Salesforce Winter ’19 Highlights — Pardot in Lightning Experience

Chris Stegall
creme de la crm
Published in
5 min readNov 19, 2018

The days are getting shorter, pants are getting longer, and radiators all over the world are waking up from their Summer slumbers. The seasons are changing and that means one thing — a new Salesforce release is here!

Last week we took a look at the new Lightning Reports: Dive Deeper feature to help users get more insight into the details and relationships behind their data. Today, we’ll keep our data-lover hats on and head over to sales and marketing for a look at one of the coolest new bits of the Winter ’19 Release: Pardot in Lightning Experience!

Pardot and Salesforce have been staples of the marketing world for years and now they’re finally fully connected! Offering a single platform for both the sales and marketing departments to maintain 360-degree visibility into their customers, prospects, campaigns, and what it takes to get to “Closed — Won”.

[And if you’d rather watch than read, jump down to the bottom of this post to enjoy a short demo video!]

Everything in One Place

Gone are the days of separate windows, tabs, duplicate menus, and confusing inconsistencies. With Pardot now tailored specifically for the Lightning Experience everything can get done on the same page (literally and figuratively), with a new, user-friendly layout and dramatically improved navigation! More than an integration, Salesforce completely re-engineered Pardot so that it’s become part of a seamless one-platform solution. Now both your sales and marketing departments can easily collaborate and focus on finding and nurturing new leads, closing deals, and maximizing the ROI of their efforts.

SF Campaigns

Pardot in Lightning Experience also includes Salesforce Campaigns, designed to give your teams full transparency and visibility into all of your marketing efforts. Featuring an improved, and more efficient, campaign management process and increased reporting functionality, Salesforce Campaigns make it easy for your team to get high-level insight into their campaigns’ health, effectiveness, and returns. Streamlined navigation and increased flexibility and functionality free up your marketing and sales teams to focus on the message, not Salesforce menus.

Campaign Path

Campaign Path eliminates the communication gap between your marketing department, on-the-ground sales team, and the executive suite. You now have the ability to create a customized, organized path for each campaign so that everybody can check or track its progress instantly with an easy-to-read, graphic status display. No more sales reps left out of the loop about upcoming campaigns and offers. No one stuck waiting on a campaign that was cancelled weeks ago. And even more insight into bottlenecks and room for improvement in your rollouts!

Top Leads

And now that your stakeholders have transparency into your campaigns, your marketing department can focus on what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next — instead of playing communications coordinator between departments. One of the most robust tools now available to help them make those decisions is the new Top Leads Page. Here you’ll be able to drill down into a specific lead to see their entire engagement history! Landing page activity, forms they’ve submitted, site searches and more.

For your marketing team, it’s valuable insight into the effectiveness of their efforts and, for your sales team, it’s even more information towards qualifying those leads, identifying their pain-points, and nurturing them into the pipeline!

Reporting, Influence and Analytics

Because this is Salesforce, you’re probably expecting some awesome new dashboards, reports, and tools designed to help you understand all that delicious new data too. And you’d be right!

Pardot’s reporting lets you use customizable campaign influence on all of your campaigns in Salesforce. That means you can leverage Pardot influence models (or any other custom attribution models you have in your instance) to leverage that data and experience into results.

The Analytics Studio gives you detailed, relevant B2B marketing analytics in an easy-to-read, dynamic, graphic-centered format. Simple menus let your marketing team see relevant data, modeled the way they want it, with just the click of a mouse — empowering them to take quick, data-driven action (and giving them all the evidence, graphs, and charts they need to back up those decisions in the next “all-hands” meeting).

A personal favorite for us here is the multi-touch attribution dashboard. It gives us great insight into which campaigns are driving the most leads, closing the most deals, and driving the most revenue. We can see how each campaign and touch plays a part in the path from prospect to client, and it removes the guesswork from determining if those middle-ground campaigns between “lead created” and “deal closed” are effective.

To take a look at the Pardot in Lightning Experience, hit play on the video below:

And if you’d like to find out how we could help your sales and marketing teams harness this powerful new platform, reach out to us — we’d love to help!

In the meantime, stay tuned here for more Winter ’19 Release highlights and let us know in the comments if there’s something specific you’d like us to cover!

Happy working!

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Chris Stegall
creme de la crm

Digital Marketing Director @ MK Partners. Salesforce lover, user, and constant learner.