Nov 03, 2015 By Adam Blitzer

Salesforce Announces New Gmail Integration, New Reporting Dashboards and Faster Data-Sync for Pardot

in Featured, Marketing, Marketing Cloud

B2B marketers are constantly telling us that the number one thing they want is to better engage buyers who remain anonymous for the majority of the sales cycle. In fact, 65 percent of B2B buyers only connect with a vendor or sales rep after they’ve made the purchase decision, according to IDC. This highlights the disconnect among customers, who want to find the right sources of information to help them make purchase decisions; marketers, who want to intelligently move prospects through the buying cycle; and sales reps, who lack the insights into their prospects’ needs to provide tailored engagement.

Pardot, our B2B marketing automation solution, allows companies to build the bridge that empowers marketing and sales teams to prospect smarter together to turn anonymous buyers into happy customers. And today, we’re announcing new Pardot capabilities that make it easier than ever for sales and marketing teams to better engage prospects while working from their email and Salesforce.

New Gmail Integration: Salesforce Engage for Gmail

Salesforce Engage for Gmail extends the power of Salesforce Engage — our solution to empower sales reps with real-time, mobile marketing tools--to the most used email application in the world. Engage for Gmail, is the first marketing automation plug-in built specifically for sales reps, empowering them to send emails directly from Gmail. In addition, the side panel (shown at left) surfaces detailed lead information directly within Gmail for sales reps. As you can see, this lead information goes beyond simple things like email open and click activity, and offers a holistic view of prospect activities such as attending an event or viewing website content. With the new Engage for Gmail, sales reps can:

Gain a holistic view of prospects, including name, company, title, address, phone number, whether the a record is a lead, contact, or prospect and their corresponding Pardot lead score and grade directly within Gmail.
Add and remove the prospect to and from Pardot lead nurturing campaigns with one click using the “Add to Nurture” button. If a sales rep clicks to add a recipient to a nurture campaign and that prospect does not exist in Pardot, a prospect record will be automatically created and assigned to the user.
Send and monitor one-to-one sales emails from Gmail in one click.
Log all Gmail email interactions--including clicks and opens within Salesforce.

"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,” said Chad O’Neal, marketing director and head of marketing automation, Pearson.

New Pardot Data Visualizations and Report Customizations

Pardot includes new powerful reporting capabilities that enable marketers to easily assess the true ROI of their marketing efforts, leading to greater marketing accountability.

Pardot reporting is even better thanks to deeper integration with Salesforce, giving users new ways to visualize data on a variety of different reports. For example, the new visitors report displays reporting of anonymous visitors and identified prospects to the website. And new multi-score lead scoring, shown above, allows marketers and sales reps to discover which products a prospect is most likely to buy at any moment. For more detailed information on how our reporting works, visit our knowledge base.

These new reporting capabilities strengthen Pardot's existing reporting, which empowers markets to:

Tie each closed deal back to its original source with closed-loop reporting.
Match website visitor behavior and Pardot prospect data using the Google Analytics Connector.
Get a high-level view of sales cycle health.
Monitor the performance of paid search campaigns.
Gain greater insight into email open rates, deliverability rates, email client and browser usage, read rates and more.

Faster Data Syncing with Salesforce

Surfacing prospect insights so sales reps can respond before the competition is crucial. 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.