Dreamforce 2021 Hacks for Busy B2B Marketers

You are likely aware Dreamforce 2021 is streaming live on Salesforce+ September 21-23 if your job has anything to do with Salesforce or Pardot. That’s because the good marketers at Salesforce know how to find you and make sure you come to whatever thing they’re promoting.

Well, it’s all with good intentions. That’s because there’s lots of information Salesforce needs to relay to customers, users, consultants and partners as the platform evolves. 

Dreamforce serves as the annual culmination of that information relay. It’s the place to go to learn more about the direction Salesforce is taking with the platform so you can adjust your own technology strategy. But, like most things in 2021, you’re gonna have to watch it virtually unless you have a golden ticket to this invite-only event.

Attending Dreamforce virtually is creating barriers for me as a busy human person. So, I put on my marketer hat to figure out how I can hack this. 

Here’s the Cliffs Notes version of Dreamforce 2021 for B2B marketers who have other stuff to do.

Major Dreamforce 2021 Announcements

Salesforce always saves their flagship Dreamforce event for sharing major announcements. In 2020, it was the Slack acquisition and Salesforce pandemic response. 

Two big themes dominate Dreamforce 2021: 

We’re all getting used to this digital-first world. Salesforce is creating more educational and inspirational content every day while enabling people to work and learn from anywhere. So making some big Slack announcements and moving all that video content to one hub makes perfect sense.

How to Hack Dreamforce 2021: A B2B Marketer’s Guide

In years of Dreamforce past, in-person attendees could choose from many Pardot-focused sessions to learn about a wide range of Salesforce and business strategy topics. There was even an agenda builder to help attendees sort through all the content. 

Salesforce+ is going to house all of those hours of recorded sessions and video content. And Salesforce is going to broadcast live on the platform, which means most of that video content will be available to everyone after the conference is over.

If you’re like me, then you probably don’t block time to attend entire virtual conferences — let alone three days in a row. Instead, you have the parts you want to see playing on one screen while you’re working in another and you get all stressed out from not giving full attention to either. 

I’m also more of a reader than a watcher when it comes to learning new concepts. So, I’m going to provide the reader’s version of everything marketers should catch at Dreamforce this year by collecting the blogs/articles that give insights into these sessions. Then you can read about the topics that interest you and only tune in for the fun stuff (i.e., Fresh Prince & Foo Fighters!)

Remember to take a relaxing break from Dreamforce 2021 at ParDreamin’ Pond.

Day 1: Tuesday, September 21

Dreamforce Main Show: Welcome to the Trusted Enterprise with Marc Benioff and special guests

The main show is top-secret new content, so you’ll have to tune into that one.

Session Description 

Today, every business has to transform to become a Trusted Enterprise. Join Marc Benioff and special guests to learn how the Slack-First Customer 360 helps businesses of all sizes succeed anywhere.

9:45 a.m. PT / 12:45 p.m. ET

From Idea to Exit: Build a Thriving Business on AppExchange

Here’s an AppExchange-focused Dreamforce preview from Holly Rushton with the lowdown for Salesforce product people. These AppExchange-focused sessions are especially beneficial for B2B SAAS and product marketers.

Session Description 

Trailblazing entrepreneurs share how they landed on a profitable business idea, secrets to scaling, wisdom from the journey, and why they love being part of our partner ecosystem.

12:00 p.m. PT / 3:00 p.m. ET

Welcome to Your Digital HQ

Slack and Salesforce

This session addresses the Salesforce acquisition of Slack that was finalized in July 2021 and builds upon Slack-First Salesforce Customer 360 and Digital HQ concepts. 

You can read more about the Slack Digital HQ concept in this press release from Slack.

Session Description 

Redefining what’s possible in a digital-first world.

12:00 p.m. PT / 3:00 p.m. ET

Grow Moments into Relationships with Slack-First Marketing

Salesforce is introducing the concept of using Slack to manage marketing campaigns and projects. Using integrations, workflows, and channels, marketers can use Slack to feel more connected with the company as a whole and create a more collaborative experience.

You can earn a Slack-First Marketing Trailhead badge to understand this concept.

Session Description 

In relationships, every moment counts. Marketers must be data-focused, AI-savvy, and agile. Learn how Trailblazers have done this, plus get a peek at new Marketing Cloud and Slack innovations.

1:00 p.m. PT / 4:00 p.m. ET

Data and Privacy in a Cookieless Future

first party cookie

This is a big one for marketing operations professionals. MOPs everywhere are rethinking their strategies in response to impending deadlines as most major web browsers drop support for third-party web tracking cookies. 

Martin Kihn, Salesforce SVP, Market Strategy, Marketing Cloud, presented a webinar in June 2021 with the same name as this Dreamforce session. Here’s a blog Kihn wrote that explains the concepts and links to the webinar.

Session Description 

How will changes in cookies, the rise of real-time unified profiles, AI-driven measurement methods, and the privacy imperative impact marketers? Learn how to thrive in the cookieless future.

1:30 p.m. PT / 4:30 p.m. ET

How to Do Sales Prospecting the Right Way

Sales and marketing goes hand-in-hand, which means the best B2B marketers understand the sales process inside and out. Lucky for you, Salesforce has already released a guide on this very topic that you can peruse at your leisure. Here’s the Salesforce Complete Guide to Sales Prospecting.

Session Description

Prospects are the fuel for the sales pipeline. Whether you’re just starting out or an expert hoping to level up, learn how you can turn prospecting into a science.

3:00 p.m. PT / 6:00 p.m. ET

What is RevOps and Why is it Critical to Your Success?

RevOps is one of those buzzwords that’s puzzling marketers who are new to the concept. But it’s one of those areas that brings every division together at a company because they are working toward a shared goal. Diligent B2B marketers should understand this concept so they can contribute in meaningful ways through their marketing efforts. Here is the Salesforce guide to understanding revenue operations.

Session Description

86% percent of executives say revenue operations is important to meet their goals, but just 41% are very confident they understand RevOps. Learn why RevOps is important and how to get started.

5:00 p.m. PT / 8:00 p.m. ET

Day 2: September 22

Explore Slack & Salesforce’s Successful Path to Integration

This particular session is going to be interesting because it explains how Slack and Salesforce teamed up to integrate the two platforms. So, you may want to tune in for this one. 

This session will also serve as a great companion to the concept of Slack-first marketing. Here’s a guide that includes instructions on how to build your Slack-Salesforce integrations to make it all work like magic.

Session Description

Learn how Slack’s business technology developers, in partnership with Salesforce, exponentially sped up the integration of both companies by building innovative solutions on the Slack platform.

9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Getting Back to Growth: B2B Sales Reimagined

We’re all rethinking everything we thought we knew about sales and marketing. Companies on Pardot are already ahead of the curve, but rethinking their sales strategies to meet changing priorities takes some work. Check out this Salesforce guide to reimaging sales strategies and fuel economic growth.

Session Description

In a post-pandemic world, most sales leaders are focused on filling the funnel and getting back to growth. Learn how to reimagine sales strategies in the complex and dynamic world of B2B sales.

9:30 a.m. PT / 12:30 p.m. ET

Time to Digest All That Dreamforce Content 

Hopefully this Dreamforce 2021 guide for B2B marketers proves to be helpful as we all navigate this new way of approaching Salesforce events. 

We’ll have to accept these virtual conferences as the norm until the day comes that gathering in large groups is safe again. And maybe we’ll continue to see these hybrid in-person/virtual conferences so everyone can attend regardless of their location (or comfort level in large crowds). 

Let us know how you feel about Dreamforce 2021 in the comments below.

Wishing B2B marketers got more love at Dreamforce 2021? Well there’s a whole three-day virtual conference coming October 27-29 to fill those gaps. 

Register for ParDreamin’ 2021 so you can fill your head with all the Pardot and B2B marketing knowledge you need to accomplish your professional goals. We promise you’ll meet people like you who do awesome things with marketing automation. 

The post Dreamforce 2021 Hacks for Busy B2B Marketers appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.

By |2021-09-20T16:11:05+00:00September 20th, 2021|Categories: Events, Salesforce News|

Hayley Tuller Named 2020 Merivis Volunteer of the Year

Being generous with our time through volunteer work is a core value at Sercante.

Sercante Solution Engineer, Hayley Tuller, has taken that generosity to a new level. Her volunteer work in the Salesforce community earned her the 2020 Merivis Volunteer of the Year Award.

Merivis Co-Founder and Executive Director Kate Perez presented Hayley with the award during a virtual keynote presentation on May 26 at the 2021 Merivis Summit.

(more…)

By |2023-01-25T21:10:18+00:00May 27th, 2021|Categories: Career, Events, Salesforce News, Sercante News|Tags: , , |

How to address Pardot issues related to the Salesforce outage

On May 11, 2021, Salesforce and Pardot users experienced a Salesforce outage related to a domain name service (DNS) issue. Salesforce was down for about four hours because of an “emergency break fix” that wasn’t successful.

The Salesforce outage affected Pardot. However, Pardot remained up and running even if marketers couldn’t log in to their specific instances.

As always, you can check https://status.salesforce.com/ to find information about ongoing issues that could potentially affect your Salesforce org.

Around 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, marketers noticed they couldn’t log into the CRM or Pardot. Salesforce was actively restoring services at 8:30 p.m. EST, and the team restored many services that were impacted by that time.

Resolved-Multiple Salesforce Applications Disrupted

Were Pardot end users affected by the Salesforce outage?

Pardot end users likely did not experience the effects of the outage.

It is currently looking like the outage may have caused a few delayed emails and delayed sales people callbacks. However, we’re expecting these small delays to be all end users will experience during this outage event. 

How did the Salesforce outage affect Pardot?

Salesforce co-founder and chief technology officer Parker Harris commented on the outage via Tweet. He said the base issue causing the Salesforce outage was related to the domain name system (DNS). 

The DNS issue affected Pardot by restricting access to the CRM, which caused the Pardot-Salesforce connector to become unavailable. 

In addition, Pardot sends emails using Marketing Cloud send services (at least as far as DNS naming organizes them). So, Pardot was most likely unable to send emails during the outage.

Pardot authentication happens on Saleforce.com services, so Pardot users were not able to to log in during the outage. This login unavailability impacted both marketers trying to log in as well as API authentications. 

Next steps for Pardot users now that service is restored

The core of Pardot was unaffected. But we do have some things to check around the edges of Pardot where it interacts with other Salesforce services. 

Here’s how you can stay ahead of potential issues that may have been caused by the Salesforce outage:

Check new leads or prospects

Spot-check any leads that came in on form fills during the connectivity outage. Make sure new leads made their way into the CRM correctly. 

Look at your busiest forms and form handlers that have completion actions to sync to Salesforce. Make sure all prospects have the Salesforce cloud icons you expect. If they do not appear to be syncing, open the prospect record and click “Sync with CRM.”

Verify Pardot successfully delivered emails during Salesforce outage

The Salesforce outage may have delayed email delivery. It appears as though Pardot couldn’t communicate with outbound email servers. Look at reporting for any email campaigns or you scheduled for delivery on May 11, 2021. Also, check any autoresponders that may be connected to form fills to ensure everything was delivered as expected. 

Verifying Pardot sent your emails can give you assurance that the outage didn’t affect your campaigns. But remember, email is a fault-tolerant service, and any sending issues will fix itself automatically. Or, the Pardot team will push the buttons to make this right for us.

Monitor API integrations

Third-party integrations likely lost the ability to sync with Pardot during the outage event. However, the ways in which the outage affected APIs depends on how the integration was built to deal with these situations. 

Here are three ways your APIs may respond to outages.

The API:

  • Will automatically retry to connect, and the data should have made its way into Pardot with no issues. 
  • May have retried and stopped after too many unsuccessful attempts, so we don’t have the data in Pardot. 
  • May not retry to connect, so we don’t have the data in Pardot. 

You will need to check your Pardot tool integrations and figure out how to sync any missing data. You can likely sync missing data by manually pushing ‘retry’ in each tool. Or, you can use the normal export process to import data into Pardot just like we do when we don’t have the tools integrated. 

What is DNS?

DNS or Domain Name System is effectively the computers ‘phone book’. This is the system that translates ‘TheSpotForPardot.com’ to the IP address (kinda like a phone number) that computers use to talk to each other. So with a DNS issue, the computer’s phone books to each other don’t work right. They can’t correctly talk to each other. 

Pardot and the Pardot services didn’t have any DNS issues during this time, but rather the Saleforce platform infrastructure had DNS issues. So, the world could interact with Pardot services just fine — it continued to collect forms, deliver whitepapers, etc. 

Pardot just couldn’t talk to Salesforce services, which includes authentication for logging in.

If you’re seeing connector issues, check out this resource to troubleshoot for common Pardot-Salesforce connector issues.

Get help from Pardot consultants

If all else fails and you’re completely lost in Salesforce outage freakout mode, then we’d love to talk to you. 

The Sercante Pardot consultant team knows a thing or two about Salesforce outages and how they affect Pardot orgs. Contact us to chat.

The post How to address Pardot issues related to the Salesforce outage appeared first on The Spot For Pardot.