Salesforce.com’s Pardot Marketing Automation Platform Integrates with Gmail

Today, Pardot—Salesforce.com's B2B marketing automation solution—announced new capabilities that make it even easier for businesses to better engage buyers from both email and Salesforce.com's native platform.

With a recent IDC study (commissioned by Salesforce.com) reporting that 65 percent of B2B buyers only connect with vendors or sales reps after making their purchase decisions, the disconnect between the two parties is apparent. The latest Pardot features—including new Gmail integration, new reporting dashboards, and faster data syncing—seek to improve that relationship.

Considering Gmail is the most used email application in the world, it's small wonder why the integration is so compelling. Extending the marketing tools of Salesforce Engage, Engage for Gmail is a marketing automation plug-in designed specifically for sales reps, enabling them to send emails directly from Gmail. The application also enables access to important information about prospects—including name, company, title, address, phone number, and corresponding Pardot lead score and grade—all within Gmail.

"The new Gmail integration enables sales reps to make workflow decisions based on information that is immediately made available and in direct view as they navigate their inbox. It will speed up processes and make for more informed interactions with leads," says Adam Blitzer, senior vice president and general manager of Pardot at Salesforce.com.

Users can also add and remove prospects to and from Pardot lead nurturing campaigns in a single click, send and monitor one-to-one sales emails from Gmail in a single click, and monitor all Gmail email interactions—including clicks and opens—within Salesforce.com.

Although the Gmail integration comes in the form of a Chrome extension and thus is specific to desktop usage, mobile users have the option of using Salesforce Engage for the Salesforce1 app, which, according to Blitzer, "gives sales reps the power to sell from anywhere right from their mobile phone."

Chad O'Neal, director of marketing operations at Pearson, praised the platform: "As we set out to strengthen our sales and marketing partnership, Salesforce Engage gives us the ability to empower sales to execute their own marketing-approved campaigns effectively and efficiently, which will allow us to scale and be more precise in our marketing efforts."

In addition to the Gmail integration, Pardot's new data visualizations and report customizations enable marketers to easily assess the actual return on investment of their campaigns. Reporting is improved by deeper integration with Salesforce.com, allowing users new ways to visualize data on a variety of reports, and new multiscore lead scoring enables marketers and sales reps to discern which products a prospect is most likely to purchase at any moment.

These new capabilities improve upon Pardot's existing features, which allow marketers to get a high-level view of sales cycle health; monitor paid search campaigns; and gain insight into email open rates, deliverability rates, read rates, and email client and browser usage.

Pardot also upgraded its data sync with Salesforce.com. "Pardot is the number-one marketing automation solution used by Salesforce customers," Blitzer says. "We are proud to report that Pardot now has the fastest data sync with Salesforce out of any marketing automation tool, automatically checking for changes as frequently as every two minutes."

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