Every Salesforce and Pardot geek knows that Dreamforce is when the biggest, baddest product announcements come to light. With just 6 weeks until the big event, I feel like a kid impatiently waiting for Christmas.
There was a tantalizing tidbit posted in the Success Community last week with a few hints:
“For the Salesforce Winter ’18 release, we are going to pilot some very cutting edge development work. We are calling this the “Edge Pilot” internally for that reason. We want to ask you all to be a part of it. There will be a lot of goodies for you to try out. With each Salesforce release, we hope to graduate some of the work out to be generally available and add new features to the pilot to get your feedback.”
The post goes on to outline some of the features that we may be seeing as part of this Winter ’18 pilot. Here are some of the teasers they shared, with some thoughts on what that might mean for admins day-to-day:
1. A new Lightning app with all Pardot functionality
Would love to see this. Preferably with navigation that mirrors the current Sales Cloud experience. While I’ve gotten used to the side bar navigation, the layout and icons are confusing to many new users.
There’s also room to improve the overall UX and terminology used to make it more intuitive. The recent addition of the ability to adjust columns on some report tables (i.e. the List Email Statistics Table) has been great – can we get that on all tables, por favor?
Here’s the preview screenshot shared along with the Success Community post:
2. Alignment of campaigns between Salesforce and Pardot. This is similar to how we sync Accounts or Opportunities today.
Hell to the yeah. Cue happy dances for Pardot admins worldwide.
How nice would it be to create a Campaign in Pardot, and have that automatically created in Salesforce? Or vice versa?
And if they can make the campaign terminology consistent across Pardot and Sales Cloud, even better.
3. Native Engagement History (think Prospect Activity) summarized on Campaign records and available in custom reports. The pilot will not have all data, but enough to get an idea of how this will work.
I’m literally salivating over this. Native Engagement History would likely mean a new Salesforce object similar to Activities — and if that’s the case, we are going to see the ability to report on our email and Engagement Studio campaigns EXPLODE.
Think the power of native Salesforce reports and dashboards, but for Pardot.
4. The ability to build new Engagement Programs and List Emails from native Sales Cloud objects.
Hmm. Natural follow up question: which native objects? Campaigns? Products?
No, wait… ACCOUNTS? Are we talking about account-based campaigns and Engagement Studio programs?!
:clasps hands together in silent prayer:
I love the enthusiasm for our pilot! I hope you spur some people to sign up. The more customers that are involved, the better the product will be.
I’ll keep spreading the good word, Adam. Definitely excited for the changes coming down the pipeline!