Wouldn’t it be grand if your organisation could provide each salesperson with a personal marketer? Just imagine: Sales could respond immediately to a buying signal from a prospect, using the template messaging that Marketing has developed while adhering to all corporate guidelines. How’s that for a win-win between Sales and Marketing? Sounds like a pipe dream? No way, this is for real. This personal marketer even has a name: ‘Salesforce Engage’.

Here’s a true story: as I was giving training on Salesforce Engage technology to a marketing department, the marketing director noticed a hot prospect account checking out all the information on a product (including pricing!) that the prospect, previously, had said they were not interested in. Within minutes, the marketing director took this up with Sales who contacted the prospect immediately. That’s the kind of sales and marketing experience Salesforce Engage has on offer. What happened is that Sales were able to contact the prospect at a moment he was interested in buying. Usually, in marketing it’s the other way around: we set up a campaign when we are interested in selling, regardless of a prospect’s buying intentions.

Digital promiscuity

As everyone is creating great and helpful content, consumers will move from one website to another, trying to inform themselves. You’re lucky if customers stay on your website for a couple of minutes before wandering off. That’s what I call digital promiscuity. The sales and marketing trick consists in catching the customer while they are looking at your goodies and acting immediately. And that’s where Salesforce Engage helps, with customised Alerts, Campaigns and Reports.

Engage Alerts

Engage Alerts are real-time services that inform you about prospect activity. These alerts tell you what content prospects are consuming, what newsletters they are subscribing to, etc. Clicking on an alert will take you to the contact record in your Salesforce app. To risk being flooded with alerts, sales can filter prospects based on location and activities.

Engage Campaigns

Campaigns is the true personal marketer, as it allows sales reps to send tracked emails via Salesforce to one specific prospect or to a group of them. Rather than letting Sales write their own emails, Marketing can provide templates with the right messages to be sent, thus ensuring that all emails are on-message.

Engage Reports

Engage Reports tracks all these emails you have sent for engagement and lets an Engage-user track how leads and contacts interact with Engage Campaigns, for instance which emails were opened, what users clicked on, etc. Reports can be set up per user or for a team of salespeople.

In short, Salesforce Engage allows Sales to see what people are doing, act on it and analyse the performance of their actions.

Optimising thought processes

Tools such as Pardot and Salesforce, and all the functionality in them, help bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing, assisting them in working together towards the same goal: bringing in business for the company. While Pardot helps optimise content processes, and Salesforce automates sales processes, Salesforce Engage goes further than that, actually optimising thought processes. You can look into the mind of a prospect, and strike while the iron is hot.