Connections, Day 2: Salesforce.com Introduces Customer-Centric Tools to Encourage Collaboration

Atlanta — On day two of Salesforce.com's Connections conference at the Georgia World Congress Center, speakers stressed the importance of communications that span across departments and place the customer’s needs at the top of any organization’s priority list.

In his morning product keynote, Bryan Wade, senior vice president and chief product officer of Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, highlighted the benefits of crafting highly personalized customer interactions using Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder. Wade walked attendees through several updates to Journey Builder that, he said, make the tool easier to adopt than ever before, among them the Audiences feature, which enables users to easily apply to Journey Builder important customer data they have stored within the Marketing Cloud. "It's a simple setup wizard, so if you have lists, and you have data extensions, if you're running automations, every campaign can now become a journey," Wade said.

Also new is Personalization Builder, which leverages predictive intelligence to tailor the content users see in emails, in mobile applications, and on the Web. "We've had our predictive technologies for several years, but now we're making it easy to adopt." The wizard option allows users to tag a Web site with JavaScript code to set the personalization process in motion, Wade says.

The Marketing Cloud Command Center, Wade noted, focuses on collaboration. "I talk to a lot of marketers; I meet the CMOs," Wade said. "And what I find is that even within your own marketing team, your email marketers don't talk to your social marketers; your mobile marketers don't talk to your advertising team. Your CFO, and your vice president of HR—do they know what you do? Do they understand the touch points you have with your customer? They probably don't."

The Command Center, therefore, is designed to heighten cooperation among an organization's various departments, as it calls attention to customer activity on social media sites, in their emails, within the Journey Builder tool, and on the Service Cloud. And "we're going to continue to add more to it," Wade said.

During an afternoon keynote titled "The Era of Intelligent B2B Marketing Engagement," Shannon Duffy, chief marketing officer of Salesforce Pardot, had a similar message to share with business-facing professionals. "B2B marketing is all about giving your marketing teams the tools to market better, your sales teams the tools to sell better, and connecting these two so they can work together more effectively," Duffy said. "We know that the companies whose B2B marketing automation and really drive home sales and marketing alignment are more successful. They have higher customer retention and win rates."  

Duffy said that the new Lightning Components for Salesforce's Pardot marketing automation platform are designed to aid these crucial collaborations. "The first [of these componenets] is the ability to analyze your engagement history from anywhere,” Duffy said. Having a clear view of this activity is valuable, Duffy said, as it gives sales and marketing departments insights into all of a prospect’s engagements with their brand, including Web and email activity and content downloads.

"We're also unveiling the ability to track lead scores across multiple products," Duffy said. This update is geared toward those companies who manage more than one product line. For example, sales teams can leverage the feature to better understand which prospects would likely be interested in complementary purchases. “This is great for cross-sell and upsell,” Duffy said.

Also updated for Lightning is Salesforce Engage, which gives sales reps the ability to nurture reps using insights and tools provided by the marketing department. 

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