Get Started with Account Engagement
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how marketing automation and Account Engagement can help your business.
- Define basic marketing automation terminology.
- Describe how Account Engagement differs from other Salesforce marketing tools.
Welcome to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution. If you’re a business with marketing and sales teams that work to drive pipeline and grow revenue, Account Engagement can automate your marketing activities and unite your marketing and sales departments so that they can work better together. As a marketer or program administrator, you’re likely working on a variety of projects. Account Engagement gives you a central location to manage your marketing initiatives and report on their success. Not only that, but it tracks prospects as they interact with your company marketing channels, like your website, emails, and forms, so your marketing and sales teams can deliver a personalized experience. Account Engagement gives you the power to customize your marketing efforts and create targeted engagements to fit your company’s needs.
Now, all your favorite marketing automation features are in a slick UI, built right on the Salesforce platform. No more jumping back and forth between Account Engagement and Salesforce—now sales and marketing can work in the same space. You'll learn how to navigate the Account Engagement in later units, but for now, let's take a look at what it is and how it can fit into your marketing efforts.
Say What?
Even in this brief introduction to Account Engagement, you’re probably already swimming in buzzwords and business jargon, so let’s simplify it. Account Engagement helps move your leads through a sales funnel. The funnel begins when visitors interact with marketing materials you created to generate interest in your products and ends when qualified prospects are assigned to a sales rep.
Now we’ll define the funnel stages plus a few other marketing automation terms to start.
Lead (or demand) generation: The act of creating interest in your products or services through marketing efforts.
Visitor: An anonymous person who visits your website and is now tracked in Account Engagement.
Conversion: Once a visitor gives you their contact information, such as an email address, by submitting a landing page or form, they are converted to a prospect.
Prospect: An anonymous visitor that has converted and is now identified. A record of the prospect will exist in Account Engagement, similar to a lead record in Sales Cloud or other CRMs.
Lead nurturing: Sending targeted messages at specific intervals based on a prospect's actions and whether or not they’ve met certain qualifying criteria.
Lead qualification: You probably have thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of people interacting with your organization. Your sales teams can’t contact each of them, so as marketers it’s your job to help send them the best prospects. This process of finding the gold needles in the haystack of prospects is called lead qualification. You decide the threshold for when a prospect is ready to be assigned to a salesperson for them to follow up.
Account Engagement uses two metrics for lead qualification: score and grade.
- Prospect score: A prospect’s score is a numerical value indicating how interested they are in your product or service. A prospect’s score can increase or decrease based on how they interact with your marketing materials.
- Prospect grade: A prospect’s grade is represented by a letter (A, B, C, D, etc.). It indicates how closely a prospect fits the profile of your ideal prospect.
You can leverage score and grade to determine which prospects are ready to reach the end of the funnel and have a salesperson follow up with them. With the help of automation tools, you can quickly assign qualified prospects to the appropriate salesperson.
Campaigns: Campaigns help you understand how your marketing initiatives are performing. They are the foundation to marketing ROI reporting in Account Engagement and Salesforce. Campaigns are used a few different ways in Account Engagement. For example, every prospect has an assigned campaign that tells you the first marketing-related contact they had with your company. You can also use campaigns to group relevant marketing materials together. And most importantly, you can use Account Engagement automation with campaigns to track all the marketing touchpoints in a prospect’s journey, which opens the door to better ROI reporting.
Hopefully these terms all make sense, and if not, in this module we’ll be talking a lot more about these concepts and giving more examples. For a complete list of terminology, check out the Account Engagement Glossary.
When to Use Account Engagement
People today expect all parts of your organization to communicate with each other. When they talk with a sales rep, they want the rep to know which product or offering they’ve already researched on your site. At Salesforce, we help companies use data to deliver that connected customer experience. The Salesforce platform supports all aspects of your business, whether you're in sales, marketing, commerce, or service.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is the smart marketing automation solution powered by the world's #1 CRM platform. Customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37%, on average.
According to Social Media Today’s “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report 2019,” 75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tool. The majority of marketers are using marketing automation because it can help you grow at record speeds.
Account Engagement is a great fit when you want to:
- Generate more leads and move them quickly through the pipeline
- Engage buyers on their terms with dynamic, personalized campaigns
- Understand each step from click to close, capturing true marketing ROI
- Remove silos across organizations that lead to disjointed customer experiences
- Make data driven decisions
- Strengthen or build your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy
Now you’ve learned how marketing automation can help grow your business and help you connect with your prospects and engage with your customers. In the next unit, we’ll dive into the user interface and talk about how to find your way around Account Engagement.
Resources