UPDATED 06:53 EDT / APRIL 09 2015

Salesforce.com targets B2B lead nurturing with new services

Salesforce.com no-software logoSalesforce.com Inc. is expanding its cloud-based marketing platform with two new services that draw on real-time data about prospects to increase the success of deal-making. The launch promises to help extend the scope of targeting efforts beyond the initial engagement to every step of the way toward a purchase.

The additions implement the business-to-business sales automation technology that the customer relationship management giant obtained through its acquisition of ExactTarget, Inc. in 2013 to shrink the prohibitive amount of associated legwork that made such extensive interactions impractical before. The optimization starts with the marketers who plan out the targeting process.

Engagement Studio, the first of the two new services, provides an environment for creating campaigns that adapt with each action by a prospect to maximize the chance of a sale. Salesforce says that the platform tracks over 100 metrics to identify the best way to proceed after specific interactions.

The responses take the shape of highly targeted engagements like following up on visitors who have downloaded a white paper describing a certain product with an email containing success stories from organizations that are already using that particular solution. The service maps out such interactions to so-called “nurture paths” that provide a high-level view of which campaigns are most likely to culminate in a purchase.

That visibility, which is provided through a visual reporting feature built directly into Engagement Studio, allows marketers to tweak individual deviations such the length of the follow-up email or the time frame at which it’s sent for the best result. And according to Salesforce, the service automatically identifies many of those small details on its own to produce improvement recommendations aimed at sparing users the hassle of finding everything themselves.

The optimizations that marketers make to their campaigns are pushed down to Sales Cloud Engage, the second new addition to the cloud provider’s B2B marketing arsenal, which is geared toward the customer representatives who execute the deals. The service can be used to set a prospect on a specifie nurture path based on in-the-moment considerations, like a certain expectation they communicate over the phone, and make other quick changes to optimize conversion.

Sales Cloud Engage is due to launch exactly two weeks from now at $50 per user per month. Engagement Studio will follow suite sometime later, with a pilot release scheduled for the second half of this year, which is also when Salesforce plans to reveal pricing.


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