Perhaps the key challenge of B2B sales reps in the digital age is getting an audience with a customer before he has made a purchase decision based on Web research. Salesforce this week announced an integration with Gmail it hopes will allow salespeople to elbow into that process armed with better customer intelligence and real-time email engagement tools.
The Salesforce Engage for Email solution surfaces lead information on prospects that details their recent activities—such as website visits or trade show attendance—and provides names, companies, titles, addresses, and phone numbers. Synced with Salesforce’s Pardot marketing automation system, the method can determine whether the record is a lead, contact, or prospect and can add or remove the record from Pardot nurturing campaigns.
Tapping the Engage library of marketing-approved email templates, reps can immediately react to customer activity with Gmail messages that can be monitored for engagement activity. New reporting capabilities within Pardot help salespeople discover which products a prospect is most likely to buy.
In separate news, Salesforce Marketing Cloud announced it has been selected as a Pinterest marketing developer partner for content publishing and that it will be introducing a new set of tools for marketers to employ in connecting with customers through Social Studio. The solution will include tracking tags for Web analytics, marketing automation, and CRM to gauge how Pinterest drives engagement.
