Salesforce Marketing Automation Options in 250 Words

Once in the Salesforce ecosystem, it's easy to be sold a Salesforce-branded marketing automation solution. Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud both live under the Salesforce umbrella, but neither was developed by Salesforce. Both were previously owned by ExactTarget and purchased by Salesforce. Salesforce now sells both at a premium for marketing automation services while falling behind industry standards in features and usability upgrades.

Pardot is marketed as a user-friendly solution for marketers using Salesforce. However, the functionality is very limited and platform upgrades occur infrequently.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is marketed as a powerful solution to fully harness and act upon your Salesforce data and enable marketing automation. However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud...

• Is a deeply technical solution that requires special skills to fully utilize. Those skills include Structured Query Language (SQL), AMPScript, HTML, Java, and more.
• Lacks basic marketing functionality (like lead scoring) without purchasing additional 3rd party applications or more Salesforce products.
• Has a complex integration with Salesforce that requires manipulation of data extensions to act on the data in any meaningful way.

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketer-friendly solution with little to no friction in starting to automate marketing, build a blog, run campaigns, and more. HubSpot...

• Has the strongest native integration with Salesforce on the market.
• Includes all necessary features to build powerful marketing automation and revenue operations foundation for your organization to attract, convert, and delight customers.
• Offers additional features in top-tier packages or within the existing HubSpot ecosystem limiting the reliance on integrations and 3rd party tools.