At the Salesforce World Tour, in Sydney a number of marketing cloud platform name changes were announced. One of Salesforce’s marketing automation tools - Pardot, is being renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. 

Some of these changes are quite significant and will not happen overnight, especially since the changes are dependent on unraveling product features and users consciously adopting the new terminology. The name change has some implications for the Salesforce marketing cloud community. 

1.The Split between B2B and B2C

In the past for many years, Marketing cloud would cater to B2C marketing whereas Pardot was called the “B2B marketing automation solution”. However, a couple of years ago, Salesforce tried to remove the binary split between pardot and marketing cloud which matched the reality - Pardot is in fact better suited to “considered” purchases but has B2C customers whereas Salesforce Marketing Cloud has transactional B2B customers. 

By renaming Pardot as “Account engagement”, it looks like Salesforce is trying to reinforce the split. 

The official statement from Salesforce talks of a close relationship between the two and not a distinction. They acknowledged that customers don’t neatly fall into the B2B or B2C criterias and that it is not Salesforce’s intention to split them but to bring them closer. 

2.Pardot and “Account Engagement” 

To those who understand how the Salesforce-Pardot connector data-sync works, account engagement can be puzzling, for the simple reason that pardot works mainly with the lead/contact objects, whereas the account objective is read- only. Although there has been an increase in the number of “account based” enhancements over the past few releases, Pardot is far from being an “account-based marketing (ABM) platform. 

Furthermore the non-profit sector which uses pardot to do B2C marketing does not have the term “account” appearing on the Nonprofit success pack (NPSP). Although they are a small portion of the bigger picture, these changes could have people confused and alienated. 

3.Skill sets 

As a consequence of having generic names, the skill sets now will also sound generic. The concern lies in the fact that the new names do not reflect the specialisation in this technology, the expertise that Pardot/Marketing cloud specialists have spent years mastering. 

This calls for a huge adjustment on behalf of recruiters. Greater effort to understand the shift and recognise the value of skills that specialists in the field have. 

Savant is informed by market research and has a specialised Salesforce team with extensive experience and expertise in Salesforce talent solutions. We make it our job to stay informed about industry changes and alter our practices to best suit the talent demands of the market - to ensure we recognise quality talent and the right skill set for our customers.

If you are on the path of digital transformation and are migrating to salesforce as your main CRM platform, Savant can support you with the best talent in the industry that can be technically vetted through our salesforce partnerships with experts and market-leading onboarding advice and consultation. To know more about how we can assist you, please reach out to us at - technology@savantrecruitment.com