One of the announcements from 2018’s Dreamforce that brought much cheer to B2B marketers was the Salesforce Pardot and DemandBase integration. The collaboration promises to deliver an efficient and integrated Account-Based Marketing (ABM) experience to B2B marketers, allowing them to use Demandbase’s website engagement and intent data within Pardot and Sales Cloud
The martech ecosystem can be complex and fragmented, making it difficult to engage individually with relevant accounts. Also, since sales and marketing teams use different platforms for day-to-day work, it becomes tough for B2B marketers to share all the data across systems. A survey by the Martech Industry Council revealed that B2B companies have approximately 16 technologies in their marketing technology stacks, but only 3% of companies admit that these technologies are easy to integrate..
But an integration where CRM and marketing automation come together with ABM can empower B2B marketers to engage with their target accounts, with the strengths of the three technologies coming together. The collaboration offers a great way to find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI.
Benefits of using Salesforce Pardot + Demandbase
- The integration allows you to build, activate and manage B2B audiences within Salesforce by pulling data from the Demandbase ABM and CRM systems, combining them with Sales Cloud existing reports and using AI-generated recommendations.
- You can utilize Demandbase’s anonymous website engagement and intent data to segment accounts in Pardot campaigns, discover account engagement and build custom lists on your ABM program.
- You can combine Demandbase data with both CRM and Pardot data to dig up insights within B2B Marketing Analytics.
- Based on account-level insights and intent, you can implement nurture campaigns in Pardot.
- You can empower your sales team with real-time account insights and help close more deals.
Challenges resolved by Salesforce Pardot + Demandbase
“ABM blurs the line between sales and marketing, enabling both teams to align faster and focus on the same goal: delivering a memorable customer experience,” says Michael Kostow, SVP and GM, Salesforce Pardot. His statement practically sums up what the Salesforce Pardot and Demandbase integration is about and the kind of challenges this combination helps resolve.
For many decades, sales and marketing teams have struggled to work together and share data to win accounts and close sales, thanks to the disparate platforms they work on. Sales and marketing alignment has been a rather serious issue that plagues organizations. According to Forrester, only 8% of companies have strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments. IDC states that the inability of B2B companies to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs 10% or more of revenue per year. A research by Aberdeen revealed that companies with poor sales and marketing alignment have a 4% revenue decline.
These hurdles come with additional challenges – like the dramatic change in how powerful customers have become and how the business is all about delivering customer-centric experiences across every touchpoint. This calls for a dynamic shift in how sales and marketing function and in tandem; simply because, for a customer, there is only one company and not two different teams. They do not distinguish between who they are interacting with, and therefore, a lack of alignment between sales and marketing could result in missed opportunities to create seamless customer experiences..
Here the Salesforce Pardot + Demandbase integration comes into play, blurring the lines between sales and marketing and enabling both teams to align their goals, and focus on a single factor – delivering a smashing customer experience. Hitherto, the sales teams at B2B companies have labored to drive pipeline and close business, but without a comprehensive view of accounts this has been one of their biggest challenges. The integration allows sales to access a complete view of marketing’s target accounts, which is in addition to insights like early buying signs. Aggregated account level insights, activity of individuals within an account, behavior data on the website with insights and behavior data across the web are some of the other challenges that are easily resolved and made available to sales and marketing teams. In the words of Chris Golec, CEO of Demandbase, “Our new analytics functionality leverages the best practices from some of the world’s most sophisticated B2B marketers and brings them to life for every company, no matter where they are on their ABM journey.”
“Does my business need this (extraordinary) combination?”
If you are in the B2B space, then we say it would make sense to make this investment. Gartner VP/analyst Todd Berkowitz says that in spite of marketing automation platforms adding ABM-like capabilities to their features, standalone ABM tools are developing significantly, meaning that their additional functions will find their space in massive technology stacks of marketing departments. An ABM platform integrated into marketing automation of a B2B company enables marketing teams to look beyond individual accounts and target prospective new accounts at scale. That very change can impact marketers’ future options in tool selections. With more heads involved in technology-buying decisions and with the AI option thrown into the ecosystem, it has become increasingly critical to have an integrated technology environment
If you would like to know more about the benefits of Salesforce Pardot and Demandbase integration in the context of your business, write to us at services@suyati.com.
