Pardot Winter '20 Release Overview

In a world of rapid release cycles and constant updates, major platform changes are a fact of life. The final Salesforce release of 2019 is one such update. It marks the end of the road for data.com and the Classic user experience, two core components of the Salesforce product family for many years. The previously discussed mandatory update to Lightning is now upon us. All Salesforce organisations are being forcibly upgraded from classic to Lightning regardless of the new UI's impact on customisations or training. This is a big change but an understandable one given the limited uptake of Lightning among existing customers. It is probable that most Salesforce customers would never have bothered transitioning to Lightning by choice due to the major workflow differences and the resulting training and support costs. Now that it has happened after plenty of warning, but in a way which allows heavily customised organisations to opt-out.

The option of disabling Lightning Experience through user permissions still exists and isn't going anywhere. Instances with lightning disabled will continue to use Classic for the foreseeable future. Additionally, previously upgraded users still have the option to switch back to Classic using an option in the top right of the Salesforce UI. The only catch is that once enabled, the option for admins to disable Lightning at the system level has been removed. Lightning can no longer be ignored and with it the hundreds of new features that have been added to it over the past 4 years. Aside from all the new functionality, there have been some existing features that never made the jump from Classic to Lightning. One of them was the Recycle Bin, which has finally been added to Lightning. Previously, you had to switch back to Classic to see it. The same applies to printable list views.

The headline feature in the Winter release is probably Einstein Search, which introduces AI powered personalised search and conversational search. Using AI to personalise search results is rapidly becoming a basic expectation for any system containing as much information as Salesforce. It's not just the search results that will be personalised though. The search experience will become much more personalised, with quick links, suggested searches and record previews in the search box. The ability to create profile specific search result list layouts only enhances the personalised feel. The primary catch with Einstein search is that it is a beta feature, which (as always) requires additional licensing. Fortunately, the ability to run mass actions such as merge and bulk assign from search results is available to everybody. This is a nice capability that will become essential to any admin.

Salesforce Reporting

Much more useful to Salesforce users is a long list of report enhancements that are also in beta. Salesforce reporting is very flexible but the capabilities of the reporting engine are quite limited. These limitations have been addressed by a set of additional reporting capabilities that will be a big deal for anybody who builds complex reports containing advanced filters and counts or summaries. Row-level formulas are the most powerful of these because it allows report builders to add formulas and create calculated columns in Salesforce reports. These introduce the full capability of calculated formula fields to reports. The formulas that can be written in Salesforce aren't quite as complex or powerful as Excel formulas, but it's a close run thing. The formulas available for use in reports can cover text and date calculations as well as numerical calculations. Trusted Excel favourites such as Vlookups and If statements can all be used, and the formula output can be a text string as well as a number. For many use cases, this removes the need to export and manually manipulate reports in Excel.

Equally useful will be field to field comparisons in report filters, allowing report builders to see if the contents of one report field are higher or lower than another field on the report. Date and opportunity values comparisons will be the most common use for this capability, but they won't be the only ones. The new ability to report on unique values in report summaries will also be widely appreciated. This means that duplicates can be excluded in report totals, which is useful when producing data counts for marketing lists or data health analytics among many other use cases.

Snippets and Variable Tags

Moving onto Pardot, the headline marketing automation feature of this release is a big one. The introduction of Snippets is long overdue. Much like in other platforms, Snippets are sections of reusable shared content that can be inserted in emails. This allows promo banners, footers and header content to be maintained in one place, ensuring consistency across campaigns and reducing the time needed to make updates to widely used content. Snippets tend to be used far less than they should be, as they are an essential component of a sophisticated email template, particularly if that template needs to be used by multiple business units or multiple countries. For now, Snippets are an email only feature and don't work on landing pages, an unfortunate trend that also applies to numerous other useful email editor features in Pardot.

The same applies to the optional upgrade from PML to HML that headlined the August Pardot release. This arcane and highly technical change is actually a big deal, but it only applies to emails. PML and HML are different methods for inserting field merges into code. PML is another name for 'variable tags', which Pardot admins will recognise as the method for adding prospect fields in emails. Handlebars is an open source templating language that is used to do the same thing in various CMS systems, as well as in Salesforce email templates. Thus, Salesforce are making this change to align Pardot with the core Salesforce platform better. To a standard Pardot user, the main difference is that variable tags will now be wrapped with curly brackets' {{ }}' rather than percentage signs' %% %%'.

The importance of the HML upgrade lies in everything else that Handlebars can do. This blog uses handlebars to show you this article, with field merges used to insert the article content and conditional if statements used to hide the next and previous post navigation when there is no content to navigate to. A stripped back version of that functionality is now available in Pardot emails, as if-else statements can be used to show or hide sections of an email based on the contents of a prospect field. That is a powerful capability, which allows much greater flexibility in dynamic content than available in the native Pardot dynamic content feature.

Then there is the ability to track links in field merges, which is only possible using HML and is not supported by classic PML variable tags. The upgrade from PML to HML has been available since the end of August. However, accounts using variable tags within landing pages are advised to hold off upgrading. Everyone else should make the change as soon as user training allows. Assets are converted automatically after the upgrade, so there is no loss in functionality unless you're using landing pages.

Pardot Reporting

Otherwise, this release is mostly centred around enhancements to reporting and Einstein lead scoring. B2B Marketing Analytics is being integrated directly into Salesforce so that a managed package is no longer required to install and configure it. Additionally, it is now possible to include prospect field history in custom dashboards created using B2B Marketing Analytics. This covers both current prospect field values and historical prospect field information, allowing the creation of bespoke reports to analyse activity by the profile data used to segment and score on leads, contacts and accounts. Comparative activity reporting that breaks down campaign results by persona or account profile is a common request, and this update makes such reporting easier.

The engagement history dashboards used to display Pardot campaign results on Salesforce campaign records gain numerous enhancements. They are now available on accounts as well as on campaigns, which will be very useful for Sales who tend to be the main consumers of account level marketing analytics. At the same time, the Engagement History dashboards will gain visibility of web page activity and automated email activity alongside the existing list email and landing page information. This, in combination with the account level dashboards is a powerful reporting tool.

Einstein scoring is a powerful predictive scoring add-on that gains much needed visibility and clarity. As the AI uses machine learning to score prospects, it can be challenging to determine exactly how a lead that qualifies through Einstein scoring actually achieved a high score. The available descriptions are vague. Now the scoring will actually tell you which assets it believes are driving conversions and contributing to the score, which has reporting benefits both for campaign performance and for scoring analysis. On a similar vein, the Einstein score fields are now available in Salesforce reports and score fields that you're not interested in using can now be hidden.

As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official release notes. Contents of the release are subject to change.