New Salesforce Account-Based Marketing Innovations Apply AI to Identify Customers Most Likely to Purchase

• Launching today, new Salesforce Account-Based Marketing (ABM) innovations help companies surface their most valuable accounts

• Leading brands like McAfee and Wartsila use Salesforce ABM technology to drive qualified pipeline growth and close deals faster

By Meredith Brown, SVP & Head of Product, Salesforce Pardot 

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a seismic shift in the marketing industry, as every business was forced to transition to a digital-first world virtually overnight. 

Pre-pandemic B2B reps met customers where they were looking to do business — dinner meetings, live entertainment events and industry conferences. Now, these customer interactions are primarily happening digitally from anywhere, with Zooms as the new conference rooms and sales deals closed in home offices. 

As customer demands for these kinds of digital experiences grow, B2B companies need a platform to build a single view of their customer, identify key accounts and quickly turn new leads into deals.

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Salesforce ABM takes personalization to a new level

Powered by Einstein, Salesforce’s Account-Based Marketing (ABM) technology provides companies with a complete B2B marketing platform. Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce’s ABM technology uses AI to help marketing and sales teams understand buyers in strategic accounts, focus on their most important sales opportunities and deliver personalized content to strengthen relationships with their customers. 

Today, we’re excited to introduce two new ABM innovations within Salesforce Digital 360, which will help companies easily identify accounts with the strongest buying signals and kick-start their ABM campaigns in seconds — driving more qualified pipeline growth: 

• Einstein Key Account Identification uses AI to surface the accounts with the highest likelihood to purchase, and provides scoring, recommendations and insights for companies to market and sell to these accounts. Now companies can use AI to analyze data across their Salesforce CRM and marketing engagement across the web to tier accounts in prioritized order. This helps marketing and sales teams focus on priority accounts — optimizing their resources to close deals faster.

• Accounts as Campaign Members uses AI-powered insights to create personalized ABM campaigns for every buyer within top-tier accounts. This new capability allows organizations to target their most valuable accounts even if they do not have any contacts for that account. They can then add the new account contacts into their marketing campaigns the moment they are identified. Previously, marketers could only target an account if they had an individual contact in their CRM. Now, marketing and sales teams can create ABM campaigns in seconds, and deliver targeted campaigns across email, web, social, and digital events. Pardot’s B2B marketing automation technology is built on the core Salesforce platform, targeting campaigns to a Salesforce account object is unique and exclusive to Pardot users.

Connect buyer experiences across sales, marketing, commerce and service

Every business operating today needs to deliver connected digital experiences for their buyers, from anywhere. However, buyer behavior is changing — and they’re bringing B2C buying habits to B2B purchases. These buyers have done the research, read the reviews, and they know all about a product before the sales team even reaches out. 

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By using Sales Cloud with Pardot, companies can deliver a consistent marketing and sales experience for each account based on all insights into a buyer’s purchase intent and engagement. This reduces the time and complexity needed to backchannel and get buying consensus across an account’s decision makers — taking the guesswork out of traditional account prospecting and target account selection to drive revenue growth. And with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud, teams can increase recurring revenue from top accounts and know which accounts are most likely to renew based on buyer behavior and account characteristics. 

Salesforce ABM accelerates customer and partner success from anywhere

Companies across technology, communications, transportation, healthcare, business consulting and energy are using Salesforce ABM technology. 

McAfee, one of the world’s largest technology security companies, is using Salesforce ABM to change how they engage with their customers across digital channels. “With Salesforce, we’ve simplified our data visualization to better engage our customers and prospects,” said Brett Hannath, Chief Marketing Officer at McAfee. “This past year, we’ve shifted our organization to work from home and transformed how we engage customers. ABM has helped us personalize customer engagement, align our sales and marketing teams and improve data accuracy.”

Wartsila, the global leader in solutions for the marine and energy markets, has used Salesforce ABM to transform how marketing and sales work together. “Our mission at Wärtsilä is to enable sustainable societies through smart technology for the marine and energy markets,” says Jaime López, General Manager for Marketing Operations at Wärtsilä. “With Salesforce, we are able to better understand how to create value for our customers, and how to help them on the path to 100% renewable energy and a decarbonized marine ecosystem. The ground-breaking AI-based Pardot features like Einstein Attribution and ABM account identification have fundamentally changed the way our marketing team makes decisions, and strengthened the relationship with our global sales teams.”

Sercante, a Salesforce consulting partner, uses Salesforce ABM to drive targeted sales opportunities. “Sercante is focused on helping sales and marketing teams be wildly successful on the Salesforce platform,” said Andrea Tarrell, CEO & Founder of Sercante. “In order to do that, we need to have our own sales house in order so we can find the right prospects at the right time. Using Einstein Key Account Identification has given us an AI boost in prospect identification and outreach. This way we can see what accounts have proven to be the best for our bottom line and which ones will follow in their steps.”

Salesforce ABM helps teams transition to an all-digital world

With ABM technology, Salesforce is enabling B2B businesses in any industry to focus on their top sales opportunities and personalize every interaction. These new solutions will be an important part of the post-pandemic economic recovery, while helping every team move forward into an all-digital, success-from-anywhere future.

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