Marketing automation is quickly becoming one of the most essential tools for marketers. According to our 2015 State of B2B Marketing report, which surveyed more than 2,200 B2B marketers, 70% of respondents stated that marketing automation was either an effective or very effective tool for digital marketing strategies.

As more and more companies implement marketing automation, we are excited to share that they are increasingly deploying Salesforce Pardot. In fact, today we’re announcing that Pardot is now the fastest growing and most deployed marketing automation application by Salesforce customers.

We find that this growth is primarily due to our team being laser focused on the customer and your challenges. The B2B sales cycle has changed dramatically in recent years. Prospects now research options online and engage with companies only when they’re close to making a purchase. While the actions prospects take during the research process present numerous engagement opportunities, most marketers and sales reps don’t have the visibility or context required to understand how best to connect with the individual and advance them through the buying process.

Marketers may know a prospect opened an email, but don’t how long they were engaged with it or what they did next. And by the time sales receives the intelligence, the moment of engagement has passed and it’s too late to act on it. What companies need is a solution that assembles these individual data points and translates them into actionable insights.

Today, Pardot is making it easier than ever for sales and marketing to work together on one platform. Pardot’s seamless integration with Salesforce CRM helps marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles and demonstrate marketing accountability. And with our recently launched Salesforce Engage app, marketing can empower sales teams to deploy their own personalized, tracked email campaigns, putting the power of marketing-curated content and insights in the hands of sales reps, on any device.

For example, Nextiva is a cloud phone systems trusted by more than 100,000 companies. According to Nextiva VP, Marketing Yaniv Masjedi, “Compared to our previous marketing automation solution, Pardot allows us to be more effective, efficient, and intelligent in the way we work from both a sales and marketing perspective. It provides us with greater business intelligence on customer activity, helping us close deals faster and spend our time more wisely. Pardot allows us to work smarter, and it enables us to be more effective in the way we communicate with customers. Not just measuring clicks, but what happened after that and how it impacted the business.”

Nextiva is not alone. Customers who use Pardot see an average 34 percent increase in sales revenue, 48 percent increase in marketing productivity, 37 percent increase in marketing campaign effectiveness and 38 percent increase in prospect engagement, according to the Salesforce Pardot 2015 Customer Relationship Survey.

If you haven’t yet checked out Pardot, sign up for a demo to see how you can boost your sales.