At its World Tour in Sydney, Salesforce announced that it’s changing the names of several of its Marketing Cloud products. Pardot, one of Salesforce’s marketing automation tools, will now be known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

There are several reasons behind this strategic change.

The move is part of an initiative called “MC Easy,” (Marketing Cloud Easy) which is part of the “Salesforce Easy” innovation goal. The aim is to make Marketing Cloud’s broad suite of products consistent and easily understood by everyone.

Marketing Cloud is made up of “Studios,” “Builders,” and plugins that have retained their original names (after being acquired by Salesforce). Salesforce recognized that the vocabulary they’ve used has been inconsistent and that the changes will make it easier for us to talk about products across different Salesforce “clouds.”

These are significant changes that won’t happen overnight, but what are the implications for the Pardot community?

B2B vs. B2C

Salesforce tried to eliminate the binary B2B/B2C divide between Pardot and Marketing Cloud a few years ago. The reality is that Pardot has B2C customers (whereas Salesforce Marketing Cloud has more transactional B2B customers).

Salesforce says that Pardot’s “Account Engagement” will allow us to work “side by side” with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They have recognized that customers do not fit neatly into B2B or B2C boxes: their intention is not to divide them, but to bring the two sides together.

Pardot architecture is different

Pardot’s architecture (or data model) is separate from Marketing Cloud’s. In fact, Pardot is already more tightly integrated with the rest of the core Salesforce platform. The company’s long-term product development plans have paid off as it developed connected campaigns, marketing asset sync, and the Pardot Lightning app. Marketing Cloud itself doesn’t come close to this level of connection.

Pardot and the account object

“Account Engagement” is confounding to those who understand how the Pardot-Salesforce connector data sync works. Pardot works primarily with the Lead and Contact objects (a two-way create/update between Salesforce and Pardot), while the Account object is read-only.

Although there have been some “Account”-based improvements in recent releases, Pardot is far from being an account-based marketing platform. Pardot’s relationship with the Account object still leaves a lot to be desired. Naturally, one would wonder if there will be any changes on the product roadmap; at this time, Salesforce cannot confirm that there are.

We’ll see what the long-term result of the name change is. What is clear is that there will surely be less confusion about how Pardot is pronounced! 

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