Salesforce introduces new AI-driven ABM capabilities

Salesforce has announced new ABM capabilities which both promote personalized engagement with account members, and support campaigns targeted at accounts where account members are currently unknown.

The announced enhancements are Accounts as Campaign Members and Einstein Key Account Identification.

Accounts as Campaign Members. Previously, marketers had only been able to use Salesforce to target accounts if records of individual leads or contacts at that account. This new capability will allow accounts themselves to be added as campaign members, i.e. targets, even if no records of individuals are associated with those accounts.

Types of campaigns which can be targeted at accounts rather than individuals include call down campaigns (to begin identifying contacts at accounts), advertising and social media messaging, and email campaigns targeted at an account address.

Read our exclusive with Salesforce’s CMO about virtual Dreamforce.

Accounts as Campaign Members allows users to associate the Salesforce CRM account record with a campaign for execution within Pardot, and is therefore exclusive to Salesforce Pardot users. “Having direct access to all of the rich data on the Salesforce account object and related objects when targeting accounts will be an advantage for customers using Accounts as Campaign Members with Salesforce CRM and Pardot,” Meredith Brown, SVP and Head of Product, Salesforce Pardot, told us.

We asked what this meant for Salesforce users with marketing automation integrations other than Pardot — Marketo, for example. “Use in Marketo would require additional synchronization and API calls between the Salesforce CRM account object (the source of truth for most customers) and Marketo’s account object. It also may not be real-time,” Brown said.

Einstein Key Account Identification. Einstein AI will identify accounts with high purchase intent through scoring and surface recommendations and insights to help sales teams optimize engagement. The AI will draw on data from Salesforce CRM and online marketing.

Why we care. Digital-first B2B marketing and selling will require more and better capabilities, and this looks like a way for marketing and sales teams to start nurturing accounts with a degree of personalization before much is known about the buying team. Also, as with the 360 Audiences CDP, we see Salesforce promoting capabilities within its own product suite as an alternative to integrations with independent best-of-breed solutions.

Read next: Salesforce makes a move in the CDP race.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.