MARDREAMIN’ SUMMIT 2025
MAY 7-8, 2025 IN ATLANTA - GA
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View the session live or catch the replay here. You’ll find the recording and all related resources on this page once available.
Our live discussions are happening over in Slack. That’s where you can connect with speakers, join session threads, and chat with other attendees in real time.
As we move into the next normal, you’ll need to prepare your business for the future by becoming more digital and agile. See how Trailblazers like you are using Salesforce Pardot, part of Salesforce Customer 360, the world’s #1 CRM, to humanize digital interactions, engage customers with empathy, and optimize budgets & impact.
I’m excited to share some stories from some incredible trailblazers today and I’m going to speak about how Salesforce and our customers are leading through change. It should come as no surprise to all of you that we’re in a health crisis, that we’re in economic crisis, that we’re in a racial crisis. For us at Salesforce it is a very good time for us to lean on our values. Our values really guide us. And as a company, they’re at the root of everything that we do, and those values are trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. And what we’ve tried to do over the course of this pandemic and through this challenging year is to really live those values.
This summary covers the opening keynote and key stories from a virtual gathering of marketing automation professionals, emphasizing resilience, digital transformation, and the evolving role of the marketer during a challenging year.
Purpose-Driven Business: The event opened with the story of Bitty & Beau’s Coffee, a company inspired by children with Down syndrome, dedicated to creating jobs for people with disabilities. Their successful pivot to an online business utilized Salesforce Customer 360.
Virtual Accessibility: Switching to a virtual format massively expanded access, attracting 3,400 attendees from 62 countries, far exceeding initial attendance goals.
Digital Acceleration: The pandemic accelerated digital transformation, forcing businesses to complete multi-year plans in months. Achieving a Customer 360 view using a unified platform is now critical.
Marketer’s Evolving Role: The B2B marketer’s role has expanded to owning the entire customer experience, demanding cross-organizational collaboration and leveraging analytics and AI.
Salesforce addressed the health and economic crises by focusing on its core values: Trust, Customer Success, Innovation, and Equality.
Trust: Sourced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of PPE for global healthcare organizations.
Customer Success: Provided free product and ensured platform reliability for customers working remotely.
Innovation: Launched Work.com to help customers safely manage employee returns, contact tracing, and vaccine distribution.
Equality: Provided grants and free product to help small businesses survive and thrive.
The keynote featured two customers who successfully navigated significant pivots using Salesforce and Pardot:
Challenge: Keeping essential supply chains running during unprecedented complexity and dealing with planner exhaustion.
Pivot: Enhanced their AI algorithms by incorporating new data (like mobility and consumption patterns) to solve unique supply chain problems.
Marketing Strategy: Used Pardot to deliver time-sensitive, role-based campaigns (e.g., advising CFOs vs. CIOs) with an emphasis on empathy.
Technology Success: Seamless integration between Pardot and Sales Cloud enabled effective Account-Based Marketing (ABM), allowing sales to have continuous, informed conversations based on prospect content consumption.
Mission: Creating a world without waste by driving radical efficiency and reducing $\text{CO}_2$ emissions through their algorithms.
Challenge: Its mission, which relies entirely on in-person youth service and global school building, was halted by restrictions.
Pivot: Shifted to socially-distant and virtual service (e.g., calling seniors, launching a “Make Masks Save Lives” campaign which produced 86,000 masks). School building shifted to limited-person, socially-distant crews.
Marketing Strategy: Used email and Pardot to deliver real-time impact and content (like “enhanced ground break” videos) to keep donors connected to the work happening in the field.
Technology Success: Implementing Pardot helped break down organizational silos. Enhanced tracking and scoring resulted in a quadrupling of donations on Giving Tuesday, with one donor making an $18,707 gift directly tracked to an email click and the campaign goal.
Current Initiative: Leading the “Feeding Communities, Not Stigma” project to address food insecurity.
The audience was asked to donate $5 to BuildOn; if all attendees participated, the resulting amount would be enough to fund an entire school, with Salesforce matching all donations. Attendees were also reminded that the Pardot Product Roadmap session would not be recorded and was a must-attend event.
