What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It’s a great platform with a lot of strong features and functionalities — and also a popular choice against other competitors like Dynamics CRM and SugarCRM. Here at Net-Results, we love Salesforce which is why we’ve worked hard to create the most flexible and stable integration with our platform!
You’ll want to take your options into careful consideration! Because working together, instead of separately, these two systems can take your sales and marketing operations to a whole new level. What does that mean for teams like yours? The Sales team closes more deals. Marketing generates more leads. And both teams work better together than ever before!
While some marketing automation platforms come packaged with a streamlined, sometimes overly simple CRM, the marketing automation solutions we’re going to talk about today instead give you the ability to use the platform alongside a number of the best CRM tools on the market today — like Salesforce!
Never fear, we’re here to help!
What should you look for in a marketing automation platform for Salesforce?
There are a lot of things that you should look for when looking for a marketing automation platform for Salesforce. First off, you’ll want to make sure that your marketing automation platform can integrate with Salesforce to allow all of your teams to:
- Gain Instant Access to Customer Data
- Create Targeted Campaigns
- Sync Conditions (Bidirectionally)
- Allow (Unlimited) Custom Objects
- Report on Revenue Metrics
So let’s get into the best Marketing Automation Platforms for Salesforce!
Net-Results
So yes, we’re going to talk about Net-Results (that’s us, in case you missed it!). Net-Results is a complete lead generation and lead management platform to help your organization simplify your life and drive revenue. We’re all about our easy-to-use and easy-to-learn platform that helps businesses around the world save time and money every day. With Net-Results, you can engage, track, and convert leads at every stage of your funnel with our single, easy-to-use-and-learn platform. Once you’ve established effective marketing campaigns in the platform, use Net-Results to report on every metric and prove impact and positive ROI!
With the Net-Results + Salesforce Marketing Automation Integration, you can leverage Salesforce data seamlessly by leveraging Salesforce opportunities and reporting in your Net-Results campaigns, automate your list management, and assign and create tasks to smooth the handoff process between sales and marketing.
We’re really proud of our native Salesforce Integration. Feel free to schedule a demo to see it hands-on and see how you can make your life easier with Net-Results + Salesforce.
Pardot
Pardot, or rather, Salesforce Pardot, is usually the go-to for Salesforce users who started with Salesforce and are now getting into marketing automation. It’s highly customizable, has a solid integration with Salesforce, and had a lot of strong suits. Salesforce is a huge company, and with that also comes lots of resources, including implementation teams and lots of consultants who can help get you up and running.
The downside is: it’s not uncommon to need those consultants and implementation teams. And they’ll cost you (somewhere in the ballpark of $10k isn’t abnormal). Of course, this adds to the already decently high price of Pardot.
Act-On
A lot of praises have been sung for Act-On’s tight Pardot integration (examples right here and here), although over on G2, there seem to be some discrepancies where it seems like there can be some synching issues. Like most marketing automation integrations for Salesforce, Act-On allows you to create lead-management programs that update fields, create tasks, assign owners, and convert leads directly in Salesforce. Overall, Act-On has a solid reputation and a solid Salesforce integration!
Marketo
We’ve talked before about Marketo and their competitors, . While the “very first sync in your subscription may take hours or even days” [source], it seems to be smooth sailing from there on out.
While the Marketo Salesforce integration is solid and the Marketo name-share in the industry is astronomical, it can be really difficult to learn and has notoriously bad support — which is a big deal, especially when the technology is so important for both your Sales and Marketing teams. Our data shows that the average Net-Results customer reports going live in only one month and the average Pardot user reports going live in 2, whereas Marketo’s average is over three months. That can definitely be a big deal if you’re having to go live with both your Salesforce and Marketo accounts at the same time, or if you’re simply trying to make Marketo and Salesforce play nice.
That’s all folks! Hope that was helpful!
