Author: Franz Malten Buemann

A few years ago, Pardot users were used to dozens of different feature releases launching throughout the year. In 2018, we consolidated our feature release schedule to a cadence of six releases a year. In the time since, our customers and partners have been able to follow our more streamlined release schedule — but we’ve heard that even six releases per year can be a lot to keep up with.
That’s why Pardot is excited to announce that we’re further simplifying our release schedule, moving from six releases a year to just three. We’re still innovating at the same pace as before, but this new release schedule allows us to align with the three major annual Salesforce releases. It removes the complexities of managing Pardot-only releases, giving our customers and partners more time to review and adopt features.
WHEN IS THE NEXT PARDOT FEATURE RELEASE?
The newest Pardot feature release is Winter ‘21 — and it’s available now, along with the Salesforce Winter ‘21 release. Future Pardot feature releases will also be aligned to the Salesforce major release schedule, so the next release will be Spring ‘21. Visit our Releases page to learn more, and join us for a virtual session where we’ll overview key Winter ‘21 features on October 28th. 
WHY ARE PARDOT-ONLY RELEASES ENDING IN 2020?
Over the past two years, we’ve learned more frequent releases mean a heavier lift for everyone involved — our internal teams, external partners, and especially our customers. It takes a lot of effort to get ready for new feature releases. After conversations with our partners and customers, we’ve decided to align with the three major Salesforce releases. This will make planning, training users, ensuring organizational alignment with Salesforce admins, and adopting new features easier for everyone.
If you have questions or comments about Pardot’s new feature release schedule or our Winter ‘21 release, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter.
 

ABC news reporter Will Reeve appeared on Good Morning America sans pants – not realizing the audience had a full view. Non-profit department head Lizet Ocampo shared that her boss “turned herself into a potato on our Microsoft teams meeting and can’t figure out how to turn the setting off.”  The UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted the Zoom code to his cabinet meeting to the general public.
It’s safe to say that we’re all adjusting to the full-staff remote work set-up that COVID-19 has forced on us. Remote and freelance workers that were previously able to focus in a quiet house or co-working space are dealing with a full house of young e-learners. Team members who thrived on in-person feedback and spontaneous brainstorming are finding the isolation of remote work paralyzing. And obviously, we’re all a bit thrown by having to conduct our meetings online.
With no concrete end to COVID-19 in sight, leaders need to be proactive about making remote teams as effective, or more effective, than they were in-house. A big part of this is ensuring that your team productivity and company culture remain intact.
Keep Productivity Alive
Remote work isn’t a new concept. Forbes shares that “70% of full-time employees work remotely at least one day per week, according to a 2018 research study from Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG”. However, evacuating the entire office into a remote work situation is an abrupt transition. Teams accustomed to tightly scheduled workdays may find the move especially frustrating. 
1. Maintain Structure With Clear Expectations
The Marketo blog Remote Working 101/Survival Kit Remote Employees Need To Succeed says, “While you don’t want to seem overbearing and draconian, setting boundaries is essential for ensuring you get the results you want. Your team should have set deliverables, and they should be manageable and in line with what you’d expect from on-site employees.” Uphold some of the traditional structure of your onsite workday while allowing your team the flexibility they need to make their unique work from home situation successful. 
2. Reinforce Good Work
Acknowledging employees who are staying on track and rewarding those who surpass expectations is more important than ever when you have a remote team. The approving nods or mentions made in a team meeting – all these things are lost when we work remotely. Taking the time to send an email or highlight an accomplishment during a video chat will reinforce productivity in a positive way.
3. Keep Creativity Alive
Nothing kills a creative brainstorming session faster than a scheduled meeting with an agenda. Creative thinkers need spontaneous interaction in a safe space in order to bounce ideas back and forth before formal discussion. Utilizing Slack, and apps like it, give your team a way to connect immediately when inspiration strikes.
When larger brainstorming sessions are needed, online whiteboards like Miro recreate the conference room session your team might be accustomed to. It’s a close experience to the in-person experience of riffing on an idea.
Keep Your Company Culture Alive
Chances are you’ve invested a lot of time and thought into your organization’s culture. It will take a deliberate and conscious effort to keep your organization’s culture alive when everyone is working within their own personal home-based culture.
1. Leave space for personal connection
While it’s important to keep online meetings and emails focused and on-task, allow some time for casual conversation. People are lonely and your team is no exception. Taking a minute to ask everyone how they are raises the energy level of meetings and emails by reminding employees that they are part of something larger than the tasks before them.
2. Maintain a sense of humor
Interruptions will happen during online meetings. Hopefully, no one gets a pantsless eyeful – but expect pets to bark, spouses to walk by and kids to interject. Your facial expressions will convey a great deal, and set the tone of the conversation. By reacting without disapproval, and then quickly redirecting your team back to the agenda you’ll foster a healthy remote culture.
3. Ensure your team has the tools and connectivity they need
Laptops, internet connections, and courier service might not seem like they are part of your company culture but they are. Remember your first day on the job and how exciting it was to set up your work space? Got used to that pretty fast. But when it’s gone you realize how much having everything at hand contributed to your outlook. Employees that are unable to complete their work because they don’t have the same resources at home will become frustrated and angry. Especially, if the burden for funding remote supplies lies 
How has your organization been fostering productivity, collaboration, and keeping your culture alive in 2020?
The post Pants Are Not Optional | Keeping Productivity & Company Culture Alive appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

ABC news reporter Will Reeve appeared on Good Morning America sans pants – not realizing the audience had a full view. Non-profit department head Lizet Ocampo shared that her boss “turned herself into a potato on our Microsoft teams meeting and can’t figure out how to turn the setting off.”  The UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted the Zoom code to his cabinet meeting to the general public.
It’s safe to say that we’re all adjusting to the full-staff remote work set-up that COVID-19 has forced on us. Remote and freelance workers that were previously able to focus in a quiet house or co-working space are dealing with a full house of young e-learners. Team members who thrived on in-person feedback and spontaneous brainstorming are finding the isolation of remote work paralyzing. And obviously, we’re all a bit thrown by having to conduct our meetings online.
With no concrete end to COVID-19 in sight, leaders need to be proactive about making remote teams as effective, or more effective, than they were in-house. A big part of this is ensuring that your team productivity and company culture remain intact.
Keep Productivity Alive
Remote work isn’t a new concept. Forbes shares that “70% of full-time employees work remotely at least one day per week, according to a 2018 research study from Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG”. However, evacuating the entire office into a remote work situation is an abrupt transition. Teams accustomed to tightly scheduled workdays may find the move especially frustrating. 
1. Maintain Structure With Clear Expectations
The Marketo blog Remote Working 101/Survival Kit Remote Employees Need To Succeed says, “While you don’t want to seem overbearing and draconian, setting boundaries is essential for ensuring you get the results you want. Your team should have set deliverables, and they should be manageable and in line with what you’d expect from on-site employees.” Uphold some of the traditional structure of your onsite workday while allowing your team the flexibility they need to make their unique work from home situation successful. 
2. Reinforce Good Work
Acknowledging employees who are staying on track and rewarding those who surpass expectations is more important than ever when you have a remote team. The approving nods or mentions made in a team meeting – all these things are lost when we work remotely. Taking the time to send an email or highlight an accomplishment during a video chat will reinforce productivity in a positive way.
3. Keep Creativity Alive
Nothing kills a creative brainstorming session faster than a scheduled meeting with an agenda. Creative thinkers need spontaneous interaction in a safe space in order to bounce ideas back and forth before formal discussion. Utilizing Slack, and apps like it, give your team a way to connect immediately when inspiration strikes.
When larger brainstorming sessions are needed, online whiteboards like Miro recreate the conference room session your team might be accustomed to. It’s a close experience to the in-person experience of riffing on an idea.
Keep Your Company Culture Alive
Chances are you’ve invested a lot of time and thought into your organization’s culture. It will take a deliberate and conscious effort to keep your organization’s culture alive when everyone is working within their own personal home-based culture.
1. Leave space for personal connection
While it’s important to keep online meetings and emails focused and on-task, allow some time for casual conversation. People are lonely and your team is no exception. Taking a minute to ask everyone how they are raises the energy level of meetings and emails by reminding employees that they are part of something larger than the tasks before them.
2. Maintain a sense of humor
Interruptions will happen during online meetings. Hopefully, no one gets a pantsless eyeful – but expect pets to bark, spouses to walk by and kids to interject. Your facial expressions will convey a great deal, and set the tone of the conversation. By reacting without disapproval, and then quickly redirecting your team back to the agenda you’ll foster a healthy remote culture.
3. Ensure your team has the tools and connectivity they need
Laptops, internet connections, and courier service might not seem like they are part of your company culture but they are. Remember your first day on the job and how exciting it was to set up your work space? Got used to that pretty fast. But when it’s gone you realize how much having everything at hand contributed to your outlook. Employees that are unable to complete their work because they don’t have the same resources at home will become frustrated and angry. Especially, if the burden for funding remote supplies lies 
How has your organization been fostering productivity, collaboration, and keeping your culture alive in 2020?
The post Pants Are Not Optional | Keeping Productivity & Company Culture Alive appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Marketing has changed.  And so have the people doing it. The breed of new marketers is under 40, successful and experienced – they’ve worked for big corporations and small businesses, and now they’re running their own mini-agencies.
One thing connects them all: they believe marketing is not about selling. Instead, it’s about helping audiences. 
1. They talk like humans, not like businesses
The way marketers communicate with each other, other businesses and even their audiences often sound like unintelligible nonsense. It’s a sure-fire method of distancing themselves from everyone else, even if that’s not the idea. The new marketers use natural language, not business language. They’re easy to understand and they don’t use business-speak to dress up a dull concept. They use creative who share the same values, so the content they make is accessible.
2. They know that many agencies are slow, unimaginative, and expensive
Big agencies have big power. Some do great work. Some win awards. But many are more interested in numbers than results. They’re inefficient, tend to tell the client what they want to hear, and charge huge amounts. 
New marketers don’t work like this. They have small teams, in small offices – if they have an office at all – so the client isn’t paying for their fancy building with its accompanying rent. 
They work quickly and push boundaries – but they listen to the client. And if something isn’t going to work, they’ll say so. 
3. They don’t care about performance marketing
It’s not purely about the numbers. Being able to measure something (leads, open rates, click-throughs) doesn’t make it a success – it just means you can measure it. Instead, there’s a movement towards intuitive marketing, when you’re delivering content through the channels you know your audience responds to.
These are people who believe marketing is about more than generating leads for sales. In fact, they believe marketing is about anything other than generating leads for sales. Especially creating content and then using it. For them, marketing and content is about helping your audience
4. They put their efforts into podcasts, LinkedIn and social media
Podcasts are not exactly new. Neither’s LinkedIn. But does your company have a successful podcast? Do you get enviable engagement on LinkedIn? Or is it more like a couple of comments and a handful of likes? 
Given the time we’ve had to get to grips with these channels and formats, you’d think brands and companies would be doing a better job of using them as a marketing tool. But they’re not. Despite often having huge numbers of followers, many big corporates’ LinkedIn accounts get very low levels of engagement.  
New marketers know that podcasts are the new blogs, even though they’re not new and Seth Godin worked this out a couple of years ago. They have big followings on LinkedIn and they get enviable engagement. They know how to make this content and use it to market themselves and their clients.  
5. They know audiences don’t care about your company, awards, offices, and sometimes, even the product
There’s a new marketing truism: nobody cares about your company. Instead, people care about what you can do for them, whether that’s at a personal or corporate level. 
Like so much of how new marketing operates, this comes back to content. Content that solves problems, helps the audience and avoids any kind of sell is worth something to the audience. New marketers put this sort of content ahead of anything else – then, once they’ve won the trust and interest of the audience, they can start to talk product, benefits, and features. 
The post The New Breed of Marketers | 5 Attributes That Distinguish New Marketers appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Marketing has changed.  And so have the people doing it. The breed of new marketers is under 40, successful and experienced – they’ve worked for big corporations and small businesses, and now they’re running their own mini-agencies.
One thing connects them all: they believe marketing is not about selling. Instead, it’s about helping audiences. 
1. They talk like humans, not like businesses
The way marketers communicate with each other, other businesses and even their audiences often sound like unintelligible nonsense. It’s a sure-fire method of distancing themselves from everyone else, even if that’s not the idea. The new marketers use natural language, not business language. They’re easy to understand and they don’t use business-speak to dress up a dull concept. They use creative who share the same values, so the content they make is accessible.
2. They know that many agencies are slow, unimaginative, and expensive
Big agencies have big power. Some do great work. Some win awards. But many are more interested in numbers than results. They’re inefficient, tend to tell the client what they want to hear, and charge huge amounts. 
New marketers don’t work like this. They have small teams, in small offices – if they have an office at all – so the client isn’t paying for their fancy building with its accompanying rent. 
They work quickly and push boundaries – but they listen to the client. And if something isn’t going to work, they’ll say so. 
3. They don’t care about performance marketing
It’s not purely about the numbers. Being able to measure something (leads, open rates, click-throughs) doesn’t make it a success – it just means you can measure it. Instead, there’s a movement towards intuitive marketing, when you’re delivering content through the channels you know your audience responds to.
These are people who believe marketing is about more than generating leads for sales. In fact, they believe marketing is about anything other than generating leads for sales. Especially creating content and then using it. For them, marketing and content is about helping your audience
4. They put their efforts into podcasts, LinkedIn and social media
Podcasts are not exactly new. Neither’s LinkedIn. But does your company have a successful podcast? Do you get enviable engagement on LinkedIn? Or is it more like a couple of comments and a handful of likes? 
Given the time we’ve had to get to grips with these channels and formats, you’d think brands and companies would be doing a better job of using them as a marketing tool. But they’re not. Despite often having huge numbers of followers, many big corporates’ LinkedIn accounts get very low levels of engagement.  
New marketers know that podcasts are the new blogs, even though they’re not new and Seth Godin worked this out a couple of years ago. They have big followings on LinkedIn and they get enviable engagement. They know how to make this content and use it to market themselves and their clients.  
5. They know audiences don’t care about your company, awards, offices, and sometimes, even the product
There’s a new marketing truism: nobody cares about your company. Instead, people care about what you can do for them, whether that’s at a personal or corporate level. 
Like so much of how new marketing operates, this comes back to content. Content that solves problems, helps the audience and avoids any kind of sell is worth something to the audience. New marketers put this sort of content ahead of anything else – then, once they’ve won the trust and interest of the audience, they can start to talk product, benefits, and features. 
The post The New Breed of Marketers | 5 Attributes That Distinguish New Marketers appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.