Salesforce Ben's Lucy Mazalon Talks Account Engagement (Pardot) vs. Marketing Cloud

Mar 13, 2024

Salesforce Ben’s Lucy Mazalon Talks Account Engagement (Pardot) vs. Marketing Cloud

Episode Notes/Resources:

In this episode of Salesforce Simplified we’re talking with Salesforce Ben’s Operations Director, Lucy Mazalon, about the differences between Salesforce’s Account Engagement (Pardot) and Marketing Cloud.

The reason we’ve called on Lucy for this topic is that she is an 11x certified Marketing Champion and the founder of The DRIP, Salesforce Ben’s sister blog for marketing professionals.

Resources:

Lucy Mazalon on LinkedIn

Salesforce Ben

The DRIP on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The DRIP Newsletter

Transcription:

Mike Boyle: Hi everyone. In this episode of Salesforce Simplified, we’re going to be talking with Salesforce Ben’s Operations Director, Lucy Mazalon. Hi everyone, Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. And we’re going to be talking with Lucy about the differences between Salesforce’s Pardot and Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Now the reason we’ve called on Lucy for this topic is that she is now an 11x certified Marketing Champion and founder of the DRIP, which is Salesforce Ben’s sister blog for marketing professionals. And for those who don’t know, Salesforce Ben – at salesforceben.com – is the leading content producer of the Salesforce world. Lucy, welcome to the Salesforce Simplified podcast. Love having you here.

Lucy Mazalon: Hi Mike, thank you so much for inviting me and hello to all of you listening.

Mike Boyle: So yesterday was an exciting day for you. Yesterday you were 10x certified, today you’re 11x Salesforce certified. You got that Marketing Associate exam. How does that feel to have that one behind you?

Lucy Mazalon: Well, I think the Marketing Associate is an interesting one. It follows a pattern of Salesforce also introducing the associate back in 2022. So yeah, it’s basically giving people who may not want to study for the admin or email specialist, sorry, for the Marketing Cloud, Admin or Marketing Cloud email specialist. It gives you a good feel for the core concepts of marketing cloud, but also just like generally how to be a better marketer.

Mike Boyle: Well, congratulations on that and looking forward to changing eleven to twelve. No pressure. Not putting any pressure.

Lucy Mazalon: There is something in the works, but we can talk about that later.

Mike Boyle: Good deal.

All right, so let’s talk a little bit about Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Can you give me a high-level overview of the architecture of how they fit into the Salesforce ecosystem individually – Pardot and Marketing Cloud…

Lucy Mazalon: Yeah, of course. So, I did write a kind of like history of Marketing Cloud. So, I mean I’m not a history buff, so I don’t have the dates cemented in my mind, but I’ll give you roundabout dates. So pretty much Pardot was founded I believe 2012. Then exact Target founded acquired Pardot in 2013. I’m saying that with hesitation because I know people out there will be like, no, it wasn’t 2013. But anyway, so yes, marketing, sorry, exact Target acquired Pardot and then Salesforce acquired Exact Target in 2013. 2014. So, it was like basically a medium sized fish eating a small fish and then the big fish eating the medium sized fish alongside the small fish. I don’t know how else to explain it, but anyway, under one happy family I think both products saw huge traction just being under the Salesforce umbrella. But these products were selected because they do have such a good integration with Salesforce and with the founders, the respective founders, they had considered how can we best integrate with Salesforce? And then Benioff [Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff] and company turned around in 2013, 2014 being like we need a marketing product. So Exact target was the clear choice there.

Mike Boyle: I love the fish analogy. Trust me, I think that’s hilarious.

Pardot and Marketing Cloud, they’re two very powerful marketing automation tools, but let’s talk about what sets them apart. Can you break down the key differences between these platforms for us?

Lucy Mazalon: Sure. Traditionally Pardot – now Account Engagement – was always geared well, was geared towards B2B. So, business to business marketing, that’s when you have a customer that’s interested, but there’s multiple processes, stages in the cycle. It’s a long conversation with multiple influences. It’s not just like B2C – as in business to consumer – where someone just goes oh yeah, I like that pair of shoes, click, buy. So traditionally Pardot was framed as a B2B solution. However, that was then changed to be ah, a considered purchase. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s a business to consumer, business to business, if there’s a considered purchase where it might take weeks, months, even years to market to that person, get their loyalty and then sell. Whereas marketing cloud is very good at the handling the mass transactional purchases.

Mike Boyle: Gotcha… We often hear about businesses using either Pardot or Marketing Cloud, but are there any situations where it makes sense to use both of them? Are there any unique benefits or synergies when combining those platforms?

Lucy Mazalon: I’m laughing. If you have a lot of money, a lot of budget, then you can use both. I think there are companies out there that use both. I know a couple of people in my network that work at companies that use both. I think what the most important point to understand is, first of all, don’t expect someone to be an expert at both of them. Like you’ll have consultants out there that will be able to consult on both or be able to implement or be able to advise. But if you’re talking about an in-house situation like at your company, don’t expect this one person to be the Pardot admin and also the marketing cloud admin because it’s just too much for them to keep up with. Another thing I want to highlight is shoehorning this. because I used to be a consultant, I was a consultant for like five years, mostly on Pardot and Salesforce but the idea of when there’s different price points, a company just going for a cheaper option and then trying to stretch it, trying to push their use case into it where actually they should have gone for the other. That I think is a huge red flag.

Mike Boyle: Lucy, are there any specific industries or sectors where Pardot or Marketing Cloud excels know can be effective across the board?

Lucy Mazalon: Well, I think when it comes to Salesforce marketing products like Account Engagement – aka Pardot – and Marketing Cloud, there’s no industry angle on it. These are pretty industry agnostic. However, like I said, there are some industries that could be primarily B2B. For example, recruitment, legal, and professional services, they’re typically B2B. And then you’ve got things like retail, travel and leisure which are primarily B2C. But that doesn’t mean that you’re saying okay, we’re traveling leisure, you’ve got to go Marketing Cloud. Because like we just said, within those travel and leisure companies you might have a division where they’re targeting consumers en masse, but then they might also have a partner network. I know some companies do this where they need to do the B2B relationships with their partner network on Account Engagement – i.e. Pardot. So yeah, it’s not an easy question to answer, but I’d say overall pretty industry agnostic.

Mike Boyle: Anybody listening to our podcast, Lucy, who might be considering a salesforce, Pardot, or marketing cloud solution, no doubt is concerned about scalability. So, can you talk a little bit about how Pardot and Marketing Cloud can handle large volumes of data and expand customer bases? And are there any limitations you might need to keep in mind?

Lucy Mazalon: Good question. I’ll start with Pardot – i.e. Account Engagement – Salesforce core as in your Sales Cloud instance and Account Engagement – i.e. Pardot – they have a close relationship and Salesforce imposes quite, I wouldn’t say stringent, but extra storage costs. So, I think that’s every admin’s bugbear is that they have to keep checking storage costs. How many contacts, leads, accounts, assets, opportunities, whatever do you store in your Salesforce org? Account Engagement on the other hand, doesn’t do it in such a way. You get a certain number of prospects. I think it’s 10,000 prospects. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe it’s 20,000 for free and then every 10,000 above that you pay more. So, there are storage limitations for both. But I think it’s all about just keeping your databases clean, saying like okay, if I pump in a thousand random contacts to Salesforce and they sync to Account Engagement. What’s the consequence? Or vice versa? Like how much more could we be paying? Is it necessary? So, this is what I’m shouting about all the time, data quality, data retention. I think because in Europe we were pretty, I don’t say well trained, but pretty restricted under GDPR and now a lot more privacy regulations coming in through America. So, I think you guys are just slowly with CCPA and other ones that are forthcoming, I think this is going to be a practice or a mentality that a lot of people start to adopt. We had that in 2018, so it was a big shock, and it was kind of a rush to get it done, I’m not going to lie. But anyway, with Marketing Cloud, I would say there’s not like a limitations with Marketing Cloud. I would say just the sync to Salesforce, you have to be very considered in how you organize your database in order for it to sync to Salesforce. There’s something called email individual results where if you’re a salesperson looking at a contact record, you can see results, email results from Marketing Cloud for that individual, whereas with Account Engagement you can see a lot more. I think there’s pros and cons to each. I think things will change very quickly. Also, I would say that not giving away any big news or secrets, but I know that there’s going to be big changes in terms of how these two essentially separate platforms. So Pardot and Marketing Cloud versus the Salesforce core platform, how they might be combined bit by bit. I think honestly there’s going to be big changes in the next one to five years.

Mike Boyle: Well, that’s scalability… I wanted to talk to you about integrations, which is something from your background I know you’ll know a little bit about here. They can make or break a platform integrations. How well do Pardot and Marketing Cloud integrate with other Salesforce products? Are there any integrations that you recommend for maximum efficiency?

Lucy Mazalon: Yes, it is a case of how well does it integrate with the Salesforce core platform? Because the core platform is where you can get the most bang for your buck. Honestly, like with things like Salesforce flow, you can trigger stuff to go into these separate platforms – i.e. Pardot and Marketing Cloud – you can do a lot with flow. Having said that, there’s a few, but out, of the few very promising Marketing Cloud partners, so ISBs, some that have been established for a while that I think, I don’t know when it was, it’s only been a couple of years since we actually had a section on the app exchange for Marketing Cloud. So that’s obviously promising. In terms of account engagement. The idea has always been to move account engagement bit by bit onto the Salesforce core platform. So, you’ll see a lot of features that are shared between the original Pardot database and the core Salesforce platform, for example campaigns. But what’s really exciting is that they’ve, I think it was maybe about a year ago, the product development team in the Account Engagement division at Salesforce have been really thinking about extensibility. Not only have they improved the API to make your own custom integrations, but they’ve also launched external actions and external activities. The difference between them I won’t go into, but it’s almost, I would say it’s not no code but it’s low code. A way to integrate external platforms, bring them into that Engagement Studio journey. So that sequence of emails and activities in a way that it’s just click, click. And essentially you’ve just forged an integration with an external platform. That probably wasn’t the best description of it, but I think and talking with other Marketing Champions as well, they think that’s the two most underutilized features of Account Engagement. And these are people that work with clients day in, day out. And they say why are more people not using this? So, I think yeah, in terms of integration you don’t have to go into the heavy code part of it. You can either get prebuilt solutions, you can do it yourself with the external actions and external activities and sorry Mike, one more thing I wanted to mention.

Mike Boyle: Sure.

Lucy Mazalon: And something that we talk about a lot on SalesfprceBen.com is Salesforce Labs. So, these are apps that are available for free that Salesforce employees have created. I think there’s some sort of program within Salesforce like oh, if you want to create an app you can spend work time doing it. So, they’re free. But what was really interesting is that a lot of, so I’m talking about account engagement aka Pardot. A lot of the people that were experts, like OG experts, they joined Salesforce and started creating all these free apps. So, we cover a lot of those on the site. So, if you’re thinking about extensibility integrations, just weigh up the different options before you do anything custom.

Mike Boyle: Good advice, Lucy… Just two more questions for you. As I alluded to earlier, I imagine some of the people that would be listening to our podcast right now are thinking about Pardot – a.k.a. Account Engagement – or Marketing Cloud solution. And there of course are other automation tools available out there. What are some of the standout features or functionalities that make Pardot and Marketing Cloud unique and more powerful than others in the market.

Lucy Mazalon: Well, I think you’ve got to think about the flow of work for a marketer. A marketer wants to see their own database, send an email to their own database and control the automation around that. And sure, I’ve mentioned flow, but actually there are other, I’d say more visual components to both Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement that bring marketing activities alongside automation together. And when those options are exhausted or whether there needs to be some data manipulation on the Salesforce side, whatever they want to do on the sales side, that’s where flow comes in. But there’s a lot of really, I don’t want to use the word juicy too lightly, but yeah, there are a lot of great visual tools like both, i.e. Pardot, Marketing Cloud, and Journey Builder are both canvas-driven. Like they’re both canvases where you can literally go, this email goes to this audience and then what and have decisions going down. So, I think there’s a lot of automation you can do within these platforms. It’s just knowing what you actually want to do because with the whole Salesforce platform there’s a bunch of automation options. But do you want it to be for this particular campaign? Do you need it to be across your marketing database? You need it to be across your whole customer database, like across the platform. Those are the considerations I’d say.

Mike Boyle: My last question, Lucy, you briefly touched on this a little while ago, but looking ahead, what trends do you foresee influencing the development of both Account Engagement, a.k.a. Pardot and Marketing Cloud? How do you see those advancements impacting their respective positions in this marketing automation landscape we’ve been talking about?

Lucy Mazalon: It will be an interesting time; I think just being familiar with some of the other competitors out there. A lot of times when I was consulting I’d be doing a rip and replace. So, ripping out something else and replacing it with a Salesforce marketing product. It’s a competitive landscape and I think what Salesforce will continue to do and will, should lean into is the integration of the core platform. So, I think, well, it’s been going on with Account Engagement for a few years, piece by piece, object by object, they’re moving them onto the core platform away from this separate database. So, if you imagine you got Account Engagement in one bucket and then you’ve got the Salesforce core platform, they’re taking a piece from the Account Engagement bucket and making it. So, it’s just the reading it from the core platform, for example, campaigns, users. So, you’re only managing things from one side. I think Marketing Cloud is a bit of a beast if I’m allowed to say it. It’s a huge infrastructure. I can’t even begin to fathom how hard it would be to bring it onto core. But I think a lot of the new innovations that they are bringing out will be powered by Data Cloud. So, Data Cloud is like the new Salesforce platform. It’s like the underpinning that’s been rearchitected, reconfigured, and they are building new Marketing Cloud innovations on the Data Cloud, which suggests a slow but steady movement onto the core platform. I don’t know if that answers your question, but yeah, I have an article where I speculate again, I don’t work for Salesforce. I’m not affiliated with. Just, you know, listen to what people are saying and these are just me.

Mike Boyle: Thoughts that we all admire… Lucy, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Salesforce’s Account Engagement, a.k.a. Pardot and Marketing Cloud.

Lucy Mazalon: A bit of a mouthful, right?

Mike Boyle: Exactly. Hey, I hope you don’t mind us dubbing you the go to person here on the podcast for all things marketing…

Lucy Mazalon: I would obviously say yes, but I think there’s a huge community now of marketing cloud and part of Account Engagement experts who I honestly admire every day when I speak to them, I think like, wow, I’m a little bit rusty. So, yeah, especially things like unusual use cases, whatever. There’s a huge community now and it’s the Marketing Champions community who will really go out their way the extra mile to help you. And it’s not like these people have full-time jobs, so it’s not a, given that they’ll give their time, but they are passionate about the products. I think just people making requests need to be also, you know, these people love hashing things, so.

Mike Boyle: And I think they’re going to really appreciate what you just said, Lucy.

Lucy Mazalon: No worries.

Mike Boyle: That’s really nice. Again, thanks for joining us. I appreciate you having the time to be on the podcast today, and I look forward to having you back again.

Lucy Mazalon: No problem.

Mike Boyle: I will be placing several links in this episode’s notes for more information about Lucy, about SalesforceBen.com, and about The DRIP. So, look for those inside this episode’s show notes and to the audience. If this is the first time that you’re listening to our podcast, I would be very grateful – Lucy would be very grateful – if you considered giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and also subscribe to the podcast anywhere you get a podcast, including now on YouTube Music, which is kind of cool as well. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thank you so much for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast. Our next episode… just around the corner.

Salesforce Ben’s Lucy Mazalon Talks Account Engagement (Pardot) vs. Marketing Cloud

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