In our tightly knit community of Marketing Cloud pros, it was a pleasant surprise to our team when we came across the registered ISV partner SalesWings. SalesWings promises no less than delivering the long-awaited B2B Studio for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Or in other words, all those missing pieces that people love in B2B Tools like Marketo, and which kept them from coming over to the beautiful world of the Marketing Cloud: plug-and-play lead website tracking, lead scoring, sales insights, and more. Is Saleswings the death sentence to Adobe Marketo, or only some minor add-on? Let’s have a closer look at what it does, and who it’s for.
Relevant industry trends and considerations
Marketing Cloud is no longer the B2C solution in Salesforce’s portfolio. It is the omni-channel marketing platform of choice for marketers who are serious about data, and who want to build on a platform for the next 5 to 8 years. “Creating lasting customer experiences” is one of the phrases associated with the Marketing Cloud and one desire of B2B digital marketers these days – and absolutely right so.
The nature of B2B lead acquisition has changed, and it all starts with how leads buy these days. Digital connections, digital engagements, digital everything – is key, but only part of the equation. B2B clients expect businesses to create a buyer experience that’s as unique as they are. That means that your engagements have to be relevant to them and reach them on the channels they prefer.
Personalized and timely lead engagements both from the marketing and sales side are the response to the clients’ growing needs for unique attention.
SalesWings use cases and fit
SalesWings, it turns out, is a highly versatile solution when it comes to personalizing how you interact with your leads from both marketing, and a sales perspective. It not only helps you collect valuable data but has a set of intuitive tools to enhance your existing processes for both sales and marketing. Let’s have a look at the platform’s components:
Customer journey tracking
At the heart, SalesWings provides a plug-and-play lead website tracking script for the Marketing Cloud, which will start collecting lead activity instantly and ties it to your business leads who click in your mails or fill in your existing web forms. All data is pushed with real-time sync into a native Marketing Cloud data extension.
SalesWings will track email, ads, social, and detailed website engagement to cover the entire customer journey. Thanks to its integration with Google Tag Manager, you can leverage your existing custom event triggers to collect even more granular data.
SalesWings is almost like a small CDP (customer data platform), which made us think of Interaction Studio. Yet we found SalesWings to be highly complementary to Interaction Studio as it covers all the “known leads” part of the funnel perfectly well, all the way down to sales insights and alerts.
Identifying leads needs and interests
The most versatile tool of SalesWings is its real-time profiling solution, which they simply call “tags”. Based on the lead’s activity, leads automatically collect tags that will continuously enhance your data set that you need to segment your leads for personalized journeys. You can tag leads based on interest in products or services, topics they read about, buying signals, or channel engagements. This data is natively available in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Note: Check out DEselect to use tags to build audiences in SFMC in an incredibly simple way)
Image: All profile tags are natively available in a Marketing Cloud data extension for segmentation, as well as in the Salesforce CRM for reporting and sales insights.
Some example use cases we saw:
- Lead profiling
- Interest-based customer journeys, experiences, and segmentation
- Add leads to a journey once they show qualified interest in a service / product
- Identify cross-selling or bundling opportunities with tag reports in Salesforce CRM
- Create an attribution report to understand which content your leads are most engaged in
Image: Tags arrive in real-time into a native data extension for segmentation, triggering journeys, and more.
Lead qualification and lead scoring
SalesWings brings in another missing piece which is a fully-fledged lead scoring solution, just like you would know it from Marketo, Pardot, or Hubspot. Important to note is that SalesWings will not only score leads and contacts but includes account and opportunity based scoring.
The SalesWings approach to lead scoring is interesting as to how it combines both predictive and point-based scoring, to provide for a better way to qualify leads as MQL’s and ensure they are handled in a timely manner by your sales reps.
Note: SalesWings scoring is available within SFMC to qualify leads within journey builder.
The predictive score calculates the current strength of engagement and marks them in a user-friendly way with a flame. Leads are either hot, warm, or cold, and over time it dynamically adjusts to how leads behave in order to surface hot leads timely to sales over longer buying cycles.
The point scoring and grading solution allows clients to implement multiple scoring categories based on both activity and Salesforce CRM data, to score and understand the level of interest in different services, products, brands or topics.
We particularly like how simple it was to set it up. A marketing manager can handle all lead scoring on his own with a simple click-based user interface.
Image: SalesWings provides native scoring and grading for leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and campaigns
Sales enablement and sales insights
Besides sales and marketing alignment features around lead qualification, SalesWings goes a step further and provides a set of useful tools to enable sales teams to sell more.
Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) is a strongly loved add-on to the Marketo marketing automation platform, and SalesWings promises to top it.
While we aren’t experts of Marketo Sales Insight, we loved the intuitive and visual presentation of the SalesWings’ sales insights on the lead and contact records. It required little training to understand it and it provides useful insights about what interests the sales reps have to talk to, or what content is best suited to send over to the leads. SalesWings data is native in the Salesforce CRM and you can also use it to provide very targeted reporting and visualize data in dashboards.
Image: SalesWings sales insights are embedded on the lead and contact profile. (Image source: https://www.deloittedigital.at/solution-saleswings/)
The cherry on the cake is SalesWings’ real-time sales alerts over email and browser, and its handy lead cockpit (lead deck) which puts the best leads right in front of the reps with a slick Chrome Extension.
In conclusion
We found the B2B Studio to be a great addition to the Marketing Cloud family. Companies who look to fuel their marketing journeys and their approach to sales with lead activity and profile data will find a solution that is both easy-to-use and flexible in its use cases.
Annex: Isn’t Pardot the B2B solution of Salesforce?
A few years ago, the team at DEselect would have asked the same question and the answer would have been yes. Today, splitting Pardot and Marketing Cloud into B2C and B2B is no longer an accurate representation of the nature of the tools.
Pardot is a great marketing automation tool for SMB with a set of built-in functionalities. Marketing Cloud – as you probably know – is the much more versatile omnichannel solution that can leverage data in flexible ways to communicate with leads in a personal way. It furthermore has better governance tools for clients that are active in multiple markets. With the SalesWings B2B Studio, it now also has a great option to unlock versatile B2B features for companies who have the “lead” notion as part of their acquisition process.
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