Both Marketo and Pardot have their strengths, especially when integrated with CRM systems like Salesforce, but for growing B2B SaaS companies, the real question isn’t just which one is better—but whether either is built for the future.

Pardot, now branded as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, has been a go-to choice for businesses, particularly those already using Salesforce CRM. However, many B2B SaaS companies are finding that Pardot doesn’t quite keep up with their marketing automation needs.

Marketo, like other marketing automation vendors, historically has priced on the number of contacts/leads a customer puts into Marketo’s “contact database” plus any add-on modules a customer may purchase such as ABM or content personalization. However, since Adobe purchased Marketo in 2018, additional pricing mechanisms have been introduced.

HubSpot has long been a popular marketing automation solution, especially for smaller businesses. It definitely has a smooth user experience, a wealth of resource libraries, and decent features for a free or starter plan. However...

Marketo has long been a staple in marketing automation for B2B SaaS companies, but it’s increasingly becoming outdated and overpriced. Many businesses are finding themselves frustrated by escalating costs and features that no longer meet their needs.

The SiriusDecisions Waterfall was quite popular because it addressed a key challenge for businesses at the time. But as the market evolved, so did the needs of B2B companies—and this is where the limitations of the demand waterfall model began to show.

Whether you’re focused on product-led initiatives, refining your ABM strategies, or fine-tuning your demand gen engine, subscribing to these newsletters will equip you with the insights needed to succeed in the fast-moving SaaS world.

Go-to-market-focused events may be rare, but the ones listed above pack a punch. From practical workshops to networking with industry leaders, these conferences offer unique insights into solving your biggest GTM challenges.

Whether you're a seasoned go-to-market (GTM) specialist or transitioning to a product-led approach, the right newsletters can provide the edge you need.

Sales-focused events may be plentiful, but the ones listed above offer unparalleled value. From practical workshops to networking with top-tier sales professionals, these conferences provide unique insights into addressing your biggest sales challenges.

With more B2B SaaS companies looking at PLG to run alongside their sales-led motion, Marketing Ops have to keep up with the new ways of doing business. Diving deeper into PLG and implementing PLG strategies matters to MOPs professionals now more than ever.

As 2025 approaches, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are gearing up for a year filled with opportunities after a period of widespread marketing budget cuts. The following conferences are designed to help CMOs sharpen their strategies, explore the latest marketing technologies, and connect with peers and industry leaders.

Whether you’re looking to deepen your expertise in product-led growth, enhance your skills in demand generation, explore the latest advancements in AI, seeking networking opportunities, or inspiration from industry leaders, these events are not to be missed.

Pardot launched in 2007 and quickly establish itself as a leader in the emerging B2B marketing automation category. In 2012, ExactTarget acquired Pardot for $95M. The next year Salesforce acquired ExactTarget and with it, Pardot.

GTM Operations has become essential, especially in SaaS, for driving GTM strategy and ensuring that all departments work cohesively towards common goals. The concept of GTM Ops has evolved alongside the increasing complexity of go-to-market strategies.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of our newest feature - web tracking via Inflection’s own .js tracking. Inflection users can now get insights and operationalize the insights on their prospects’ and customers’ web activity to tailor warm outbound, nurture campaigns, enhance lead scoring, and more. 

While traditional marketing often focuses on generating a high volume of leads, the real game-changer lies in understanding how users engage with your product.

When requesting product data from other teams, expect objections about security, costs, technical issues, and more. Marketing can address these with clear proposals, real-time data benefits, and modern tools.

When we are just interacting with prospects, data like website activity, CRM / enrichment, etc., is the required data set to do marketing well. However, a whole different data set is required when interacting with customers/users and that is anchored by product activity.

Marketing’s access to product data is important to engage leads, users, and customers effectively. Marketing and Product collaboration is the only way to do it right.

We need to care about aligning marketing and product teams as much as we do about marketing and sales alignment.

We are thrilled to announce a powerful enhancement to Inflection's capabilities: the addition of user and org properties in our dynamic list feature. Now, you can add a deeper level of personalization to your journeys with user and organizational properties too.

We’re super excited to announce that Inflection now supports Salesforce Campaigns. If you are a marketer using Salesforce Campaigns this integration is set to level-up the way you manage, track, and optimize your marketing efforts.

In this article, we'll explore some of the best practices for leveraging Formstack with Inflection to enhance your marketing automation capabilities and streamline lead management.

We just published our 2024 edition of the product-led go-to-market (PLGTM) vendor landscape and it has already created a lot of buzz in the PLGTM space. This year we have a whopping 196% growth in the number of vendors from our first edition (PLG Vendor Landscape 2021), which indicates the increasing popularity of product-led growth go-to-market approaches among SaaS companies.

Marketing to developers is a bit like cooking for a food critic – you've got to get it just right. It may not be an entirely new recipe but you need to make some tweaks to be able to market to developers successfully. You've got to understand their language, their needs, and their quirks.

Cross-selling is basically hunting for new business. While the customer marketing, CSM, and Account Manager can work on upselling, cross-selling requires different sales motion because of the inherent challenges.

A traditionally sales-led business has a lot to make a lot of changes. A pricing strategy revamp is one of those big pieces to move while adopting a product-led motion.

It’s not an easy process to transition to product-led GTM but, you can start by making product adoption your primary goal.

In this article, we'll demystify the concept of Product-Led Growth and provide a roadmap for sales-led companies looking to make the transition.

Inflection can now integrate directly with Formstack and Webflow, improving your ability to communicate both leads and product users/customers from the same place.

Here's the bottom line for B2B SaaS companies: it's not just Gmail's personal accounts feeling the impact—it's a call to action for all of us. The evolution in Gmail's sender guidelines demands proactive measures to ensure seamless operations and sustained success.

Successful onboarding isn't a one-size-fits-all deal. It's like tailoring the road trip according to the terrainIn this article, we will take you through different onboarding journey templates you can customize and make your own version of.‍

A reverse trial in SaaS is when customers get full access to a product for a limited time, after the trial, customers choose a paid plan to continue using the product’s paid version or downgrade to a free version.

Focusing on smaller deals upfront can be the key to rapid growth in this economy. It's not about downsizing your clientele; it's about closing smaller deals initially within your ideal customer profile and then expanding.

Ever been lost in a maze of folders, desperately trying to find that one important campaign? We get it, we’ve been there too. So, we decided to do something about it. We’re thrilled to announce a better way to organize marketing campaigns using tags, NOT folders.

If you are struggling with low product adoption and high churn rates, the solution becomes clear: a thorough overhaul of your onboarding experience is the key to revitalizing your customer base.

Ramli John, the author of the Product-Led Onboarding book, and content Director at Appcues, drew parallels between Super Mario Kart and product adoption during his talk at the PLGTM 2023 sessions. Here’s what I learned from his talk.

Welcome emails are so much more than just warm gestures; they are strategic tools that can influence user engagement, retention, and conversion rates. Let's delve into the world of Welcome emails.

SaaS onboarding email flow varies based on user needs and product complexity. A tailored onboarding experience, be it for a simple tool or detailed roadmap for a complex product, ensures users reach their goals. So, how do you build the best SaaS onboarding flow?

Integrating a data warehouse like Google BigQuery with a marketing automation tool like HubSpot can decode not only customer behavior but also guide your product-led growth strategy with unparalleled clarity.

In this blog post, we will dive into the intricacies of connecting Amazon Redshift, a powerful data warehousing solution, with HubSpot, a leading marketing automation platform.

In this blog post, we will describe how to connect Snowflake, a very popular data warehouse used by many product-led growth companies, and HubSpot, a popular marketing automation tool.

Product-led growth loops represent the mechanisms around the product that encourage users to take specific actions that lead to more users adopting the product. Growth loops can take various forms, such as referral programs, virality features, or network effects. 

When you connect Segment, a powerful data management platform, with HubSpot marketing automation you're essentially creating a bridge between your product data and your marketing strategy. In this blog post, we’ll detail the steps to connect Segment to HubSpot.

Growth marketing is a marketing approach focused on fostering strong connections with customers, cultivating loyalty, and nurturing a lasting bond between the brand and its consumers ultimately leading to long-term sustainable growth. 

Account-based marketing is key to unlocking enterprise pipeline potential. Adding an ABM motion in a product-led growth company requires a mind shift and strategy change. In this post, we are going to share how you can drive more enterprise pipeline via ABM at a product-led company.

We delved into the intricacies of onboarding, exploring strategies that extend far beyond the traditional sign-up process using psychological principles in this blog post.

We just published our 2023 edition of the product-led go-to-market (PLGTM) vendor landscape for 2023 and it has attracted many more views than the last year’s edition. We believe it’s mainly because of the whopping 178% growth in the number of vendors from our first edition (PLG Vendor Landscape 2021) and the increasing popularity of product-led growth among SaaS companies. 

Onboarding red flags can be your roadmaps to improvement. If you are designing an onboarding experience from scratch, it’s useful to have these points at the back of your mind as you build and launch.

Naturally, every SaaS business wants to build a better product onboarding experience. But, where are we falling short?

Like most early-stage startups, we built an onboarding experience from scratch with limited feedback while our product is still evolving. In this article, we will take you through our journey of switching from a time-based to product activity-based onboarding approach at Inflection.io.

Inflection.io secured a spotlight position in The 2023 Emerging Tech Report by GTM Partners, a recognition shared with just 14 other vendors out of 100 applicants.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) puts the product experience front and center, aiming to win customers over through the product's own merit. But like any hot topic, myths have popped up around it. Today, we're here to uncover the reality behind onboarding myths in PLG companies.

What does an ideal onboarding journey look like? There is no one answer to this question. The ideal onboarding journey looks a bit different for everyone. Onboarding experiences, when done right, can be both simple and the best possible introduction to a product or service.

If you already have a product onboarding process in place, it is high time to evaluate and make changes to positively impact your business. Here are 15 proven best practices for product onboarding.

Companies collect heaps of data directly and indirectly from their customers every day. This data ideally should help the stakeholders make business decisions. Reverse ETL helps us break data silos and leverage data by pushing it to SaaS applications where it makes more sense.

There are some very effective best practices to revolutionize onboarding at a PLG company. But, the biggest lever a PLG company can pull to make their onboarding more efficient and successful is ‘personalization’.

One of the leading causes of customer churn is poor onboarding. Onboarding is your chance to show off the value of your product and leave a lasting impression on users. Getting onboarding right also establishes trust and credibility, making users feel confident in achieving their goals with your product. So, how not to suck at onboarding?

According to Google Trends, CS Ops is growing at a faster pace than marketing operations. Why are companies like Jasper, Miro, 6sense, and Gong have all recognized the value of CS Ops and have incorporated it into their team?

Product-led growth is implemented differently by each company. We wanted to know how successful PLG companies are doing it and surveyed a bunch of them to gather insights. Here are my top 5 learnings from The State of Product-Led Growth 2023 report.

Inflection brings you the never-before-seen journey builder that is going to help you execute the most effective customer and prospect journeys, effortlessly. You can now automate complex, multi-stage journeys at scale, all powered by real-time product usage data.

We are excited to introduce Product Data Explorer to our platform to help our customers easily understand and manage product events. This new feature enables non-technical teams at product-led companies to easily see all available product events in one place with the option to enable and disable them as required. 

We are thrilled to announce a significant enhancement to Inflection - the introduction of Salesforce Accounts support. This exciting new feature allows seamless integration between Inflection and Salesforce, enabling automatic synchronization of Account objects and associated fields and the ability to use Account data in building audiences and personalization. 

Product-led growth. Never has a term seemed so clear, yet meant so many different things to different people. Through 100s of conversations with companies doing product-led growth, I've come to the conclusion that there are 3 different maturities. Product led offer, motion, and company.

Not only does PLG offer great economics on that user/customer, often with fantastic NRR results, but every user/customer ALSO helps you win more accounts. This blog talks about how PLG can give you compounding returns.

In this blog post, we'll delve into the nuances of acquisition-led versus customer-led growth, explore the potential of "product-led" strategies, and discuss the significance of net revenue retention (NRR) as a key metric for sustained business growth.

Figuring out the product packaging is as important as figuring out the right pricing strategy. In this blog post, we are going to discuss two important product packaging strategies that are popularly used with a usage-based pricing model.

We sat down with our partners and PLG experts in producing The State of PLG Report 2023 to comprehend the report stats and the ground reality of running a successful PLG motion. This blogpost summarizes the discussion.

We’re now introducing the support for manual scoring for marketing qualified leads (MQLs), product qualified leads (PQLs), and product qualified accounts (PQAs) on our platform. This functionality lets our users set up MQL, PQL, and PQA scoring seamlessly and efficiently and then take action to create more MQLs, PQLs, and PQAs.

Product-led companies can now create highly engaging campaigns for their audiences and personalized communications, from onboarding to automated QBRs, to revenue & pipeline expansion with data directly from BigQuery.

Customer-led growth (CLG) is a strategy that prioritizes customer insights to guide growth. In this growth model, the focus is on delivering an amazing customer experience and scaling up brand advocates. By prioritizing the customer experience and building long-term relationships with your customers, you can drive sustainable growth and differentiate yourself from the competition.

The Inflection marketing team needed to learn Segment. Like many of our customers, Segment is tracking product actions (logics, features customers are using, etc). We needed to use this data in campaigns - onboarding, adoption, free trial flows, retention.

In this article, we will explore the importance of PLG in driving sustainable growth and some of the best examples of companies that have successfully implemented this strategy. 

Product-led sales has emerged as a subcategory of selection and prioritization, specifically built for and targeting the sales team at product-led companies.

Insights derived from Amplitude can be actionable in more ways than product improvement. Connecting a marketing automation platform is one of the most popular integrations to use the power of product intelligence to drive growth in PLG businesses. This article details the process of data sync between Amplitude and the popular marketing automation tool, Hubspot.

Aaron Bird, CEO and co-founder of Inflection.io (former VP of Product Adobe and Marketo) walked us through the best practices for maximizing a PLG motion and 8 email campaigns successful PLG companies are running today that drive more activation, revenue, and pipeline.

Most marketing automation tools, like Marketo, do not recognize product users and they are not aware of the org contexts of product users (they can only handle accounts from Salesforce). That makes it very difficult for PLG companies to properly coordinate and run growth campaigns for these users at Org level and user level.

Branching in campaigns is crucial for personalizing and directing your customers to their own customized paths of product experience. It allows you to tailor your messaging to your audience segments based on their interests, behaviors, and preferences to generate more PQLs/PQAs, convert to paid, or expand the customers. With conditional branching, you can always reach out with the right message at the right time.

We're excited to announce a powerful new feature for our users: the ability to update person fields as an action step in the campaign flow.

Webhooks are a way for one web application to communicate with another application in real time, allowing our customers to greatly extend the capabilities of Inflection. You can use webhooks in Inflection to trigger action through any of the tools in your tech stack that accept webhooks. Let’s unpack a few of several use cases of using webhooks with Inflection.

Inflection is thrilled to announce our bi-directional native integration with Salesforce. With the power of product and CRM data, you can now personalize PLG campaigns like never before as well and push data into Salesforce from Inflection.

Onboarding is a crucial part of any product experience. When done right, it can help your users become familiar with your product quickly, and get the most out of it. In this guide, we'll look at how to create product onboarding campaigns with Adobe Marketo Engage.

Connecting BigQuery and Marketo helps marketers track, analyze, and report leads and contacts better with centralized marketing data. It also opens new gateways to opportunities arising from data integration with other sources like CRM with product analytics.

More than 14,000 businesses use Redshift to get actionable insights from their data. Using the data for launching automated marketing campaigns is at top of the list of use cases powered by Redshift. Redshift users can establish a custom data integration with Marketo to exchange data that powers the marketing campaigns. There are two ways to do that.

The purpose of integrating Marketo with Segment and Marketo is to seamlessly transfer customer data to Marketo in real-time to power marketing automation with the right data. This blog post explains how to establish a connection between Segment and Marketo in detail along with known limitations.

Product-led growth thrives on great product insights. Amplitude is a popular choice for PLG companies to get those insights. This article explains the process of connecting Adobe Marketo with Amplitude, for running PLG comms.

Connecting Salesforce to Intercom is super easy and doesn’t need technical expertise. Managing SFDC leads can also be done directly from the inbox of the Salesforce app. Though Salesforce and Intercom seems like a dream combo, Intercom falls short when it comes to executing personalized communications for PLG use cases. Especially for B2B companies.

The goal behind connecting Snowflake and Marketo would be to use actionable raw data to fire up personalized campaigns to communicate with your customers at scale. The integration would also help in analyzing and taking data-driven decisions in marketing.

By integrating Salesforce and Customer.io, businesses want to streamline their communication processes and gain valuable insights into customer behavior. But, the absence of native integration between the platforms raises a set of challenges for Salesforce users planning to personalize communication at scale and at a fast pace.

Both Marketo and Outreach became the leaders in their respective eras by recognizing the fact that one-size-fits-all is not acceptable and enabled automated and tailored experiences with a different GTM. The same winning formula applies to the new era we are in. Curating a unique product experience at scale for the users through automation and personalization is the way to win in the product-led era.

This simple guide helps you build your first product onboarding emails and campaigns in HubSpot. 

The buying process is easy in PLG businesses. With the transactional ease comes the abandoned cart problem commonly faced by consumer businesses. Abandoned cart emails are popular in B2C because of their success rate and the same best practices can be applied for better conversion rates in PLG businesses too.

Growth automation helps product-led companies run both ENT and PLG motions out of one system to get a much more comprehensive view of the prospects and customers.

When it comes to upgrades, oftentimes your user is not the decision maker or buyer. And, the buyer need not be an active user. Upselling and cross-selling campaigns crafted with the right product activity and CRM data can be instrumental in reaching out to the right customer and gaining expansion revenue.

Product qualified accounts are an aggregation of metrics collected about the company compared to threshold criteria.PQAs are commonly used in B2B product-led growth (PLG) companies to understand buying readiness of an account.

Think of how you got started on Slack. Word of mouth is not a cliché but an effective growth strategy to compound user acquisition in PLG. How often do your best customers and product champions organically share their amazing product experience with their network purely out of delight?

A reactivation strategy should be part of every PLG company’s growth strategy to ensure that churn is not permanent. A tailored product-led reactivation campaign helps you win back the best customers and maintain a healthy bottom line.

Recap emails can be the ultimate tool to drive product engagement for a product-led growth (PLG) company. Reminding users of the value they are getting with the product is another touchpoint to improve retention and reduce churn.

Personalized and product-led milestone emails delivered at the right time are one of the best ways to mitigate activity churn. Show them appreciation, give them reasons to stick with your product, help them at tricky turns, and celebrate their wins. You can earn their loyalty on top of slaying churn.