Both your sales and marketing teams play vital roles in the success of your business. However, they each go about their business separately. Your marketing team creates the content and campaigns that attract new customers, and your sales team employs the tactics to turn leads into paying customers. But what if you could make them work in unison?
They’ll work more effectively and efficiently and sell more products. The problem is, it’s challenging to bridge the gap between them. Fortunately, Salesforce Engage can close the gap and align your sales and marketing teams!
What Is Salesforce Engage?
Salesforce Engage is a Pardot add-on that helps your sales and marketing teams work better together. As we’ll show in more detail later, with the tool, your marketing team can easily create and share content with your sales team. In turn, your sales team can use this content to close deals more effectively.
In addition, Engage also provides sales teams with the insights they need to approach the right prospects at the right time. As a bonus, all this is provided to sales teams within the Salesforce platform.
How Salesforce Engage Works with Pardot
Pardot, presently known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, is a marketing automation platform that offers email campaigns and automation, lead management, and so much more. In other words, it’s where your marketing team creates and manages their Salesforce marketing campaigns, content, and assets.
But how does that tie in with Salesforce Engage? Well, while your marketing team can create highly effective campaigns in Pardot to attract leads, your sales team may need more time or skills to create the same content to nurture those leads. And yet, nurturing is vital if your team wants to close more deals.
Salesforce Engage bridges this gap between your sales and marketing teams.
When using the tool, your marketing team, as usual, will create engaging and valuable content in campaigns in Pardot. (This includes the content and templates they’ll use for either 1:1 or 1:many campaigns.)
In turn, your sales team can then use Engage to send these approved emails and campaigns to their prospects to move them through the funnel and close the sale.
Let’s face it: your sales team is in the best position to know whom to target and what deals are more likely to close. Here, one of the major benefits of Engage is that it offers prospect filtering, which gives your sales team the insights typically reserved for your marketing team in Pardot. For example, they can filter Salesforce leads based on their activities. Alternatively, they can filter leads geographically.
Either way, your sales team can engage with and nurture prospects more effectively by having granular insights into prospects’ activities and behaviors. In turn, your marketing team will have more profound insights into how effective these campaigns and emails are, which allows them to refine and make improvements where necessary to increase performance even further.
Ultimately, by having both platforms, the silos between the sales and marketing teams are eliminated. More importantly, with the marketing content your marketing team provides, your sales team can engage with the right prospects at the right time.
The 4 Key Salesforce Engage Components
Now that we’ve seen how Engage works with Pardot, let’s look at its four key components:
- Engage Campaigns.
- Engage Reports.
- Engage Alerts.
- Engage for Gmail and Outlook.
Engage Campaigns
With Salesforce Engage Campaigns, you’ll make it easier for your team to access marketing content and deliver valuable, personalized content to your audience. Your marketing team can provide your sales reps with email templates and other campaigns they’ve designed in Pardot. There’s even an extensive pre-made template library.
You can send these campaigns to single or multiple leads, contacts, or other stakeholders. Your sales reps can launch them quickly from Salesforce, the Salesforce app, or even Gmail and Outlook. Simply put, Engage allows your sales team to easily launch campaigns with marketing-approved content.
Ultimately, this ensures that your teams align on the content types each account needs to receive. Marketing can do their research and validate it through sales teams sending campaigns via Salesforce Engage. Similarly, sales teams get personalized content without having to sit through endless brainstorming meetings.
Engage Reports
Once you’ve launched and run your campaigns, you’ll also want to know how they perform. This is where Engage Reports comes in. Similarly to other Salesforce reporting features, Engage Reports allows you to track the following:
- How your leads or customers react to your emails
- If they open them
- If they click through
It offers email tracking insights through an extensive range of reports that give you deeper insights into your campaigns’ performance. You can also filter your emails to get more granular insights into how your emails perform across a specified date range.
The major benefit is that it shows your team what works and what doesn’t. In turn, they can make data-driven decisions to make improvements where necessary.
Engage Alerts
We’ve already mentioned how Engage Reports gives you insights into your campaigns’ and emails’ performance. Engage Alerts takes this one step further, giving you real-time data on how your Salesforce accounts interact with your campaigns. This data is arranged on a column-based view, which can be customized in your standard Salesforce dashboards based on your unique needs and requirements.
You can also set specific filter criteria to get the necessary information. Your marketing team can push content with the most engagement at any given time directly to your sales team. Combined, all these features allow you to reach out and engage with the right prospects with the right content.
Engage for Gmail and Outlook
With Salesforce Engage for Gmail and Outlook, your sales team can send campaigns and emails to prospects, contacts, and customers directly from Gmail and Outlook. This allows them to send fully trackable, well-designed, and effective emails quickly and easily.
It goes further than this, though. When you’ve installed the tool, all emails your team sends from Gmail or Outlook will be logged into the relevant lead record synced between Salesforce and Pardot.
Remember, though, while the tool offers these benefits, connecting Gmail or Outlook with Salesforce can be challenging and require a fair amount of technical knowledge. A solution like Match My Email, which syncs email and calendar data seamlessly with Salesforce, might be a better option.
Why Should You Use Salesforce Engage?
There are a ton of benefits, including:
- Filtering. Sales reps get access to extensive filtering options that allow them to find and target the right prospects at the right time. This helps your sales team work more efficiently and close more deals.
- Consistency. Because your sales team can use Engage to send campaigns and emails created by your marketing team, you’ll ensure consistent branding and messaging across all your sales and marketing efforts.
- Deeper insights. With Engage, your sales team knows how prospects engage with the emails and campaigns they send. They can then use these insights to customize their outreach.
- Reporting. Apart from the insights above, Engage also provides extensive reporting features that provide your sales and marketing teams with valuable insights.
- Easy to use. Let’s face it: your sales reps don’t have the time to learn how to use a new tool. Fortunately, Engage is simple and easy to use, and your sales reps can become pros at the tool in no time!
- Intuitive user interface. A part of the tool’s ease of use is its intuitive user interface. It’ll help you with user adoption, as well as allow team members and managers to understand the high-level effects of their strategies.
- Mobile access. Finally, Engage is available on the Salesforce app, which means your sales team can use the tool no matter where they are. If your team is already acquainted with the way Salesforce works, using Engage will simply be an add-on (unlike onboarding them to a whole new tool with a steep learning curve).
Getting Started with Salesforce Engage
Ultimately, Salesforce Engage is a fantastic addition to your standard Salesforce account that breaks down silos and keeps your Sales and Marketing teams in complete alignment. With easy access to data, practical and time-saving workflows, and no learning curve, it’ll give your revenue an additional boost!
