Monthly Archives

  • Propertybase Salesforce

    Propertybase is the leading global real estate platform designed for brokerages and teams looking to stimulate long-term growth, connect in more meaningful ways with clients, and help agents close more deals, faster.

    Focus agents on meaningful interactions with the industry’s most powerful real estate CRM. Ensure leads are properly captured, automate processes, nurture leads with drip campaigns, build informative reports, dashboards and more.

    Propertybase: Table of Contents

    • Managing Contacts : One of the most powerful aspects of Propertybase is the ability to track all of your business relationships in one place. The Contact object in Propertybase allows you to capture client information, manage conversion rates, connect with new clients and close more deals.
    • Managing Activity : In Propertybase, you have the ability to track all of your phone calls, emails, tasks and property showings in one place. Propertybase tracks these as Activities and display them on a timeline for easy referencing.
    • Managing Inquiries : Propertybase makes capturing your customer’s buying preferences a breeze with the Inquiries object. You can use Inquiries to capture what type of property your customer is looking for, how many bedrooms and baths, how much they can afford and more. You can also add custom fields to expand the search criteria.
    • Creating Linked Listings: Linked Listings allow you to create an association between a listing and a contact in the system. This allows you to easily send listings to contacts, see potential buyers when viewing a listing record and more.
    • Using Quicksend : After you identify listing matches for a contact, you can easily email them to potential buyers using Quicksend. Quicksend allows for images and document attachments as well, and currently supports sending to up to 20 recipients.
    • Matching Inquiries to Listings : Propertybase makes matching inquiry data to available listing inventory a breeze. The listing matching algorithm takes a wide range of inquiry data and matches it to available listing inventory. This feature also provides robust filtering options to help narrow your search and find the perfect property.
    • Managing Listings : Propertybase gives you the power to create your own Listings or automatically import data from popular listing services. Every Listing automatically creates a corresponding Property record and data is synchronized between the two. This allows you to manage your inventory more efficiently and focus your energy on closing more deals.
    • Managing Offers : The Offers object allows you to efficiently manage the entire offer process. This includes basics like associating a Listing with an Offer, along with buyer and seller records, as well more complex functions such as the ability to create a counter offer, add an addendum, notes and more.
    • Managing Closings : Managing the Closing process with Propertybase allows you to make intelligent forecasting of your teams production.
    • Reporting Basics : Viewing business data visually – using charts and graphs – makes it easier to gain insights compared to spreadsheets and numbers alone.
    • Using Dashboards : Combining multiple reports together on a single dashboard page layout creates powerful visual displays which provide a way to consume several reports at once. These dashboard pages typically have a common theme, like sales performance, inventory management, etc. 
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The Powerful Marketing Platform

    If you are facing issues related to building relationships with your customers or if your organization looking for software to market goods and services online, then you should consider learning about the Salesforce marketing cloud. We will explain everything about the Salesforce marketing cloud. Also, we will explain to you why you should go with the Salesforce marketing cloud, and the different platforms and channels that the salesforce marketing cloud provides.

    What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

    The marketing cloud is the platform for delivering relevant, personalized journeys across channels and devices – enabling marketers to deliver the right messages to the right people via the right channel. Below is an image that shows the different functionalities that the Salesforce marketing cloud provides your organization – journey builder, contact management tools, content management tools, analytics builder, and various channels like email and mobile.

    Salesforce launched the Marketing Cloud due to various challenges in digital marketing:

    It was challenging to use the information of customers from any social network.
    As the Social network growth is too high, it needed a platform that could manage a large amount of content being produced.
    Communication between the organization and customers was not accurate due to a lack of channels/mediums.
    All the data that was available on a customer was stuck in silos and was not being utilized.
    Companies struggled to find a return on investment across multiple channels.
    To solve such problems, salesforce came up with the marketing cloud – one platform to integrate all social programs and data.

    Why use Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

    Salesforce marketing cloud is one of the marketing cloud domain leaders along with other clouds like Adobe marketing cloud, IBM marketing cloud, and Oracle marketing cloud. Salesforce marketing cloud has a total market share of 24%. Actually, the interest in the Salesforce marketing cloud has been increasing rapidly.

    Here are some benefits of the marketing cloud you should take check out:
    • Salesforce marketing cloud provides you with a platform to plan, personalize and optimize customer journeys.
    • You can map your customer journeys with multiple channels, devices, and customer life-cycle stages like all-in-one software.
    • Salesforce marketing cloud can be integrated with other software like Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Workfront, and other applications to provide better insights into customers.

    Companies like Aston-Martin, Vodafone, Philips, Western-Union, General Electric, etc, who have huge customer bases use the Salesforce marketing cloud to connect with their customers. Businesses that adopt these tools have a dramatic advantage, not just now, but well into the future.

    We have seen why Salesforce brought the marketing cloud into the market and why your organization should consider using it. Now, let’s dive deep into the product and take a look at the different platforms and channels that the Salesforce marketing cloud provides.

    The Salesforce marketing cloud is built on Salesforce infrastructure and on the Fuel platform. It consists of various other platforms which you can utilize for your organization’s marketing purpose. A Customer Data Platform which you can use to store your customer’s data. A predictive intelligence platform that you can use for building predictive models of one-to-one customer journeys. It also consists of a platform for maintaining your organization’s content and messages. It also provides tools for performing analytics and marketing operations on data obtained from customers. You can connect with your customers across various channels like email, mobile, ads, social networks, etc. You can also use applications listed on hub exchange to add additional marketing features to your marketing cloud.

    Now, let’s discuss the different platforms and channels that the Salesforce marketing cloud provides:

    Platforms – The salesforce marketing cloud provides 6 different platforms for your organization that you can utilize to implement different effective marketing strategies:

    • Journey Builder – With Journey builder you can build peer-to-peer journeys at scale. You can deliver simple or complex journeys for every individual, no matter the size of your customer base. You can incorporate sales and service activities right into the journey. Using the journey builder you can define specific goals and measure CTRs, timing, channels, conversions, and more. You can evaluate your progress and optimize your performance along with the journey.
    • Audience Builder – With audience builder, you can build a single view of your customer using data from different sources like Sales cloud, Service cloud, and other data sources. Audience builder provides you with the functionality to filter data from multiple sources instantly. This can help your organization to target smart audiences. Not only this, but you can also validate audiences and engage with them at the right moment.
    • Personalization Builder – Your organization can use the power of personalization builder’s predictive analytics and predictive modeling, to understand each customer’s preference. This enables your organization to build profiles of customers. You can then use these profiles to tailor personalized content and deliver it across different channels.
    • Content Builder – With the content builder, you can create, manage and track content across all your digital channels from a single location. The content builder provides you with drag-and-drop smart content blocks so that you can create content once and use it at various places. The content builder comes with sophisticated algorithms to determine and deliver the best content for each customer.
    • Analytics Builder – Using the analytics builder you can uncover new insights about your customers. With analytics builder, you can display your reports using bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, and other visualization techniques. Analytics builder also comes with email analytics and reporting using which you can understand whether a customer has opened, clicked, unsubscribed, and more for each of your campaigns.
    • Marketing Cloud Connect – With marketing cloud connect you get access to all of your Salesforce customer data – data in different Salesforce products. You can trigger activities that connect interactions across the Salesforce sales cloud, Salesforce service cloud, and other Salesforce products.

    Channels – The salesforce marketing cloud also provides you with 5 different channels using which your organization can interact with its customers:

    • Email Studio – Your organization can use the email studio to create customer-engaging emails. Using email studio, you can keep tabs on your email campaigns. You can further boost your return on investment with built-in A/B testing capabilities, integrated predictive intelligence, and email delivery tools. Also, using email studio you can filter your subscriber base and send targeted email messages based on customer data.
    • Social Studio – Social studio provides your organization with social listening tools to hear conversations from different sources. You can plan, execute and track social media marketing campaigns. Using social studio you can monitor your owned social channels and participate in conversations at scale.
    • Mobile Studio – With mobile studio your organization can get a mobile-first mindset with SMS, MMS, push messaging, and group messaging. You can engage with customers at the moment, and send real-time alerts and notifications. With mobile studio, you can build powerful APIs to automate mobile marketing solutions. Using geolocation technology, you can interact with your customers at the right place and time.
    • Advertising Studio – With an advertising studio you can power digital advertising and manage ad campaigns. You can use customer data from multiple sources to securely reach customers and lookalikes across various platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Your organization can use the advertising studio to manage ad campaigns at scale.
    • Web Studio – Web studio provides you with tools to create beautiful, dynamic web pages and personalized content. You can track real-time customer interaction on your website and gain insights from it. Using the web studio, your organization can deliver personalized content and recommendations.
  • Dependent Fields In The Pardot Form

    Pardot Forms has a unique feature called Dependent fields which can be used in the forms. A dependent field is a field that is populated on the basis of the value of another field (which is known as the independent field) in the same Dynaform. Each time the value in the independent field changes, the database is automatically required to repopulate the dependent field.

    So much about Pardot is to do with personalizing experiences for your prospects, whether that’s through Engagement Studio journeys, Dynamic Content, or Variable Tags. And Dependent form fields are no different.

    Why use Dependent Fields?

    Have you ever been filled with frustration while submitting a form with a lot of information, including fields that just aren’t applicable to you? You can get off this issue by using Dependent fields which allows you to personalize the form-filling experience for each of your prospects. They will only be shown additional fields if it is relevant to them.

    For example, suppose you have a form, and this form is going to be available for prospects to fill out both in the Canada and USA. For Canada prospects, you may want to show the ‘first name’, ‘last name’, ‘company’, and ‘country’ fields. But for the prospects in USA Country, you may also want to know what State they are in, with a Dependent field. You can set up your form so that when a prospect selects the USA for the country, the form displays the State field.

    To Setup Dependent fields in Pardot Form Follow below Steps:-

    1. Open the form and click on the Edit form.
    2. Go to Step 2: Fields.
    3. Click the pencil icon next to the field you want other fields to depend on.
    4. Click on the Dependent tab.
    5. Select Display other fields in this form based on the value of this field.
    6. In When this field equals, enter the value that will display the dependent field is based on.
    7. From the Show this field dropdown, select a field.
    8. If you want to add more fields, click + Add Another.
    9. Save the changes.

  • Most Efficient Ways To Use Pardot Advanced & Business Units

    What is Pardot Advanced?

    There are four Pardot editions; Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium. You can find a full Pardot edition feature comparison here. Pardot Advanced comes with sophisticated features that aren’t found in lower-level plans.

    The Business Units feature alone is a valid reason to upgrade for many businesses and also below are some scenarios that define when you might need to move to Pardot Advanced:

    1. Whenever you want to restrict data in Pardot for different teams

    Sometimes clients want to show specific data to specific teams only. For example, Canada region data for Canada teams and so on. There may also be different levels of protection on data that must be adhered to. In countries like Germany, regulations are very strict about who can collect or see certain data. It is not possible to restrict data per region in one single account e.g. Pardot Plus.

    When you need Business Units to partition the data according to your organizational structure, which is available in the Pardot Advanced edition. In this, you can have access to Marketing Data Sharing Rules which helps you to configure which data is allowed into each Business Unit.

    You can also check this User Sync and give access for certain users into each Business Unit. This means only the right people access the right data.It keeps data safe, teams productive, and reporting accurate.

    2. Whenever you are reaching account limits very quickly and often

    Sometimes you might have limitations on data, Engagement Studio or Automation Rule really quickly. This can be a huge problem because once an automation asset limit is hit and it will restrict all of your users from creating more. This will completely stall a team.

    When lots of teams across the globe use a single instance of Pardot it tends to get very busy, quickly. This breeds a culture of putting a plaster on a problem for as long as possible and teams will pay consultants like us to help them clean up the database to free up storage or help them archive automations to try and free up the system. 

    The Business Units will help to get rid of all these problems, as each one comes with its own set of account limits. So you can let your teams do their thing. Again, Business Units is a Pardot Advanced feature.

    3. Whenever you want to manage multiple languages and mitigate risk

    One of the most common problems for global corporations is when teams in many different countries with different languages are using a single instance of Pardot. 

    You might have multiple websites too and using one instance of Pardot will mean lots of data from different sites in various countries is flowing into one single account. 

    Think how many templates you’ll need to create in different languages and factor in how many users will be in the system. The risk of a user accidentally overwriting the wrong template is quite high and this could cause massive disruption. 

    For example, if you want to do any changes in pardot records and you are having contacts from different regions,countries then it might be difficult to do the changes because some countries might have more forms, and automation than others, which meant additional time had to go into ensuring ‘business as usual and compliance for that country.

    So if you use Pardot Advanced, it would have been easier to manage (and subsequently cheaper) and quicker to implement. There would have been less need for a master spreadsheet too because it would all be homed in isolated Business Units.

    4. Whenever you want to keep teams focused, productive and aligned

    Naturally, It’s important to futureproof Pardot so you’re able to bring new employees into the business with no risk, because after certain time period your teams will grow and each employee has to come into the business.

    With Pardot Advanced, you can create Custom User Roles which limits access to the system for certain users. This means you can hire a junior and remove any ‘delete’ or ‘edit’ permissions until they’re properly onboarded. 

    Furthermore, you can only allow them access to a particular Business Unit, meaning no risk of them interfering with another team’s assets. 

    Business Units enable teams to be productive by focusing solely on their assets and of course, with a cleaner account it’s easier for them to understand and be familiar with the system as a whole.

    5. Whenever you want to check the performance by Business Unit

    Reporting by Business Unit is especially useful for global companies because some countries will be more mature than others, with different growth rates.

    It means you can identify what type of marketing to do in a particular market rather than looking at all as a whole. Do you need to focus on thought leadership? Is account-based marketing the way to go? Should you be aggressively growing or focusing on retention? 

    By using Business Units combined with B2B Marketing Analytics, you can choose to report on Business Units specifically or collate your data and report on the global business as a whole. 

    The crucial point is, you have the flexibility and visibility over the siloed metrics you need to report on. The analytics world really is your oyster!

  • How Conditional Completion Action Works

    When Conditional Completion Actions were released in 2022, we knew it was going to mean big things for MCAE (Pardot) accounts. The new feature has enabled us to improve the setup of client accounts but there’s one use case that we’re particularly happy about. Thanks to Conditional Completion Actions, we’re able to greatly reduce the number of Pardot Automation Rules required for Grading.

    For the record, Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement but we’re still using the term ‘Pardot’ interchangeably as we know our audience is still using and searching the old name online (and out of habit!).

    What is an Automation Rules?

    Automation Rules are simply criteria that find matching prospects and apply the specified action.

    Previously, in Pardot Standard accounts, an excessive number of Automation Rules were required for Grading. 

    We needed many Automation Rules to find prospects who match our ideal customer profile and then apply a grade. For example, one rule for prospects with the job title ‘Managing Director’ is to increase their grade score by 2, and another rule for prospects with the industry ‘Executive President’ is to increase their grade score by 1, and so on.

    The problem is, having so many Automation Rules can become tricky to manage, or update.

    Depending on Automation Rules for Grading has been a bit of a pain… until Conditional Completion Actions came along.

    What are Conditional Completion Actions?

    Simply Conditional Completion Action allows us to perform different actions for prospects based on their demographics or behaviors when they fill out a form.

    In short, Conditional Completion Action means when two prospects submit the same form but with different regions, we can automatically assign them to different sales reps depending on their location.

    How do Conditional Completion Actions affect Grading?

    The Conditional Completion Actions don’t replace or make Automation Rules redundant, they mean we can significantly reduce the number of rules we need. This makes our Grading easier to manage and to keep up-to-date.

    Instead of using Automation Rules to independently assign the correct Grade to new prospects, we can use one single Conditional Completion Action that does all of the allocations for you.

    For example:

    If a prospect fills in the form with the State “Washington” then those prospects will have an increased score by ‘10’ and so on.

    If you’re a Pardot Standard user who set your instance up before Conditional Completion Actions were available to you, I suggest you review and refresh but of course, take due diligence and map out the changes you’ll make on paper first before you update anything in the system!