Predictions for the Future from the Godfather of Marketing Automation, Adam Blitzer, EVP at Salesforce

This episode features an interview with Adam Blitzer, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Digital at Salesforce. Adam is truly one of the godfathers of marketing automation and B2B demand generation, having founded and sold Pardot, one of the most important marketing automation platforms ever created for CMOs and demand gen leaders. Adam currently oversees the multi-billion-dollar marketing division at Salesforce, using the products he created to meet internal demand gen goals.

On this episode, Adam discusses the evolution of demand gen, how the tools and technologies for marketing automation have changed, why the fundamental challenges for marketers remain the same, what he believes is the MarTech battleground of the future, and the software products he’s building to create the single source of truth for enterprise marketers.

Key Takeaways

• B2b marketers have two customers – your end customer and your sales team, and sales is marketing’s most important marketing channel at most B2B companies.
• The tools and technologies for marketing automation have changed, but the fundamental challenges for marketers remain the same. Marketers are trying to do four things: Know their customers, personalize their interactions, engage customers across every channel, and measure all of it. 
• Historically there's never been a single source of truth for marketing. The customer data platform is the battleground of the future, and it’s where Salesforce is building the single source of truth for marketers.

Quotes

• “Marketing has really stepped up and said, you know what, we're the steward of the brand, and we’re now also the steward of the end-to-end customer experience. Even if it flows through a part of the company that we don't own directly, it’s all a reflection of the brand and it's all a reflection of marketing.”
• “When I got started in 2007 in B2B marketing automation, it was very much about feeding the funnel and moving through the conveyor belt of leads to opportunities to closed-one deals. Now it's much more about customer life-cycle marketing. It's about turning your clicks into leads, your leads into pipeline, your pipeline into customers, and your customers into raving fans.”
• “It's very easy as a marketer to focus on the end customer and to not focus on the other very important customer, which is your sales team. At the end of the day, if marketing blows out its numbers and they hit all of their target metrics and sales misses their target metric, how many people at the company are happy? No one is happy. At a B2B company, pipeline and sales is where the rubber meets the road. As much as possible marketing and sales need to be joined at the hip, and the more that they can share goals, the better.”
• “We really believe that the customer data platform is the battleground in marketing for the next five years. With this proliferation of MarTech and the average marketer using 10 to 20 different pieces of MarTech in their stack, you have got to be at the center of it.”
• “In this world where MarTech has become so diffuse, you can control the data, you can control the workflow, you can control the content, or you can control the analytics…And we think the most foundational of those four pieces is data, so that's really what we want to help our customers with.”

Sponsor

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