Salesforce Trailblazers: Top Insights from B2B Marketing Experts

Dreamforce is now less than a week away, and I couldn't be more excited!  I'll be speaking this year on a Trailblazer Spotlight panel entitled "Top Insights from B2B Marketing Experts."  The panel will take place on Wednesday September 26th from 4-6pm at the Palace Hotel at the Pardot Station (Pied Piper).   Bookmark to save the session in your Agenda Builder, though seating will be first come first serve. 

Come learn about how Elegran has used Salesforce and Pardot to revolutionize our marketing stack, and becoming renowned as America's "Most Innovative Brokerage".  

This will be my third year speaking at Dreamforce, last year speaking about leveraging lightning to drive user adoption at Dreamforce 2017

and lead nurturing using Engagement Studio at Dreamforce 2016.  

I'm Speaking at Dreamforce 2016

I am incredibly excited to be invited by Salesforce to one of the first companies in real estate to be invited to speak about Marketing Automation at Dreamforce 2016 on behalf of Elegran, held October 4th-7th in San Francisco. Dreamforce is the largest software conference in the world, attracting over 175,000 technology entrepreneurs and business leaders, to connect with their peers and learn from industry pioneers. I will join speakers Melinda Gates, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Tony Robbins and many more on the stage at Dreamforce this year. Elegran prides itself as a pioneer in technology and real estate marketing in NYC and is eager to present successful marketing strategies on a national stage to other leaders of the global business community.
Tigh Loughhead, Marketing Director at Elegran Real Estate and Development, was asked by Salesforce to speak at Dreamforce this year about Elegran’s innovation in lead nurturing and marketing automation, which it has used successfully to build an inbound marketing strategy, align marketing and sales teams, and leverage cold and dormant leads. Recently quoted on the Salesforce blog and Pardot product release announcement of Engagement Studio, Tigh has used lead nurturing technology strategies to close the loop between the traditional marketing and sales funnels at Elegran, about which he recently gave a presentation at Salesforce’s NYC headquarters in Manhattan. Details about Elegran’s Dreamforce session can be found below.https://success.salesforce.com/Sessions#/session/a2q3A000000LBY1QAO
Elegran attributes its rapid growth in becoming one of the leading firms in New York City to its high level of customer service, the excellence of its team, and its investment in technology and marketing. Elegran’s mastery of customer segmentation, nurture and conversion have propelled it to become one of the fastest-growing and most exciting firms in the industry; and the first to totally customize Salesforce for real estate, investing in the software for every member of its sales team, becoming one of the leading firms in the world of marketing automation.
Tigh Loughhead is an expert in digital marketing with a background in advertising and real estate technology, helping to grow several startups in New York City. As an expert in marketing automation, lead generation and real estate marketing tech, Tigh brings a wealth of digital marketing knowledge and management skills, such as CRM implementation, SEM, SEO, automation, content strategy, branding and conversion optimization to Elegran. In 2014, Tigh was one of only 10 people asked to sit on Trulia.com’s “NYC Rental Advisory Council." For the past two years, Tigh has run Elegran’s marketing team, focusing on lead generation, data analysis, and aligning sales and marketing to build Elegran as a scalable business. 

Reimagining Marketing Automation with Pardot Engagement Studio

Yesterday Salesforce launched the general availability of Pardot Engagement Studio, a powerful new UI for creating and reporting on lead nurture and drip campaigns.Elegran was lucky enough to participate in the private beta, and I must admit I'm quite impressed with the new interface and its functionality.

Read more about the product release here and here , or check out a short video of how Elegran implemented the reporting interface below: 

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/06/salesforce-pardot-engagement-studio.html

http://www.pardot.com/blog/salesforce-announces-general-availability-pardot-engagement-studio-b2b-marketing-automation-reimagined/

Elegran specializes in high-end luxury Manhattan real estate, but the firm is also dedicated to being a leader in real estate marketing technology.  We currently have several drip programs running using Engagement Studio, and we've already seen a some incredible results re-engaging lukewarm and forgotten leads, and handing them back over to our sales team to close, continuing to close the loop in our marketing to sales to deal funnel.  

Engagement studio actually empowers Pardot users to listen to numerous "triggers" based on user actions, then channel the customer journey along a personalized drip, visually representing the path to marketers along an intuitive flow diagram , that makes visualizing and reporting upon the success of content and design much more robust and user friendly. 

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to share any experience or insight I might have gleaned using the program so far. 


Statsbot Salesforce Commands for Slack

Slack Commands for Salesforce and Google Analytics Automation

I've been a huge fan of Slack for a while now, the team-collaboration tool that is becoming more of an automated work management system than simply an instant message platform.  I use Slack to keep in touch with multiple teams; the marketing team at work, as well as my motorcycle club, including many individuals operating across multiple offices and timezones.  However, the true utility of Slack extends far beyond personal communication, as apps like IFTTT, Zapier and Statsbot actually integrate external software and even devices from Slack Channels and Bots, allowing you to control, report and even automate your personal and professional life directly from Slack. 

Slack commands are incredibly useful, and have replaced many of the myriad calendar, to do list or even project management platforms I've perfunctorily used in the past.  Using the /remind command in Slack allows a bot to schedule a personal reminder at a specific time, on a particular day or in a few hours from now.  Setting reminders for other team members, or even an entire channel is even more useful.  Simply type (in any channel)   "/remind [someone or #channel] [what] [when]" and @slackbot will not only remind you of [what] at that particular time, but keep a log of tasks due and completed in your Direct Message history. There are numerous other incredibly useful "slash" commands to /invite users, take a /poll, or even set up a /call with the #channel, nearly completely supplanting the utility of Skype. 

Slack also integrates with multiple other platforms and devices, allowing you to query and control other platforms directly from Slack.  I can access my Google Drive, or create a Google Hangout directly from within Slack, or integrate with other project management tools like Jira, Asana or Trello. Using IFTTT, I've set up social media posts or mentions to post to a #social channel so I can monitor activity across different sites.  I've set up a Craigslist scrape to post any new motorcycle listed for sale in New York State mentioning the word "Ducati" in the title to a Slack channel in real time. I've configured my Amazon Echo to automatically post reminder to Slack, anytime I add an item to my Alexa To Do list. 

These personal and professional automations save time, but the most impressive app I've seen yet is called Statsbot, which allows you to run Google Analytics and Salesforce reporting directly from within Slack.  As much as I absolutely love running reports in Salesforce  (then exporting and waiting to download a CSV, then finally manipulating the data) @statsbot has native querying language and native graphing tools built into the app.  

For the past month, I've set up automatic weekly and monthly traffic and conversion reporting, so I get a direct message in a private channel as soon as I get a cup of coffee on Monday morning, or right before a marketing meeting. 

Similarly, I've set up alerts for traffic or goal thresholds, that automatically notify me if visits and conversions don't reach or surpass specific targets, so I can make adjustments to the website or any campaign in real-time.  I have similar email alerts set up through GA, or Uptime Robot, but I'm much more likely to notice a Slack notification over a form email. 

Finally, last week Statsbot announced an integration with the Salesforce API, integrated with Slack, that functions similar to the Statsbot Google Analytics integration.  

I can query individual leads or accounts with the info command.  I can query amount won or this week's leads by source, and make marketing adjustments on the fly, rather than wait for an ROI report from a marketing or finance analyst. 
I can query a list of all open opportunities by stage, or even opportunities scheduled to close this month, which is far easier than getting a quote from my favorite Salesforce consultant to build a dashboard.  And, I can get realtime stats on my sales team, how much they're closing, from where and how well they're managing Salesforce. 

Best of all, I can schedule these reports to run hourly, daily or weekly, and report back to me at a specific time, when I think I might need it. 

Slack is quickly becoming the most used software tool in my professional life, as it's giving me realtime insight into various different platforms, social channels, applications and data, that I would need to query individually to use. And Statsbot is quickly becoming one of the most powerful app integrations with Slack as commands and scheduling allow me to automate much of the redundant marketing reporting that previously sucked up much of my team and my time in the past.