Salesforce.com’s New B2B Marketing Automation is a Big Win for Sales Reps

It was announced today that Salesforce.com will be unveiling new marketing automation solutions for Sales Cloud users. Intelligent Engagement Studio and Sales Cloud Engage is scheduled to be released April 2015 and is scheduled to be unveiled April 23, 2015. Salesforce will be hosting their Salesforce World Tour in Chicago on that day so it is only assumed that we will all receive more information during the events keynotes. Salesforce currently offers a number of email solutions under their brand starting with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. When Salesforce acquired Indianapolis-based ExactTarget in 2013 it obtained enterprise leading email marketing and marketing automation solutions for their customer base. As a result, the new Sales Cloud Engage will be powered by Salesforce Pardot and according to today’s press release it “will deliver sophisticated adaptive lead nurturing, visualized campaign testing and cutting edge mobile marketing tools.”

Features of the Intelligent Engagement Studio and Sales Cloud Engage

We can expect more information to be presented and I am sure that on April 23, 2015 we will obtain a full demo on how companies can be successful with these new solutions. But here is a list of features and capabilities we can begin getting excited about:

1. Real time prospect notifications on your Salesforce1 Mobile App allowing any sales rep to be notified when a prospect engages with a digital marketing piece.
2. Send custom content or a marketing-approved email message to a prospect to help move a sales through the funnel.
3. Granular reporting on prospects engagement with marketing.
4. Custom Nurturing campaigns and drip marketing.
5. Trigger based messaging .
6. Visibility to real-time campaign performance.
7. Personalized marketing automation campaigns created by sales reps.

Sales Reps Win Big

Overall, this is a big win for sales reps and their managers. The business community is aggressively tearing down the wall between sales and marketing so they are working together and towards a common goal. With the Intelligent Engagement Studio both sales and marketing will be able to easily access data to help move a prospect through to a sale. In addition, sales reps have a more robust toolset with the Sales Cloud Engage allowing them to better nurture a client and move them through a sales funnel. Sales reps will no longer have to wait on a campaign to be created but will now be able to create one on their own with the appropriate assets provided to them from marketing.

Sales Cloud Engage will be available April 2015 at $50/user/month. Intelligent Engagement Studio will be available later in the year and pricing has not been set yet. Expect more information in the coming weeks.