MarCloud Podcast #3 - Pardot or Marketing Cloud?

Foreign.

And thanks for just giving us some time of your day today. It's always an honor to be in your ear and talk all things Marketing Cloud, Account Engagement and Salesforce. So today we've got a great episode for you. You're very, very lucky that I've managed to get both Tom and Anton onto the same call at the same time. And today we're going to be discussing account Engagement versus Marketing Cloud. So before I do, I'm going to let our esteemed guests introduce themselves. They'll do a better job of it than I would. So, Anton, what do you have to say for yourself, buddy? How would you introduce yourself to all the listeners?

Well, I guess my official title is Head of Technical Services here at Mark Cloud, but I guess the reason I'm on this call is that I have been a consultant in marketing automation for nearly 10 years now. Seems like a very long time in a lot of different platforms. And I finally settled on the platform of choice for me, which is Marketing Cloud. So I'm here to discuss everything Marketing Cloud and how that compares with account engagement. Really looking forward to this discussion. We talk about it sort of offline a lot. We obviously, every time there's a new feature set of. We kind of. We do talk a lot in the teams. I talk a lot with Tom, who is our other guest, sorry to spoiler alert.

And then.

And yeah, we talk a lot about offline. And I think this is going to be a great discussion. So I'm really happy to be here.

Cool. Awesome. And Tom, for those of you, for those of the listeners that don't know who you are, how would you describe yourself?

I am founder and CEO of Markloud. I've been a part of consultant for about seven years, I'd say. So I know the system quite well, have quite a big background in map systems from a Salesforce perspective. Have the Marketing Cloud certification, although don't profess to be an expert and not as much as Anton. And we have lots of good discussions about how we would use Pardot versus Marketing Cloud, which is why I think this is going to be a really good episode.

It's going to be good. We do have a lot of those discussions, but I thought it was about time that we had this discussion in front of everybody. So let the sparks fly, as it were. So, to start off with the history of Salesforce and Marketing Cloud and Pardot is quite an interesting one. So just so we can set the scene and set that foundation, Tom, how did this all come about and how did Salesforce get their hands on Marketing Cloud and Pardot.

Yeah. So it is partly by accident from a acquisition perspective. It was Exact Target that acquired Pardot in 2012 and then only a year later in 2013. That's when Salesforce purchased Marketing Cloud Exact, as it was known then. And which is why for a number of years you'd see references to Exact Target throughout the Marketing Cloud platform. And a lot of people weren't too sure about where they were going with the platform, why they had Pardot versus Marketing Cloud. And there was a lot of, well, tours and events that Salesforce would put on and they would talk very heavily about this tool, marketing card that they've purchased and all these amazing things that they're doing with. But there was this huge community within Pardot where they weren't too sure either about what was going to happen because essentially both systems were, you know, messaging map platforms, both with their own sort of USPS and different ways of using them. But over the years they've kind of developed the platforms and given them a kind of different path, which is what we're going to explore today and how they are quite different and serve different purposes.

I think you alluded to Exact Target is still referenced. Anton, am I right in thinking that Exact Target is still in the URL, the login?

That's correct.

The login URL for Marketing Cloud for those who've used it, is still Exact Target Euro. And it's one of these things, obviously, that is the founding platform. It's a lot of other things now Marketing Cloud has evolved, it's become bigger, there's been functionality added and whole components added to it, but the core component is still Exact Target. Still it's the core engine which is built upon and there's still reference to it here. And there it is, it's fading away. But at those sort of deep system level, that's the hardest place to kind of make those changes. So you're seeing it and those. It's a bit strange for people that are unfamiliar with the history, but yeah, you're logging into an Exact Target URL. Reason.

Cool. So in theory then, the. The one that wanted, that Salesforce wanted was Exact Target and they got what is par. Kind of by default, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Cool. Okay, so that brings us nicely onto the topic that keeps coming up time and time again, because whenever you speak to somebody out there who, you know, why did you choose Par Dot or why did you choose Marketing Cloud?

The.

I don't know if it is a myth, but why don't we start here? Because everybody seems to think like, okay, well we chose we're a B2B company and account engagement was the tool for B2B. Similarly, B2C company marketing cloud is the only tool on Salesforce. That's B2C. So B2B2C Marketing Cloud, is that as strict as that? Are there outliers to that rule? So why don't we start with you, Tom? Why do you think that is and does that ring true?

That's not the rule that came from many years ago. That was how it was kind of sold. So even Salesforce themselves did. Typically, they didn't necessarily know how to sell Pardot against Marketing Cloud. It would always be Marketing Cloud is the powerful tool at that time. And that's where they, where they went and said, this is our B2C tool. And it was very easy to differentiate the two by using those definitions. However, over the years as the tools and platforms developed, for example, Pardot moved to Engagement Studio, used to be a drip program, these little very basic kind of maps, if you like, if you want to call it that, it's very basic. And then it moved towards B2B marketing analytics once they acquired Tableau. So the platforms kind of developed further and further. So it no longer became B2B and B2C. And they shut the door on that at some point a couple of years ago. And then they moved to a model whereby they said, well, well, it's slightly different. It depends on your organizational structure, it depends on your needs and how you sell. With the definition now becoming Pardot is for high value, lower volume data, whereas Marketing Cloud would be on the flip side where there'd be lots of different scenarios which Anton can talk about, but typically that would be potentially lower value but much higher volumes. You're talking about millions of data as opposed to say 100,000 or less, which Pardot would be very well suited to.

And so do we agree with that analogy?

Yeah, I think that's, that's more or less right. I think it's still this perception that is B2B versus B2C. You can kind of see where that comes from. I think if you look at some of the features that Pardot has, which are very strong features that probably beat their counterpart in Marketing cloud, things like account based marketing. So that's hence why the name changed now to Account Engagement. And if you look at things like lead scoring these of typically B2B functions, in typical marketing theory, that's how it would be typified as B2B. But what we see companies that are looking to bring traditional B2B strategies into B2C and vice versa. So I think this notion of B2B versus B2C is more going down to, okay, what tactics and what strategy do you want to deploy to. To gain your customers? Is it worth bringing in? Like, you know, just because you're a B2C company doesn't mean that you, you don't have a long duration, long selling cycle, you know, selling cycle or just because your B2B doesn't mean that you don't need a transactional component. So what you see is both platforms doing both things and obviously they're both set up for, with strengths and weaknesses in both areas. But that's what we see now as a kind of blurring of the lines. So I don't necessarily as much of a battle between B2B and B2C. It's more of a does this platform meet the needs of your strategy? And that strategy is typically a bit more of a hybrid strategy than a typical B2 B2C as we would typically describe. So I think Salesforce done very well to kind of evolve both platforms to sort of cater for both, both categories really, if those categories really exist anymore. I think in terms of marketing, I think that people doing more advanced market aren't thinking in those categories as much anymore.

That's a good point. I think the whole thing with the name change as well, they're trying to make the whole marketing cloud stack a suite of products, aren't they, rather than its own product. So I guess they're trying to blur those lines. I mean, the obvious example of the lines being blurred is that you can use Pardot with Ad Studio as long as you've got it set up correctly. What Ad Studio would be typically a marketing cloud products. It's now a product that can work with powder as well. Right?

Yeah, yeah. And from a strategic point of view, you touched on a really good point there, Anton, where blurring the lines might have been the intention, where you have marketing cloud as just this one encompassing name of all the components underneath it, including account engagement, as it's now known, whereby you kind of just plug in the bits that you need. So previously, like you kind of mentioned, it was very much customer you are in this particular industry or sector. So you are B2B or you are B2C. So we're telling you you need Pardot or you need marketing cloud. And they've kind of flipped that model where they said, yes, the two systems can do Similar things in some regard. There are differences. But now we're leading with, well, what does the customer want? And that is very much the ethos of Salesforce anyway. So it makes sense that they've positioned it in that. That way because now you can kind of say, well, yeah, Pardot does service these needs and you could use it, but maybe Marketing Cloud would do all these other fringe benefits that you didn't know about and that could suit your strategy better. So that's a really, really cool point, I think, because it does make things feel a lot clearer as to why they've done X, Y and Z.

Just realize as well, for all the listeners, we're on this. We were on this call before we started recording and we made an agreement as to what we were going to call each products. And I've just realized that we've been referring to Par as Pardot instead of account Engagement. We've sworn already.

It is hard to get over that. I think it's so hard. It is. I think it's happening slowly, but it's. I think Pardot's such a distinct name as well, an easy one. It's kind of hard. But yeah, no, we, we should be. We should be better. We should be. It's a count engagement.

We've let you down, listeners. I'm so sorry, we've failed already. Cool. Have we got any? So to that point, then, I think we've. We pretty much agree that it's a bit of a myth. Now, this whole B2C. B2B thing, it's not quite as simple as that. Do we have any examples of the clients that we've been working with that would kind of support that debunking, not.

Naming any names, but there was. There's one in the US that I thought was quite interesting and it was a property company, so they sold out spaces within apartments and they sold them to individuals. So you'd expect that typically to quite a B2C function. I guess they're selling direct to consumer, consumer to rent out this space in luxury places like Los Angeles and New York and so on. And they used Pardot and they used Pardot quite well. So they, they still used things like custom objects and integrations with Salesforce that made the journey better. But they used Pardot for the whole time because their predominant channel was email and it worked well for them and they, they reaped the benefits of engagement history. They could use B2 Marketing analytics for reporting and it made things a lot easier, clearer for them. But they didn't do any of the SMS or the app messaging and so on. So they used Pardot and it was quite successful. We've got an example of an events company that used Pardot and they switched to Marketing Cloud. I don't know if Anton wants to talk about that one or any other examples, but that was a weird one as well.

Yeah, actually, one example I'd love to start with is a pilot one and I'll go on to the marketing cloud one. So this is great because I did some consultancy in Pardot. You know, they're a better consultant than our company that can do fantastic thing to pilot. But this is one that I really remember because it really opened my eyes to the part of stability in terms of the more traditional B2C area. And that was a technology company. They were selling a technology product. Typically you would sign up to that product and then you'd have a free trial. It would offer you some free scans of your system for security updates, etc. And then so they had this process whereby what they were seeing were people dropping off. They get the free trial, but then they wouldn't complete it and they wouldn't complete the process. So essentially what we did is we used Pardot to facilitate prompting of the customer during that period of time. And this would typically be a much more transactional, interactional scenario, something that you would certainly Marketing Cloud could do quite easily. In Pardot, we managed to do this, but they have some good tools, there's good use of the API and things like this, but essentially we're able to support new customers coming in, new customers coming in, and then they're filling the trial up and also engaging and also getting feedback quite crucially back into Pardot and having that in the operational flow. So we have the engagement studios that were sending the right communication at the right time and we saw a massive pickup in people completing the trial because it wasn't the easiest thing to do to complete this trial. There was some technical elements. So what they did is they were just giving people prompts, giving them nice emails, like, hey, this is what you should do now. Making sure people weren't stuck in a step, making sure they weren't stuck and then forgetting about it. So really re engaging it. So that is typically, I would say, a much more transactional something that you would see in that marketing cloud sphere. And that was done by pardon. And then in terms of the marketing club scenario, so this is something doing much more of a B2B function. So we have this events company, they got a huge amount of data. So they got lots and lots of people. So Marketing Cloud is definitely the platform they want. However, they were really interested in looking at what people have done over periods of years and years. So what, what we were able to do with them was to create some quite clever dynamics within Marketing Cloud. And those of, you know, Marketing Cloud know that it's a very powerful tool and very, very customizable. But what we were able to do is basically build a customization for them that would allow them to aut the, the kind of engagement, the, the granular engagement that they needed to see what people, what events people had interacted with, what level of engagement they've had a year ago, six months ago, three months ago, and bring that into the flows that they were doing on the current day. So typically that's something that you would see in these B2B marketing automation platforms. So, you know, not just, just account engagement, but also other competitors like Eloqua and Marketo, et cetera. Typically that's the function you would see in those, those traditional B2B platforms. We were able to do that in, in Marketing Cloud, so we were able to actually bring in these functions, which is looking at a very long sales cycle, so looking at two to three years even, you know, and we're able to replicate that with some success in Marketing Cloud. It's not the only instance, but that's the one where I really feel it was something we were doing which wasn't out of the Marketing Cloud playbook, but Marketing Cloud was an adaptable enough platform that we could actually do that.

There's quite a few instances there that you touched on volumes of data, data model, et cetera. So I think this is probably a really good point to talk about that because the key difference for me, and it's not the only difference, but one of the biggest differences between account engagement and Marketing Cloud for me is the data model. So, Anton, do you want to just explain to us the concept of the Marketing Cloud model and how that differs to account engagement?

Yeah, sure. So I guess as many years ago I was an academic and we used to teach basic database theory. And for anyone that sat in a computer science classroom and done your basic database modules, you'll be very familiar with what Marketing Cloud has to offer because essentially what we're looking at is a relational database model, which is essentially a series of tables. And the way I like to describe the tables are like sheets in a, a typical Excel document. Right? So you've got different sheets. So each one is a flat sheet. It's got columns and rows. But the, the difference is in other systems you would just have like one sheet and you have to put everything in there or maybe two or three sheets and they're linked together. But in Marketing Cloud you can really have as many as you want and they can all be linked into a structure, so into a relational structure. So I could talk about primary and foreign keys and how these relationships work, but the key thing is that it's a data model that you can build powerful data structures, hence the term structured data, it's often referred as, which can then be used to model your data in a way that reduces redundancy. And what that means is you don't have to create massive amounts of, of data to facilitate your needs. You can create a data model that only collects the data when it's needed and then can be related to various objects. So what that means is that if you have a contact that this is the person you're actually sending the email or you're sending your SMS message to, what you can do is you can use that contact they're linked to by various other tables. So you think of various other sheets on your spreadsheet and you can pull that data in and use it as and when you need it. It's not just there in this big table that is going to be really hard to read and really hard to process as well because it's just gonna bust your processing. It's going to take a long, long time. So it's a really efficient model. It's very tried and tested. So these structures have been around since, since the 70s, I believe by recollection of history is right. But they've been around for ages. They're very tried and tested. They are very, very fast. It's another thing Marketing Cloud, I was saying to. We're doing a training call actually with a client the other day and we were just using some, some testing data. So it's like 10, 10 records in that, in that, in that table. And we were doing a filter process and it always takes about 20 seconds and it's 20 seconds, whether it like half a million or 20 records in market. It's really impressive when it comes to like big, big numbers. It's really impressive how fast it can, can do it. And part of the reason is because it has that structure and it just provides that, you know, that just provides that way of using that data and really utilizing it in an efficient way. And that's definitely the thing. I think that is probably the biggest selling point in Marketing cloud, I think it's the only marketing automation platform that really truly supports this. Others do it a little bit, but it's the one that truly supports that notion of structured data, that notion of a relational database model and it also enables you to do SQL queries, so which is a powerful way of getting that data very quickly. So it's a bit technical and it's hard concept to get over and there's lots of nice use cases for it. And I think what happens is companies often they start with some, some basic email platform and it's really common that it's the data that's the first ceiling they hit the first where they go I want to do X but I can't because I can't get that data. It's not available to me. I run out of fields to use. So and so, so and so in marketing cloud you really have that flexibility to just build what you want. You can mirror sales cloud exactly as it is. You can mirror sales club plus five other platforms into your data model. Just have one place to put it all. It's really, it's a really beautiful thing when it, when it works and when it's really thought about and when we got clients to really embrace it. It's a really beautiful thing to use. It's really great for personalization and so many other things. I can't sing it praises enough. It's really something I really love and that, that, that's coming from working in so many platforms where this was always a pain point. So I, I really love that. I think it's one of the best things about it. It's also one of the things, I think that it can be a bit scary for people coming in because they go why do I need this? And, and obviously people getting going along that marketing automation journey, they, you know, people have been doing it for a while, will understand it but you won't necessarily have that realization straight away. It may be down the line, it may also be something you don't really. The models offered by other platforms are perfectly fine for you but for me for dealing with people that have, with clients that have complex data needs, it's fantastic.

So just to really, I'm quite impressed as well. Are you saying that the relational data model came from the 70s?

Yeah, don't quote me on that.

Well, we already have.

Definitely not, not new. I mean it's certainly being used in the 80s. I, I'll try and get a fact check. Maybe if there's anyone that wants to reach out to us I might have to put it, that we can do, but it's definitely been around a long time and you know, it's used in, in a lot of beta systems, used a lot in programming and it's, it's. Yeah, it's definitely there. There are some newer approaches. So we, we got things like platforms like MongoDB that offer you a slightly different data model, but it's still structured and works in a slightly different way. And their salespeople will certainly tell you, hey, it's faster and better and all of this. So there are some other things on the horizon. So maybe you might see in the future a platform come along saying, well, we're using no SQL database, which basically a slightly different model or they're using JSON based on an object based database like Mongo. But I think at the moment it's really the pinnacle of where we are in this particular sector.

So just to relay that back for the listeners, I guess then. So with the relational data model, you can pull in Data that's maybe 2, 3, 4 degrees of separation from that contact record.

Right.

More than that, you can do, do whatever you want.

Yeah.

Which I guess probably lends itself against that whole where that common Myth of the B2C thing came about because so you know, Adidas is one of Salesforce's flagship case studies for marketing cloud. So knowing that, like an absolute nerd, I sat down one night and went on the Adidas website, put some stuff in a basket and then left the basket. I was like, I wonder now how quick this is going to be. Clearly I need to do some more stuff with my time than do what I just did. But then essentially there was an email that chased me saying like, oh Carl, look at all this great stuff that you left in your basket. Which reference the exact things I left in the basket. So that would have been marketing cloud. Right.

So yeah, and, and the other thing I think is great as well is, is that data is only really useful for probably a few hours, not even days. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And one of the things they would have done as well is that they, they would have had it so that, that would have actually been removed from the system and kept clean and then tidy. So you're not sort of cluttering up the system of things. So I bet you that went into, into the system lived long enough to provide you that email and then it, you know, it's removed because then it's, it's not useful to you. So that's where that transactional model is really, really to be helpful. And that data model is to be flexible because there may be multiple carts and maybe lots, thousands of products I imagine, and it's able to kind of pull in that information. Yes.

Yeah, it's pretty insane.

Ideal case study for that really.

So. Okay, so that's a really good analogy. Over to you now, Tom. How does that differ to the account engagement debt model?

Quite different. I love how Anton describes things. I could listen to that all day. The key, the key message from all of that I understand is flexibility, which is quite an interesting point because part account engagement is more rigid in a good way. So it is still its own database as Anton's described. It's probably a couple of sheets, it's probably a simple database whereby it's got the prospects, it has a limitation on the prospects where you need to increase it, which is not the same as marketing cloud. And the relationship model is kind of fixed in a way. So it very much aligns with Salesforce. So you have prospects, which is its own thing in Pardot which links to a lead and a contact in Salesforce and that relationship is very rigid. Once you install the package in Salesforce for account engagement, it kind of fixes that and there isn't too much manipulation you can do there because otherwise you can end up breaking the system. So they force it in a way whereby you use prospects with leads and contacts. You can use just contacts, that's a different story. And also account and opportunity. So it's very much works around those objects from, from a database perspective, I touched on it earlier, but you can add in custom objects so you can enhance the system so you can essentially add. You can't necessarily subtract or manipulate or change change the way too much. There are sort of things you can do with supports, help. But in a nutshell, that's typically how the database model works and it's a very sort of. Because it is so sort of packaged for you, a lot of things just work. And that's the way I describe it. So for your typical marketer who doesn't have all those development skills and doesn't want this, this really intricate, powerful, custom made platform that's amazingly suited to your business and whereby you just want a marketing team to be able to send emails, to be able to report on them, track roi, use dynamic content, use all these really sort of enterprise, enterprise grade features with relative ease, then part of really good accounting is really good. And I can speak to that. You know, I've been a account engagement consultant for about seven years. I'VE got the marketing cloud consultant certification because I long story so I know it to a level but I'm, I'm. I'm pretty much a B2B marketer. I've worked on Pardot, worked within that ecosystem and marketing cloud for me is, is a little bit tricky. Could get my head around. I understand it to a level that as a marketer I wouldn't want to. To specialize down that lane because I'm so heavily down this leg, if that makes sense. So. So for some teams the switch can be a bit of a shock because of the. So when you play it, play a game. If you play a game and it has like a sandbox mode immediately you kind of. You can do literally anything you want. That's the feeling I would describe before entering Marketing cloud because you can, you can do anything and sometimes you don't know where to start. Whereas part of you kind of got this, this structure built for you. You can get off the ground and running really quickly. The integration with Salesforce is the best in the space. It includes any other platform. That integration can't be beaten and that allows you to do certain things with reporting and reporting is probably one of the biggest USPs of account engagement with Sales cloud because you can start to quite quickly. Even when you implement Pardot within the first couple of weeks you can start to see where ROI is coming from and you can track it based on your own custom made model. You can choose to have a first touch, last touch, even touch or you can even start to utilize and I'm sure we'll talk about this is the Einstein artificial intelligence reporting features which can find things that you would never have found otherwise. And because of Salesforce's acquisition of Tableau, you're now getting all of the powers of these deep analytics and amazing tools that come with Pardo as standard. You have B2 Market analytics where you can start to see how well your content is performing, how much was consumed within the last X amount of days or weeks or whatever time frame you look to do. And it's. And it's incredibly powerful because of that rigid structure. So it's a very different approach to say marketing cloud which is immensely powerful but that's amazingly tailored. Whereas this solution slightly out of the box for you because even the part reports out of the box, they're brilliant. The Lifecycle reports one of the easiest reports to reference. I had a meeting once years and years and years ago when I first started Markloud. I had a meeting with this. They were an M A consultancy and they, I spent half an hour in the meeting and some of the senior people were there. I showed them the life cycle report and said, look, in a nutshell, this is how it works. This is the velocity chart, this is, this is, you know, what you should be looking at to a point. And within the first half an hour he said, you've paid for yourself today. This is brilliant. This is what we were looking for because for them it worked really well. It's very out of the box. They understood it, they knew how it all worked. Okay, brilliant. That, that worked for them and that was a really good, good use case of pilot reporting.

So.

And one other thing to touch on which I've always sort of professed as the way to do it is that separation of the databases. So Pardot has its own database sales cloud. It's a database. The typical marketing approach here would be that prospects would be created in para account engagement and then you'd nurture them to a point via scoring and grading a key USP of the platform. And then once they hit a certain threshold, you're automatically flagging them and saying right now put them into sales cloud. And that act of assignment creates a lead and it creates a marketing qualified lead. It's basically the system being marketing as a abstract idea that that system is marketing. They pass a lead over to sales cloud, which is sales marketing, have qualified the lead. So you've created an MQL and then that feeds back into the system because of the rigid model and it says you've had one more mql. So that whole idea is really nice and you can hold back and use it as a filter, which is a really, really nice touch. They always sort of try to communicate that with, with clients when I speak to them is it should be used as a filter because it protects the rest of your database, keeps things clean, it keeps your sales journeys really, really succinct and efficient and that's how the systems can be used quite well.

Now again, some really good points in there that I want to put a pin on particular pin in to come back to. Particularly the Anton mentioned how flexible marketing cloud is and then you've mentioned it again in terms of like how just immensely powerful it can be. So we'll touch on that in a second. But yeah, I do agree with you actually like that whole what could be seen as rigidity is actually a plus and a benefit in that one because I do agree that whole I feel like account engagement is definitely the tool if you, if the marketing and sales teams are tightly aligned and I could be wrong in this analogy and Anton, I'm opening myself up to being shut down here but with marketing cloud it's almost like everybody talks about breaking down the walls between marketing and sales but still feel like marketing cloud is its own thing. The marketing function is its own thing. Not necessarily, possibly not even all that close to sales but certainly with account engagement that because all the data exists in sales cloud as well. So everything that marketing and doing is completely visible to the sales team with engagement history and things like that. So it's almost like marketing is an extension of the sales team and they just have this tool over here. But it all links really nicely with sales cloud. Whereas marketing cloud I feel like it's over here in marketing it is a separate platform for all intents and purposes into. So it's, it doesn't have that tight integration with the lead or the contact. But I'm open for you to prove me wrong there Anton.

Yeah, I would agree to an extent. I think that what account engagement does in that very well. I would say top funnel but essentially that prospecting piece, we can do it in marketing cloud it's just not, not, not nearly as easy. So you really need to have a plan for it. You need to have like look at all of your, where your data is all coming from and actually manage that. You. So you need to, to build components to manage where your data is coming in. Then you have to build components to qualify. So that could be like a journey that you send people on and then push them into sales cloud. So you can do it but that is the primary thing you want to do. Then it's really like the only choice is account engagement because it's just solving a lot of your problems straight, you know, out of the box essentially. So I would say one thing I would say though is if you really want like incredible, really multi dimensional interaction. So we talked about a marketing and sales line and this kind of goes back to saying where it's a bit of a gray area. So we have built automations which do a bit of that qualification but also in that qualification we have different ways in which we do the touch points to sales. So typically this isn't necessarily the qualification up to where they're passed over to sales. So that's when you do like a lead conversion or conversion to a lead. But between creating a lead and doing the lead conversion, what we can do in marketing cloud we've got some tools which probably actually go beyond account engagement. So Things like being able to create a, a task or create a, an instance of a custom object. In Sales cloud itself directly from Marketing Cloud is a massive thing. So there's the Journey Builder where we can add an action step where we can edit pretty much anything. In sales, power is definitely there. Again, with power comes responsibility.

It's just Spider Man. I think that's the first Spider man quote I've had on these podcasts.

It's always going to come.

It was just a matter of when. I don't know how far we are into the podcast, but you slipped in there. Well done, Anton.

Yeah, I mean look for ambitious teams and for teams that like, like me just want to do like really cool stuff and just like have these incredible flows and like to really kind of use the technology. That interaction is fantastic. So that is enabled through the module that connects Sales Cloud to market to Cloud, Marketing Cloud Connect so that those features are amazing. So I would say that there's some amazing features that go even beyond what Account Engagement have. But I totally agree with Tom as an overall, the way in which para sort of locks you down, provides you with the. It's ready to go, really. I mean it's still a bit of work, but it's basically ready to go where you can go and do the prospecting. You can do the qualification for those scenarios and you combine into that the. The tools to do the qualification, like the lead scoring.

It's.

Yeah. If that is your primary objective, then Account Engagement. I think I said pardot again earlier.

So good. Yeah.

Account Engagement is your tool. But that's not to say you can't do it with Marketing Cloud. It just is just more of a task and more maintenance, like a manual maintenance to kind of keep it going. The payoff would be if you were using Marketing Cloud is potentially there's some tools there at the end of the day that you can use which go even beyond where the kind of lockdown model that Account Engagement has wouldn't, wouldn't be able to do for you. But you know, it would be a journey to get there. You would definitely need to be confident in your own team's abilities, you know, to be able to do that. But we have seen clients do that and it's a massive success for them.

It's worth mentioning as well that some customers do have both. It's a rarer case that you come across, but it is possible and it can be quite effective for those that do have the budget to do so. But those instances are a perfect example of where Sales cloud is the single view of the customer. So sales cloud is the harvest CRM. It's the central piece keeping everything together. Where some departments might be using Pardot, where their organizational structure might be just as Anton alluded to, which is the lead generation part of the business. And they use Pardot and they're using scoring and grading and using all these different tools to get the leads in. And then once they're in, that's when you can start to push them out to different areas of marketing cloud. So it might be Ad Studio, like that par to add Studio demo that we did, or it could be that you actually have some SMS campaigns that you want to do to invite them to an event, that type of thing. There are ways where you can actually create a really nice sort of journey from lead or net new leads, marketing qualified leads through to marketing cloud. You can use different components within the platform. Then again it just, it just leans into Jonathan's idea of flexibility of marketing cloud, which can support any sort of model you like. So you could plug part on the front, on the front to have the lead generation aspect or you can build it in marketing cloud. It's up to you. And how you manage it really is kind of dependent on the customer. Which again, the very first idea we talked about, Salesforce, creating products that really align with what you need as a customer as opposed to saying you need to buy this because you're B2B and this because you're B2C. So it explains a lot just through talking, definitely.

I think if I can relay an example back to you, which I think is the same customer, but I actually think they've demonstrated why marketing cloud and why account engagement as a data model. So see if you agree. But last year we were speaking to somebody who was looking at account engagement but they wanted, one of the key things that they wanted to be able to do was reference. Like if somebody had ordered something over here on a third party system, it was like an E commerce type system. But then they wanted the ability to say, okay, well if they've got like, if they've used 80% of their allowance kind of thing, then they want an email to go out of the door to say, okay Tom, you're, you know, you're pretty much 20% away from your capacity. Why don't you consider buying extra stuff?

Right?

And I remember I was the one that positioned marketing cloud to them because at the time, and again, open to being shut down, this is, this is my position on the podcast today, just putting it out There I'm open to being completely shut down by E.T. but yeah, essentially I repositioned it as marketing cloud because of that relational data structure. I didn't feel that you could do that with an account engagement. What you're essentially doing is referencing orders from a third party place and being able to use that data to then do that, have the marketing system send out an email and almost sell on behalf of. So I guess replaying that back that scenario was that there was maybe three, four degrees of separation from the customer. Like you've got your customer, you've got the account that belong to maybe an order, but then the specifics of the order, order details, line, items, etc. And now they've come back around and actually that doesn't matter at all. What matters to them is actually nurturing people for sales to pick up the phone and actually find the right people at the right time to be able to speak to, but nurture them within an account as well. So it might not just be nurturing Tom Ryan at Markloud, they might be trying to nurture Anton Minion at Markloud as well. So again, what we're doing there is we're talking to them about account engagement because that's a better fit. Would those two examples, even though it's the same customer and they've kind of switched the requirements, would those two examples pretty much say which one's the better solution for which scenario?

Yeah, I mean, again, it's about the customer's objective and what they need and what they want the most. It can be achieved in both systems, of course, as both I would have different solutions for each system. Pardot's a lot more powerful now than it was. Things like external activities, we can pull those in and external actions. So you could pull in that particular 80% trigger and say right now put them on a journey to say you're 20% X, Y and Z, whatever information you want to send them. So it is completely possible, completely doable with that platform initially when you first started speaking, I'm sure Anton would agree it did sound along the lines of marketing cloud with the relationship structure. And that's, I guess the first place our mind goes to is what, what is, what is the data suggesting and what does it align better with? You know, with marketing cloud, you can always use marketing cloud, in my opinion, because you can all. It's so flexible, you can build it to it. But is there a use case for account engagement? So, yeah, it's interesting. Obviously, as consultants we need to know more Carl. But initial point of view, yeah, either, either platform would work with different solutions for each, which is an interesting use case.

I must point out actually that at the time of suggesting marketing cloud, external activities and, well, external activities were the thing, but external actions wasn't. So, yes, I do need to point out that you can do that with account engagement now. But yeah. Would that be one of the first things that you two would sit down like to try and if you had somebody come to you and it was completely blank, it was a clean slate. Yeah. Did I see that? A clean slate? Yeah. I thought I said green slate, clean slate. And they said, right, okay, we don't know which platform we're going to go for. Would that be one of the first, first things that you hone in on what, what's the data, where are you pulling the data from, etc.

So I'll take this one. So I, I would say that, I would just say that, you know, I mean, I think Nair was a great example of where we had a discussion and it wasn't about necessarily what was presented initially, it was what we had to dig down to, to kind of understand where their priorities were. So I think if, if you can nail down where the PR customers, so, okay, what are the nice to haves, what are the essential functionalities? If most of those essential functionalities sit within account engagement in terms of being more or less out or in terms of its, its strengths, then that's what you're going to go for. And then I think if you, then suddenly you've got some of these major things that need to be done and there's really a barrier to doing those in account engagement. That's when the discussion can turn to marketing cloud. So you might know that straight away, you might not know that until you've had a couple of sessions. And that's where we like to kind of have talks quite early on and get that conversation quite early on when we're talking to prospective clients. Because you really want to understand which is the right platform to go with. Because we know the strengths and weaknesses, we know that almost invariably the they can, there's going to be some compromise that's going to be made to say, okay, well, we recommend that you go with account engagement, but you need to know that this one use case that you have is going to be harder to do in that platform. But it's weighed against the three or four the other ones you're going to do. You do work with the platform. So that would, I would say we typically Case we do get some clients that just like, like yeah, you're definitely account engagement or you're definitely marking cloud because your primary use case is just, you're just going to make your life easy, you know, doing this platform over the other platform. But in, and, and I guess the theme is that gray area where, where people sit. We talked about the beginning of, of this podcast, but really it is nailing it down to where your priorities lie and making that judgment. I think we've got a very good track record of, of selection here of actually getting the right one. And I think in that example you gave Carl, it's certainly one where we did start and we were erring towards marketing cloud. But yeah, as you, as you get to talk more, as you look into the other platform, which is key, which is sales cloud, as you go and you actually talk to people on the ground who are actually using the platform, the different teams. So you may only talk to one team initially and then when you talk to additional teams you get a bigger picture. But really it comes down to it and there's always that third option of getting both and obviously that really works as well for some clients. So obviously there's budgetary reasons why you may not do that, but it's certainly that they are two platforms that can be absolutely complementary to each other. The ideal scenario is you have both in a lot of cases, but again, you have to justify that with the use case that you have with the future use cases that you may have. You know, it's not clear picture, but I would say, you know, in terms of, of our process that we go through, it's very much trying to find out where it's going to be the, what's going to be the platform that is going to solve the most of your key problems in the most efficient way and provide you with that ability to expand upon that.

That's a fair point. I think we'll leave the data site. I know we can talk about that for ages and I know it's a definitely a subject of yours, Anton. So I think we've covered that bit. Unless there's anything striking that we haven't before I move the conversation on, but do you think we've done a good enough job there of talking about the data model between the two?

I hope so, yeah. Look, you can go into that, into finer detail. There's certain components with it and we didn't talk about, you didn't go into like making assets, how it supports your asset builds and things like that. But yeah, I I think that as long as people understand the marketing cloud or the takeaway I'd like people to have is that the marketing clouds are much more flexible, can more likely mirror third party data coming in. It can mirror your sales cloud incidents a lot more effectively whilst account engagement is more rigid. But with rigidity becomes consistency and efficiency of its own and makes things a lot more straightforward. And I think a lot of clients, when it comes down to it, should take the simplicity option. It's just a better option. So I think that if those are the two takeaways, that's what I would like to people to take from that conversation.

Which brings me nicely onto the next topic, actually. So, Tom, we talked about rigidity, but I kind of don't want to use them because it's almost like structure. Yeah, structure. We'll go with structure. It's much more structured and people might be asking, okay, well why would we not go with the more flexible system? Right. Flexibility obviously brings back more benefits. But actually thinking about it, what I wanted to talk to you about was like the team that's supporting that structure, right? Whether it's a flexible structure, which is kind of contradiction there, but whether it's flexible structure or whether it's a structured structure. So why don't we talk about that with account engagement and the team that's required to essentially get account engagement singing yeah.

So with account engagement, typically there's some sort of sales team. So essentially part of account engagement will be supporting that function because it'll be generating the leads. Not always. Always the case. Some companies we've worked with don't have a sales team and they still use account engagement, which is absolutely fine because it an example there might be. It could be a think tank. We've worked with one of those before. It could be a charity, it could be a dot org where they're just sending out communications to say thank you for your donation. This is what we've been doing. This is the great work we've been doing. We've had a lot of scenarios like that. Or it could be fundraising. They send out the link with the button to go straight to the. I forget the name of it. The place where you pay or give donate the donation checkout. There's a. There's a functionality there or use case there for them so it's easier to get up and running with account engagement. So with a marketing team, we had one in particular where they had pretty much no technical skills at all events company, but they're amazing at creative so that their Big focus is creative, beautiful email design and all they want is to send those out, to send them invites to an event that they're promoting. So in that case the team structure is very much marketing team who are very creative and a sales team to then pick up their leads and then they might lean on us for the technical setup and set up this journey and engagement studio, that type of thing. So the team structure can be small, it can be quite small teams and you can still run it quite well. You can set it up, automate it and kind of not forget about it. You don't really want to forget about anything you set up automated but you can just not touch it for a while and then just kind of dip in every month, every three months depending on the use case and kind of enhance it as you go. But there's the key point here is it's not necessarily compulsory to have any sort of development expertise for account engagement once the system's set up. And Salesforce will always sell the platform with a partner so they can implement it for you. Once it's set up, off you go. Send emails whether it's via the drag and drop function in sales cloud or you know you want to, you maybe you have purchased a template and you want to just copy and paste the code in, you can do that too. But off you go basically. Whereas over to Anton, for a different story on the marketing cloud side, I.

Was going to say because I feel like that's another key difference between the two.

Right.

So account engagement, just to sum up, you know you, you don't need that particular development skill set to make not effective, do you?

Not at all.

It's obviously with both platforms it's helpful if you know JavaScript you definitely going to enhance the experience but it's not necessary. So Anton, how does that differ to marketing cloud?

I think you know, to, to not be around the best, you are definitely going to get the most out of the platform if you have either an in house developer, a good partner to work with or at least marketing people who are technically minded so that they can embrace the platform. I do think it's, it is just a little bit more of a burden on, on your team in marketing cloud and that just comes with the flexibility that it offers. So we talked a lot about data and data structures. If you don't have someone that can understand that and how it works and how to make, you know, actually design your data to suit your use cases and understand how it can be used and why it needs to be used in that way then you're going to miss out on a lot of functionality. That's not to say that you know, everyone that uses the platform needs those, those abilities. It's got great editor, it's got a lot of things in the, in the UI that kind of help you do things. The filtering I think is particularly intuitive, etc. There are a lot of things you can do. There are also some n nice add on tools that you can use to kind of make things a little bit more straightforward. That being said, I think if you really want to maximize your investment in the license then it's 100, you know, get someone on board, get someone trained up. Now it doesn't necessarily have to be an all out dev, it could just be the person in your marketing team who kind of gets a buzz from looking at these things and kind of learning and we've seen that work really well. It could be that you've got an agency that will, will kind of pick it up a little bit. But I would say you would need at least a reasonably quick responding team to be able to do some of that dev work because then you're going to get the most out of it you can. You know, it's not to say you couldn't take off and not have developers, you would still be able to use it, you would still be able to use it say as a multi channel system them I just you won't leverage your, that data model as well because that really does require some understanding, you know, some theoretical understanding. So I think, you know, if, if you are essentially bringing in, you're going to do a lot of single audience like batch and blast type deals on multi channel. So through, like SMS, through push notifications, ad studio, etc. And that was your primary use case. You could probably bring it in and not need that development expert, at least not only in really the setup. However, if you want it to be a constantly evolving platform, if you really want to maximize the power that it has, then having an internal dev champion is going to be essential.

Yeah. So on that point it's just worth noting that if you want to get the most out of it, that then it's development to push the system. But if it's, if it's like an SME just using marketing cloud for your other email, someone like me, I could use it and I could do a good job of sending it. I'm not a developer so I would feel comfortable with that particular scenario.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right Tom. It's not that you 100% need it. You really don't know. You know you can use it out of the box. But again, it goes back to that, that alignment to your use cases. If your use cases happen to be ones that can be facilitated by Marketing Cloud, maybe you have more data than Pardot would be happy with doing. You know, you're doing some simple use cases in Marketing Cloud and you wanted to use multi channel, which I think is obviously an out of the box feature that is facilitated in Marketing Cloud. Then, yeah, we have clients exactly like that. Where, where that's the use case. They don't need a dev team, they can use the editor. There's some great tools like we Talked about, the AI tools, Einstein, etc. So Marketing Cloud has access to all of that. So there are some really good and quite advanced things you can do. But you would be leaving this whole chunk of functionality. You would essentially be there, normal be using it, unless you really had that dev champion. So that's what I'm saying. There is definitely use cases where it would be all right and you wouldn't need those. But I think probably more typically you'd want to have a deaf person because you'd want to be using those additional functionalities that you get.

Yeah. And off the back of that, sorry, Carl, there's a really key piece of advice there for customers and potential customers when, when working out which platform is right for them. So there's work that they can do on their side because sometimes customers will go to Salesforce and say, look, I need to do this basic thing and they're not thinking 2, 3, 4, 5 steps ahead and they're not, they're not thinking about the business as a whole. Where are we actually going? Are we expanding into different regions whereby we need business units? Are we, you know, going to be doing really intricate stuff, the checkout and are we going to be doing like different, you know, SMS campaigns alongside different journeys and really complicated marketing campaigns. If they're thinking only one step ahead, it might lead them down the wrong tool. I think this kind of ties in with our earlier points around. When we advise people, we sort of say like, what's your end goal? What are your solutions? And we're asking the right questions. Or sometimes if they don't have a partner to sort of hold their hand through it, they can sort of look at their feet, so to speak, whereby they're making decisions about today's current pain point as opposed to in the future. And then when they scale the system up, I think the advice there for potential customers and maybe even current customers, is to review what is your end goal? Is the current platform fit for purpose? Because we know how powerful both systems are, but the context is really, really important. You know, if you go for the wrong one, it's still a great platform that doesn't take away from the platform, but maybe it takes away from your use case because the systems aren't. No, they aren't aligned with B2B B2C anymore. It's aligned to your needs. So you have to convey the information and the pain point that you've got to be able to actually be put on the right platform. So I think that that's worth pointing out because it isn't always one way, isn't always the consultancy's fault, isn't always Salesforce's fault. Sometimes the customer misses a detail or they didn't think about a variable where the business is actually changing direction and that needs to be factored into to the tech stack. So there's interesting things there. And again partners can help you sort of hold your hand through that and ask the right questions. But I think that's quite a key point there.

Yeah, definitely. And I would add to that as well that it depends on how complex you want to make things right. Because like with account engagement, you can make account engagement complex if you really wanted to. Like, just because like we're talking about it, there seems to be more structure in terms of what you can do. That doesn't mean that you can't take it and into a whole different direction, make that complex. So we don't want to make marketing clouds complex. Account engagement, not. Because you totally could make account engagement complex. And on the flip side you could, like Anton was saying, you could just use marketing cloud as a journey builder with some emails being edited. Right. I think, I think one advice I would also give to clients out there, customers, anyone listening to this as well, is that the more complex you go. I think there is no kind of ceiling with marketing cloud in terms of complexity. Like the good thing about account engagement is you do have a little bit because of the structure of it all. So it kind of keeps you in check a little bit. But with marketing cloud, if you, you know, we did a review along a while back where I think they literally did copy the data model of the entire Salesforce Org, which was like some at daft, like 50 objects or 40 objects or something like that. When you're looking at the data model you just, you couldn't make head and the tail of it. So I think when you do that, you then start to require more skill set to come in. So if you take it in this direction and build it into this complex beast, then you are going to have to have someone with SQL experience build and make sense of this whole data model. Or, you know, there's one thing that isn't mentioned as well. There's ampscript, which is like marketing clouds, proprietary coding language as well. If you want to get like really complex and technical and pull in all this kind of stuff, then there's ampscript there. But the point is I think marketing cloud can be simple as well. It's just think about that complexity and how complex you want to make it. And just bear in mind that somebody has to make that work, whether it's us as a partner, whether it's an in house person that you have to employ. If you go down that route and you go too far down that route, somebody has to do it. It.

Yeah, it reminds me of a contact form submission we had a couple of years ago and it was something along the lines of they were ranting about, about Pardot and they were saying, well, it's not marketing automation if it doesn't write the emails for me. And that for me just kind of summarized, you know, you know, how there is still people behind the systems, it's not just automated. And then, oh, it's all done, done. There are, there is work and auditing and the work that goes into these structures and enhancing the platforms. People basically drive the systems. And that always stuck with me because I thought, I thought it was funny. I thought it was okay, so you kind of click a button and the marketing's done for the company, it's complete.

Are we proposing a GPT integration for those guys?

Even that wouldn't work for them. Even that even. I've got, I've got thoughts on AI, but let's not get.

Yeah, we'll put a pin in that one. And that's a whole other podcast episode entirely. Maybe the Christmas one, maybe we send everybody on the Christmas break and just tell everybody about AI. A deep topic. But yeah, I just wanted to make that point. That could be as simple as complex. But again, with great complexity comes great need of a skill set. I don't think I've used a Spider man quote as well as you, Anton, but never mind. Cool. And you mentioned as well, Tom, about that whole business unit structure and going global and things like that both systems do actually use business units. Right. But they, I'm right in saying that they couldn't be more different to how their use case of a business unit.

Yeah. The easiest way to summarize them is account engagements. Business units hierarchy is flat. You don't have business units underneath. You have like child business units or pair of business units which marketing cloud does does. Your structure in terms of an organization is flat. So that allows you to focus on things like you could align with service lines, perhaps you sell completely different services and they're very separate and therefore there's a need to split them. Could be geographical, it could be, you know, you keep all the Spanish speaking countries in one business unit so you have a Spanish communications and templates and everything's all built for you. There's different ways to do it, but essentially the key thing there is the business units are flat, they're side by side. There needs to be some commonality between the business units, especially when it comes to the data model where you're allowing certain prospects to flow into different business units and in some cases they might exist in both and therefore there are solutions to allow you to still have a single view of the customer and you can customize the system to have one calm automat in business unit. 1, 2 and 3. And all of the information is stored in one place in sales cloud. So salesperson goes to the record. Ah, I know what this team over here are doing and I know what this team has sent him so I'm not going to call him because he's already received X amount of communications from X, Y teams. That makes sense. So flat hierarchy but account engagement.

Okay, and how does that differ to marketing cloud then Anton?

Well, marketing cloud as elite, it's not flat, it's hierarchical which essentially means that you have have a parent business unit and underneath that parent you have what you call child business units which have a parent child relationship and that can go on. So you can have a child of a child etc. And then, and what it allows you to do is essentially have a central place that has access to the parent will have access to all of the data and all of the assets the child business units have. But it says you can dictate what those child units can see and use and also it can determine what is shared and what isn't. It's a really useful structure for I call it like the center of excellence or having a central unit, an IT unit say that that constrains your branding. So you can do email templates, they can be built to branding guidelines, then you can lock them down to a certain way that would then allow People using the child business units to rebrand it or change things within that branding guidelines, but not be able to break them. It's also your primary mechanism for, for creating a sandbox. So Marketing Cloud doesn't have a sandbox per se, but what you can do is you can create a business unit that is like your testing business unit. Then you can push some real data in there, or you can allow it to see some real data, some real assets. You can then test on that area, determine whether something works before then sharing it with the rest of the business units. So it's, it's quite, it's, it's more dictatorial. It fits in probably more if you've got a central team who have that really. So we talked a little bit about having those dev skills. They would, people with those skills would probably exist in that parent unit. They would work on those things and they might use the testing business unit, but essentially they, they would then use that parent business unit then to distribute what they've done or to publish what they've done. The other thing which I think is a really interesting use case is Marketing Cloud has an approval system. So when you do like an email template or email message, you can have it so that the person can't actually send it it or can't actually edit it. And instead of just disallowing that, what you can do is you can allow that to happen in a child business unit. But before they can sort of press go, can press send, actually it will need the approval of someone who, who is in that parent unit. So there's team. So that's a really powerful structure. Because what you're saying then is, hey guys, you can be creative, you can do things, you can change things, but what you can then do is you can push it up to us, we'll have a review of it it, and then if we like it and we're good with it, we'll then propagate that across and we'll allow you to send and do that. So it kind of allows those structures to happen and that people process to really work. So that's the best way I can describe it. It's really allowing a structured way of.