O Salesforce s Robertem Gassmayr

V sérii „O Salesforce s …“ jsem si dal za cíl během celého roku vyzpovídat alespoň 52 lidí, kteří se v České a Slovenské republice pohybují okolo Salesforce. Jedno, zda jde o lidi od partnerů, zákazníka nebo dokonce někdo přímo ze Salesforce. Máte tip na někoho, koho bych měl určitě vyzpovídat? Sem s ním! děkuji

Další v sérii mých rozhovorů s lidmi ze Salesforce komunity je Robert Gassmayr ze společnosti Hexagon, který pracuje primárně s Pardot. Což je skvělé, nikoho takového jsem tady ještě neměl.

How did you get to Salesforce and what is your role?

My job title is “Digital Marketing Specialist EMEA (Team-Lead)” for Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence and came due to my new position in contact with Pardot and Salesforce three years ago.

What are you doing in your day-to-day job, what you have to know?

With my team we take care about all Digital Marketing topics and drive the digital agenda within the company for all EMEA markets. This means from migration of several country websites to newsletter marketing, advertising on different channels or use Marketing Automation as tactic to address prospects with content they are interested in. In our marketing team we set up an on-/offline approach as we take part in lot of tradeshows and organize open houses during the year and each day we talk to different markets with their specific needs.

How to you keep with the continuous development of Salesforce, which sources can you recommend?

Twitter and the Trailblazer community and especially learning by doing and a great internal cooperation with our Global Digital Marketing colleagues in US.

Does the whole company use Salesforce or just a few key people?

SFDC is a key application. It’s a Global Sales & Marketing tool, plus Regional Service and Tech Support tool with eventual Global reach. We as digital marketing team use SFDC mainly as reporting tool and to upload data keeping the sales guys busy 🙂 It’s a tool to combine Sales and marketing much better.

Is your implementation more or less standard or there are massive customizations?

SFDC has a reasonably standard configuration considering our size, with a few app-exchange add-ins for Service, CPQ, etc. Some in-house custom Sales Process (Winning Complex Sales) plus ERP connection has been added as well.

One feature you like the most in Salesforce?

The reporting possibilities are very nice in terms of analyzing and if you are a willing to learn you have so many possibilities as SFDC is developing and providing you with a lot of new features. SFDC also grants us the possibility to see the digital marketing influence, as AdWords is connected and Analytics 360 is possible to connect to their Marketing Cloud.

If you can wish one thing, which Salesforce will be able to do tomorrow, what it’ll be?

To have kind of feature (ask a question box) to get quick insights without lot of reportings. This would save time as sales could get answered their questions right away or even have some forecast how likely a customer will buy a product or accessories. As SFDC is working on machine learning (Einstein) it might come sooner or later as we see it now in Google Analytics.

How do you keep with the quick improvement of Salesforce’s features, do you implement new features or are you happy with what you have and don’t implement them?

We are always looking into new features, but those need to add real business value for us and also to think about the Global roll-out. For now, we have a good setup to work with and to leverage those features much more.

Do you have some favorite 3rd party app?

Pardot has been extended in terms of implementation. Engagement Studio A/B testing, weekend and international holiday e-mail suppression, extensive data sanitization, geotargeting, recent score / traffic pulse scoring, multiple language support – all by API. Direct event attendee population into Pardot via an App on sale’s mobile. Subscription/unsubscribe transcription from Mailchimp. Our Pardot has API data-extrapolation to extend and improve the Google Adwords SFDC integration so we can better associate Google/Facebook/Adroll/Linked-in Ad Clicks to an Opportunity on an Account Based Marketing basis and not just default click->Opp on lead conversion association.

Pardot isn’t cheap (compared to Mailchimp for example). Is it worth the money? Why, what is so unique?

As we are using both tools Pardot has a different approach and is for me more B2B focused. For a corporate like us it’s definitely worth of. Leveraging the tool gives us much more insights to handover those to our sales reps. Aside the insights of a prospect you have 3 rd party apps and the automation behind (Engagement studio). This out of one tool with no interruption and continuously new developed features.

How often do you use it?

We send daily content to prospects and due to Pardot we can work much more professional as digital marketing department within a B2B environment, also in connection with other tools like AdWords, Eventbrite or Video Publishing tools.

If you want to be successful with Pardot (as a person) – is it more about technical skills how to use it or more about marketing skills for what to use it? Or rare combination of both?

To give consultation internally on a very advanced level it’s sufficient to have a marketing background, but to understand how the software works it is not bad to have some technical basics, but you don’t need them to work with the tool. I would recommend doing the Pardot Specialist or Consultant certification, this is also still on my to do list for the future 🙂 If you want to focus more on the implementation of course you need much more technical background. This means the software gives you two different specializations to focus on in your learning path, either technical or marketing.

How did you end up in Czech Republic? What do you like/dislike here?

My current employer gave me the great chance to combine my private and business life and therefore I moved to Prague 3 years ago. I definitely like the city where you can explore different parts and attend events of all kinds with or without family. The weather in winter sometimes could be better 🙂

1 komentář

  1. Ahoj Robert!
    I love the Insights section of the Analytics Android App. Touch the mic button, say what you are wanting to see, and boom, your data at your finger tips! I agree getting SFDC to that level of reporting would be awesome. We spend so much time writing SFDC reports, that we don’t get to spend much time trying to decide what the data is trying to tell us. I don’t think we will ever get to the google analytics level of magic reporting by voice with Einstein. Google has everybody set up the same, SFDC lets us all go different directions.

    Getting the certs is on my list of things that isn’t going to get done this week too. Let me know when you get serious about it, maybe we can get a few of us around the company working on it at the same time so we can share study resources.

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