinking about, something that I know a lot of other marketers are thinking about as well.

Speaker 1: That’s a really good point. I like your point, Ruth, about, um, conveying trust, and I think that’s I agree it’s something that’s easily, um, overlooked. I think people just get busy doing the next item. You know, here’s my marketers are always busy chugging through the list of things to do and you really need to sometimes stop and think about that, like I said, that customer journey as well as conveying trust is very important. I’m gonna go to the next question. And, Erin, I’m gonna let you go first on this one. What is one thing you took away from yesterday’s Marketing Cloud roadmap session?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think, um, one of the takeaways and and probably what I’m most excited about is the growing extensibility of account engagement. So it’s no longer I mean, it’s it’s no longer gonna be a siloed system that’s just using its data, Um, as things come out more like external actions and external activities, we can start integrating it with the different third party apps. Everything could be connected, be using data from the different platforms, and it just allows marketers to do even more.

Speaker 1: Good. Good. How about you, Ruth?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I’m in a bit of an interesting position because I was kind of behind the scenes with the road map session. So I think for me, like, as someone who’s, um, um, kind of, like, helping to build these presentations, the thing that I was paying most attention to was, you know, the chat, the comments, the questions. And what really resonated was just the level of enthusiasm and engagement we had when we were announcing what was gonna be coming up pipeline, what we recently did. Um, so as a marketer, that just makes me, again, take it back to the community. Right? It’s it’s all about, you know, why are we doing this? Why are we improving the product? It’s it’s worth all of you. So I’m sorry. That’s a bit of a non answer, but, um, um, I actually asked you the question. Thinking about.

Speaker 1: I forgot. I asked you the question. I forgot you were very involved with it. Can you if I can ask, do you recall one of the items on the chat that conveyed, like, the enthusiasm that you were describing?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Um,

Speaker 1: like, what was the topic that got the biggest kinda raw from the team or from the chat from the attendees?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So that’s a great question. There was one particular feature that everyone had been waiting for for such a long time. And when Lindsay announced it, like, just seeing the chat explode with everyone being like, this is the best. I’m so happy. Like, I’m I’m sorry. I’m completely blanking on what that feature was, but I know it was a long awaited one. Awesome. So yeah.

Speaker 1: Okay. But thank you. That was, uh, like I said, fun to hear it from you. Um, Natalie,

Speaker 4: what are your thoughts? I mean, I think it’s, uh, it kinda goes back to what I was just saying. Like, it’s it’s interesting to see the the road map kind of, like, go to the both of the really big needs for b two b marketers. Right? Like, the the need for, like, personalization and connected data and being able to target accounts instead of just individuals, like, recognizing that it’s a buyer committee. And I think you even see that in the name change. Like, it’s so it’s so hard for me to, like, not call it hard at, but, like, I get the account engagement. Right? It’s recognizing that that b two b is moving toward account level marketing, not contact level marketing. Um, so it’s it’s very reflective, I think, of that push. But at the same time, um, I think it’s very reflective of the other push too, which is, like, privacy is a concern, like data accuracy, um, understanding that there’s, like, a whole landscape of tools out there, um, and that the landscape is changing such that, um, it’s it’s going more toward a consent based marketplace. It’s going more towards, um, you know, people being able to put in checks and balances on their email security tools that might impact our downstream data. So, um, I I it’s for me, I was like, well, this is this is great. It’s satisfying both of these really big questions that we as b two b marketers are having to answer now.

Speaker 1: Good. Thank you. That rounds us out to our last, um, um, packaged question. Um, and, Ruth, I’ll look to you first on this one. What is the most interesting way you have seen account engagement be used?

Speaker 2: That’s a great question. So I think one thing that I’m seeing, um, maybe this is more for the the general trends question that you had, is that we’re seeing demand generation and ABM tactics converging. And as a result, um, in talking with customers, some people are really getting creative with how they use account engagement to really flush out their ABM strategies. So, um, I don’t know if any of you were at Dreamforce, but I did a session with Kelly Madore at Grammarly, and her team is, again, just doing some fascinating stuff with ABM and account engagement. So she is, um, basically creating segmentation lists based on email domains. So, um, you know, particular work domain like salesforce.com, like at, um, circante.com, that type of thing. And she’s creating these segmentation lists in order to display custom personalized landing pages so that companies will see their logo and, like, personalized information to get a custom experience whenever they are, um, interested in Grammarly. So she’s using I think she’s using dynamic content for this, but they’re looking into incorporating, um, marketing cloud personalization. Um, we’re also seeing other customers like NI also doing something similar in terms of very much tearing out their demand gen and their ABM, um, tactics, um, or their their targeting using account engagement. So, yeah, people are getting really creative with the system, and I I love it.

Speaker 1: Consultants can get very creative with the system, but it’s a good point on how ABM has become, you know, growing in popularity and your point on the converging of, um, the demand gen as well. It’s a good point. Natalie or Erin, I’m just kinda watching on time. If either one of you, do you wanna chime in with your thoughts? Sure.

Speaker 4: I I saw that session, Ruth, and I think I told you afterwards. I was like, that was so great. It’s such a good session. Um, there were a couple other really good ones too. And, um, one that that really stuck out to me at Dreamforce was the, uh, the Swabiz Southwest Business, um, and it was, like, how they had identified, um, customer data points that allowed them to target a new segment. So the idea was, like, they had business travelers using their personal, um, Southwest accounts to, like, book travel for business, and they used that data point in marketing cloud account engagement to go find out who the best targets would be to reach out to for this new Swab is, like, business travel, um, kind of a a process. And then they also incentivized, um, the the, like, business travelers to make referrals into, um, their internal business departments to, like, set up that relationship. Um, and it was all, like, sort of powered through personalization. It was all powered through, like, using customer data, pulling data points out of Salesforce, and, like, just thinking beyond, like, a batch and blast newsletter. So, um, I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time in, um, the email space, and I feel like the the biggest hurdle email marketers have is, like, that first big step when they’re like, I think I can do more than send newsletters and, like, understanding, you know, that, like, there’s a a whole ecosystem of email types out there that have nothing to do with pushing content to your database. Um, and so then, like, thinking, what can I do with the data I have in Salesforce? Like, what will that data in Salesforce be able to tell me that will open me up to new market segments that I maybe hadn’t thought of before?

Speaker 1: Interesting. Good. Good. I love your perspective of of, uh, you know, because you’re in the ground working, and it sounds like your company is doing a lot of interesting things, so it’s fun to hear, um, some of your insights and ideas. That wraps up our, like I said, our specific questions. I’m gonna stop sharing. And let’s see if we can Gabe, do you did you I I was not able to see the questions as they come in. Do you do you

Speaker 0: see No worries. I’ll go ahead. I’m looking at things. It looks like a couple of folks have, um, posted stuff in the chat too. I’m gonna turn off my camera because it seems like I’m having a bit of a delay on my end. So, hopefully, that’ll help. But I see there’s a question from Margo, um, from earlier, and she asked, my organization prefers to import leads into Salesforce first, then have it upload into Pardot. I’m trying to get them to change this. Any suggestions?

Speaker 3: I mean, I would I think that’s an opportunity for training with your Salesforce team and letting them know how Pardot can use those scoring and grading thresholds to not send over new leads until they’re qualified and just kind of training sales and letting them know that they will get better leads if they allow Pardot to account engagement. Sorry. Um, to use its features to qualify those leads, then send them over.

Speaker 4: Um, if I may, I feel like I don’t know enough yet about the lists. Like, I think that what is on those lists would condition my answer. So if it’s, for example, um, a list of people that they met at a trade show, um, then I would feel uncomfortable uploading them into Pardot because they may not have enough of an existing relationship to get brought into my email funnel yet. Um, and I may wanna do something proactive, you know, maybe like a one time email that’s like, hey. Great to meet you at the trade show. Would you like to opt in to our, you know, communications? Right? And I may even wanna set up depending on the origination of those lists. For example, what if they’re downloading those lists from ZoomInfo, those people have never had any prior contact with our business? Like, that would concern me in terms of setting it straight into marketing cloud account engagement. I would wanna prequalify that at some point first. Um, if it’s a situation though where I need to keep track of, like, the origination point, where did these leads come from and they are, um, you know, like, truly, uh, marketing generated leads, then, like, I would definitely agree with you. Like, you gotta get that into the marketing cloud account engagement because you really wanna be able to set your lead source, you wanna set your source campaign, and that’s gonna prevent you from losing attribution. So, like, one of the things I always worry about when you do upload and, I mean, worry is probably a strong word. Something I try to be mindful about when you’re talking about which system gets the data is, like, what am I trying to capture, and what do I need as a marketer to prove out the value of the origination point of those people? Because there was probably spend associated to them, and I need to make sure that however we upload them, I can attach my spend on whatever that campaign was so that if any of them pop into opportunities, I can prove, hey. This is what we generated off of this spend. So just I mean, it it there’s, like, not a right or wrong answer. It just sorta depends on where those people came from and how you might need to follow-up depending on that origination point.

Speaker 0: Great. Thank you. And it looks like, um, through our chat and some other folks have chimed in, but we have a question from Andrew. What got you’s have anyone seen crop up with conditional completions?

Speaker 4: Only that my my universe is limited. There’s, like, situations where I’m like, I’d like to have 30 conditions. And I’m sure, like, having worked in Martech before being at Cbiz, like, I understand that’s a big development ask, and it can create downstream development problems and features, like, can, you know, get clogged if you have too many things happening. So I get it. But, like, I’m a I’m a big dreamer. I like to have lots of opportunities. I like to be able to to super customize instead of just, like, sort of customize.

Speaker 3: Yeah. The limit of I think it’s fifth we have a limit of 15 completion actions conditional or not now. And I have seen that limit, you know, some existing assets that had a bunch of completion actions. But, really, if you if you need more than 15, you can always use one completion action to add them to a list and then do all your automations in an engagement studio program. Um, I I’ve used that before. So, like, if you’re doing more than 15, explore using an engagement studio program instead.

Speaker 2: So so

Speaker 4: I’m gonna counter you. I’m gonna give you a very specific use case that, like, I hit this is, like, where I hit, like, oh, rats. Um, so we have a form that is, uh, an RFP form, and it’s like it’s for the user experience. Like, it’s good to have it as a singular form, um, because, you know, like, then we can send people for for many reasons to a singular space to say, like, do you have an RFP you would like for us to respond to? Like, here’s the form for you to submit it. It. Right? Um, but we have so many different lines of business that we need to be able to say, like, is you know, and it’s it’s basically, it’s a radio button, like, which lines of service are you trying to submit this RFP to? Um, and then so what we’re trying to do like, this was great because we couldn’t do this before. We had to manually follow-up on this particular form. Conditional completion actions allowed us to say, like, okay. So if they press this radio button, send them to this person. If this radio button, send them to this one. If it’s this one, send them to this one, which was great. But we had maybe this is just like a CBIS thing. We had so many lines of service in there. It was like, oh, no. I’ve run out of space. Yeah. So I had to, like, get really strategic about, like, what exactly I wanted to do, and I had to make some compromises. Like, normally, we like to notify people when forms are completed just so that, you know, like, we have that that solid feedback loop. So it was like, we’re gonna not be able to notify because we need the condition actions to create tasks to the right people. So, um, I mean, that’s like one situation where, like, I really didn’t wanna create an automation rule for it. Um, and we get into some other places too where, like, we may have, um, regions that, like, we have lots of different people, um, and lots of different regions. And so you wanna be able to say, like, if it’s state a, b, and c, create task for this person. If it’s state d, e, f, create task for this one. Um, and because there are so many states, 50 as of right now, like sometimes you can run out of, uh, completion actions there too. The good news is if that happens to you, if you’re out there, we solved it with automation rules to create regions, and then now we can assign to a region and that cuts down on the number of states.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Using automation rules to kind of bucket prospects and then do those further automations is, like, key. That yeah. Awesome. It’s a huge help.

Speaker 4: It’s a great way to look at it.

Speaker 0: Other input for that question, it looks like we have a couple of other questions that have rolled in. Alright. So Amir asked best practice or advice for lead scoring in Pardot?

Speaker 3: Ruth, do you wanna take that one?

Speaker 2: Sure. I mean, I

Speaker 3: can’t, but I don’t wanna Yeah.

Speaker 2: I that’s okay. I can chime in. I I would say as someone who’s who has done this manually for a very long time, if you have Einstein, I would definitely leverage Einstein if you can because it just it saves so much time. As someone who had to, like, maintain a rubric and, like, upload it every six months as to, like, exactly how much a link click counts, um, when you don’t have to do that anymore, it’s it’s so nice. Um, but I will say too, in terms of, like, just general best practices, um, start with a rubric. Um, figure out exactly how much each interaction is worth and, um, adjust the points accordingly. Um, I would also say to, um, when you do the manual scoring, the points just continue to rack up. So, um, figure out when you might wanna reset or when you may want to depreciate because otherwise, you’re going to, um, look at your lead scores in six months, and you’re like, oh, there are people who are over 200, and I have no idea what this means anymore. So, um, building in that depreciation is important. And I know Natalie spoke about this at Dreamforce. So if you wanna chime in, you have a lot of experience with this.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Uh, I mean, those are two really great points that you bring up, Ruth. Um, I think that the challenge that I’ve always heard, um, in my years in marketing automation is, like, what do I what am I supposed to do with that score? Right? Like, I mean, you know, it’s it’s like a thing and I feel like a lot of people, like, look at it and they’re like, okay, I feel good about it. I have scoring, but then, like, we we missed that, like, but now what? Um, so I mean, for us, we, uh, we used it to identify how the buyer might be moving toward conversation time. Right? So we were like, okay. We’re gonna sit down with, um, with the the sales team members that have to do the follow-up, and we’re gonna be like, what do we feel like is the right amount of actions taken such that we could say, like, we would feel comfortable reaching out to this person and them having a positive response to us doing so. Um, but then we also try to, like, use scoring to tailor, not just, like, what service line they might be most interested in, but also, um, what type of content we should be putting in front of them. So, like, a great exercise that, like, I’m I’m really geeking out about. So if my team’s listening, they’re like, oh, here she goes again on the content journey matrix. I mean, one of the things we’re talking a lot about at Cbiz is, like, what does that content journey matrix look like? Um, and and then you layer it by buyers. You’re like buyer, service line, and then, like, where are they in the customer journey? And, like, what content do I have that, like, aligns with that buyer, that service line, and that point in the journey? And then, like, using your scoring models to say, okay. If Ruth’s score is 10, she’s clearly top of funnel. She has not engaged with very much. So what kinds of messaging do I need to put in front of her that would help her understand who we are, what we do, what the value is, and why she might wanna engage further? When she gets into, like, say, 25 or 30, and that’s, like, not a perfect number, it’s just a starting point, um, I can say, oh, she’s middle of funnel. I need to start customizing based on tags. So we use, you know, tags to say like, oh, okay. Um, not only is she in the service line, but she’s interested in this particular thing within the service line. So now I’m gonna start sending her cybersecurity information because she’s clearly very interested in that. That was her point of origination. And then as it starts to get even higher, I’m like, oh my gosh. Ruth is, like, getting ready to buy. So, like, the first thing we do is we use scoring and automation rules to send an email, a soft email. Hey, Ruth. You’ve been looking at a lot of content lately. Um, seems like you’re really interested. Can we help you set up some time to talk with one of our people to see if we’re a good mutual fit or answer any of your questions? And it’s soft. It’s not like me scheduling a task right away. It’s like first me asking, and then she can schedule the task on her own if she wants. Right? And then if it’s, like, so much contact engagement that, like, I can no longer ignore it, then I’m like, okay. Now I’m just gonna create a task and someone’s gonna reach out, and then we’ll follow-up accordingly depending on how she responds. But, yes, I think depreciation’s important to your rate. I’ve definitely seen instances where people have, like, a score of, like, 1,500. Um, so we use automation rules to score decay over certain periods of time. So we say if no engagement has happened in certain amount of time, decrease score by x amount.

Speaker 2: I agree. And I really appreciate what you said about it’s not just about the score. It’s about what you do with the score. Right? It’s how you follow-up. It’s, like, what journeys you put them on, how you get the, um, how you get sales involved. Because I think that sometimes we get so invested in the intricacies of of creating your rubric and, like, figuring out exactly how much a link click is worth and, like, how much is this form fill worth that we lose sight of, like, the entire purpose of this, which is to pass leads on to sales. So

Speaker 4: Well, and and the other point of this too, I think this is becoming more important, we touched on earlier is, like, we do have situations where there are security bots now. So, like, relying on a single thing that happened, whether it’s an email open or a click, is, like, not good enough anymore. It was good enough before all of the privacy updates, before all of the security tools. Like, five years ago, that was fine. But we’re in a spot now where, like, one singular action does not equate buyer readiness unless it’s, like, a form fill where where they’re like, hello. Yes. Please contact me. Like, that’s the only time that you would, like, verifiably know that, like, it only takes one touch.

Speaker 2: But no. That that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. So, I mean, again, being very forward thinking, I think we might have to, like, completely rethink how we approach scoring because of that, that because it’s only just gonna continue.

Speaker 1: So Thank you. I think we have seconds left. Gabe, is there

Speaker 0: anything else? We have about fifteen seconds left, and we’ll get cut off very abruptly. So I just wanna say thank you so much to the panelists today for your great knowledge and information that you shared. Um, there was a couple of questions that didn’t get answered, so I apologize. So please feel free to follow-up, um, again, and have a great day.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 4: Bye. Bye.