11 Oct Winter ’18 – What’s New in Pardot

Pardot recently hosted a product roadmap webinar to giving customers and partners a sneak peak of the new features that are planned. The release readiness team also held a webinar detailing the new features that are being released as part of the Winter ’18 released. The first part of this post will cover the roadmap and the second part will cover the planned features.

Pardot Roadmap

Pardot continues down the road of merging their platform into the core Salesforce platform. This includes a unified database, and the ability to setup and edit Engagement Programs in a Pardot marketing app on the Salesforce platform. The Pardot roadmap continues be a Lightning-first, like all of the other Salesforce Clouds.

For anyone interested there is a beta program to test out some of this functionality. The major features in this pilot include:

• A new Lightning app with all Pardot functionality (pi.pardot.com will continue to be available during the pilot).
• Alignment of campaigns between Salesforce and Pardot. This is similar to how we sync Accounts or Opportunities today.
• Native Engagement History (think Prospect Activity) summarized on Campaign records and available in custom reports. The pilot will not have all data, but enough to get an idea of how this will work.
• The ability to build new Engagement Programs and List Emails natively in Sales Cloud.

You can sign up here.

One key planned feature is the ability to schedule Engagement Program steps on a specific date. Previously, it was only possible to take an action immediately or waiting x amount of days.  This has been a gap for Pardot for quite some time, and a major pain point for Hubspot customers who transferred to Pardot. Combined with this planned feature is a feature that is currently available, which is the ability to set a start and end date and time of an Engagement Program.

Another planned feature is the ability to loop through an Engagement Program. Currently, once a prospect goes through a program they cannot go through it again. The hack has been to create another Engagement Program and use the ‘Add to List’ action at the end of a particular program to start the Prospect into the cloned program. This will be a great feature, which is set to begin piloting in Spring ’18. In the previous release we received the ability to loop automation rules, which was a big win!

Account-based marketing continues to be a theme for Pardot in their roadmap. This is in the context of Einstein their artificial intelligence core. The concept here is that Einstein will surface insights about key accounts, and marketing and sales will work together to jointly pursue relationships with Accounts.

Winter ’18 Pardot Features

Coming in Winter ’18 is Engage for Outlook. We’ve been waiting for this plug-in for awhile since Pardot already has an Engage plug-in for Gmail. This will give Sales Development Reps (SDRs) using Outlook the ability to send marketing-approved emails directly from Outlook. Note that unlike sending Engage emails from Salesforce, when sending from Outlook the email will be sent by your Exchange/Office 365 server and not Pardot’s email server. Engage for Outlook will support Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016 and the Outlook Web App.

Also, when using Engage in Salesforce you can now send emails from the Account record. This includes sending to Person Accounts!

A pilot feature in Winter ’18 is a unified Campaign data model. This data model will provide a single source of truth for Campaign ROI reporting. Previously, Pardot had their own campaign report and Salesforce had it’s own report. Pardot will now be leveraging the campaign tracking model native to the Salesforce platform, which allows for multi-touch attribution and campaign hierarchies and rollups.

Thanks for reading! Share your favorite new Pardot feature in the comments!