Salesforce Pardot Summer 20 Release Overview

Two months later than initially scheduled, Salesforce are finally rolling out their Summer release this month. For once, the release name actually matches the meteorological season. The delay hasn't affected the contents of the release, as it was already in preview when Covid-19 started sweeping the world back in March. As always, there's a lot packed into the release, but it is a relatively light one from a sales cloud perspective.

The headline feature is the new work.com service announced last month, which is pitched as a set of resources to help businesses reopening after coronavirus enforced shutdowns. Extending beyond Covid-19 response playbooks and expert articles, work.com's shift management and employee wellness tools push the boundaries of its stated goals into day-to-day operations. The platform's contact tracing app does fit the core objectives more closely, and is being used by state governments as well as by enterprise.

For those organisations who carried on operating during the pandemic, the new release offers some productivity enhancements for Sales Cloud. Unless you're using the Kanban opportunity board, split view for lists will probably become the most used feature in this release. This enhances the basic list view, by allowing users to open records while still keeping the initial list visible in a separate navigation pane. This saves plenty of time and clicks when making updates to a list of lead or contact records, and is a familiar experience in other platforms.

More Customisation

Longer-term, the beta release of dynamic forms will be the most important feature rolled out this month. The announcement of this major enhancement to page layouts was the highlight of last year's Dreamforce for many Salesforce administrators. For now, only a select group of preview customers will see the benefit. Dynamic forms simplifies the creation of page layouts using lightning pages by granting additional flexibility to where fields can be placed on the page. These capabilities can be combined with enhanced field visibility rules that allow specific fields and entire layout sections to be hidden based on field values. In effect, it will enable admins to consolidate their page layouts into a single dynamic view that changes upon record type or status, simplifying maintenance of user views.

Given that this is a beta feature, there are plenty of downsides to the new capability. The most severe of which is that dynamic forms are only restricted to custom objects for now. Expect the feature gaps to be closed as the functionality nears generally availability over the next few releases.

Administrators and platform developers will also benefit from a set of significant enhancements to flow builder, turning this tool into a visual workflow engine capable of replacing both Apex or Process Builder. The ability to execute flows after record changes or system events allows code-free creation of complex record update triggers that simply aren't possible in the simplified Process Builder environment. This can include conditional updates, as well as cascaded updates that call other applications or update other records.

The ability of flows to bypass user permissions when needed will also enhance the usefulness of flow builder, while simplified lookup value sharing and automatic variable handling make flow builder accessible to a wider audience. Finally, new debugging capabilities make flows simpler to test by introducing automatic rollback when flows fail. Flow builder will rarely be the first choice for automation in Salesforce, but these updates make it much more useful when other workflow options too complex or not powerful enough for the job.

Pardot

After a very light June release, there's a lot more coming to Pardot this month. The big news is the ability for long-time Pardot users to upgrade the Salesforce connector to last year's new v2 connector. Until now, Pardot users were stuck with whatever connector version their instance was first provisioned with. This is an irreversible process, which prevents the connector from ever being removed from Salesforce after the upgrade. The benefits come from the ability to use business units, the ability to pause the connector, as well as modified data sharing behaviour and an integration user that doesn't require a Salesforce license. The downside is that there is much less flexibility in controlling the permissions Pardot has in Salesforce. In general, most Pardot users would benefit from upgrading their Salesforce connector version but should apply caution before proceeding with such a major change.

The new connector is part of an ongoing merger between Pardot and Sales Cloud that can be seen in other aspects of this months release. It is now possible to manage Pardot users from within Salesforce. This is not an either/or change. Admins can choose to manage synced users from either Salesforce or from Pardot, but not from both. As such, it requires careful planning to make sure that user profiles are correct in Pardot before switching to managing Pardot users from Salesforce.

Similarly, the ability to add leads or contacts to a Pardot list has been enhanced with the addition of two new buttons that can be added to any Salesforce page layout. There are separate buttons for adding contacts to a basic Pardot list and for adding contacts to Engagement Studio lists. The primary use case for this is to incentivise Sales to add their leads to nurture or sales enablement campaigns run out of Pardot.

Away from Salesforce, there is a beta for first-party tracking cookies, finally bringing Pardot in line with other marketing automation platforms that have offered this feature for years. Browsers are heavily restricting the use of third-party cookies, which have traditionally been used by marketing technologies to track web activity and link it back to contact profiles. First party cookies overcome this restriction but are tied to a single domain them which limit their ability to track users across multiple sites. That's a pretty substantial restriction for the many organisations run more than one website, but on forced on them by Apple, Mozilla and Google.

B2B Marketing Analytics

A couple of significant enhancements to B2B Marketing Analytics land this month, to coincide with the sunsetting of the original version of marketing analytics. These are part of the AI-enhanced B2B Marketing Analytics Plus module that requires an Enterprise version of Salesforce. The Marketing Campaign Intelligence app allows marketers to view Salesforce campaign information and Pardot campaign information on side-by-side dashboards. The dashboards can then be filtered by accounts, segments and audience type to reveal cross-campaign trends that are often missed by the more common campaign-specific reporting. The Salesforce Einstein AI then offers recommendations and trend analysis right on the dashboards, to highlight the most important information.

Einstein AI can also be used to automatically calculate campaign attribution following this release. This automates the creation of custom campaign influence data on opportunities, based upon the campaign response history of contacts linked to the opportunity. In effect, it makes the custom campaign influence feature of Salesforce useful instead of relying on sales to manually add opportunities to campaigns. The end result is a heavily upgraded multi-touch campaign attribution dashboard in B2B Marketing Analytics that automatically calculates the impact of campaigns based upon the number and type of campaign responses linked to opportunities.

Finally, the process for implementing B2B Marketing Analytics has been simplified. Customers with customised Salesforce permission models have often struggled to get data into the tool for the dashboards to work correctly. The simplified setup process automates much of that work and highlights where changes need to be made. Combined with a streamlined dataset builder for B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, this should make the dashboards much easier to create and maintain.