The B2C customer compares in seconds and expects immediacy. And both expect the same thing: that the brand in front of them knows who they are and what they need, whether by email, WhatsApp or in a conversation with a salesperson.
Account Engagement, the Pardot we have always known, has been the foundation of B2B marketing on Salesforce for years, and it has done that job very well. It remains supported, with no end date. But AI, unified data and new channels are arriving in Marketing Cloud Next, a platform designed for B2B and B2C at the same time. That is why more and more teams are asking when to make the move, rather than whether to make it, especially those that sell to both businesses and consumers.
What Marketing Cloud Next adds
Account Engagement was built for marketing centred on email and the individual lead. Marketing Cloud Next, by contrast, is built on the Salesforce platform, with Data 360 as the database and Agentforce as the AI layer. That translates into three advantages:
- More channels: SMS and WhatsApp, as well as email.
- More context: marketing, sales, service and the web in a single customer profile.
- More intelligence: AI agents that work from that complete view.
And moving to Next does not require a leap into the unknown. It can run alongside Account Engagement, reusing your emails and landing pages and keeping your data and segments connected. That way you can move forward in stages, starting with what adds the most value.
What AI changes in B2B
With Next, an agent can respond to and qualify incoming leads at any time and pass the ones that are ready to sales, with the context already summarised. The AI also cross-references the activity of everyone in an account with their opportunities and support cases, to detect which companies are genuinely on the move.
It also improves relevance. Each person on the buying committee receives the message and the channel that make sense for them, and a campaign can start from a simple brief in natural language. All of this happens in Next, because that is where the AI has the complete view of the customer.
What if you also sell to consumers?
Many companies are not only B2B. A manufacturer sells to distributors and also to the end customer; an insurer works with companies and with individuals. With Account Engagement, B2C often ends up in another tool, with different data and a different team.
Marketing Cloud Next makes it possible to manage B2B and B2C on a single platform: the professional buyer and the end consumer share the same database in Data 360, the same AI and the same channels. You gain a single view of each customer, no matter where they come from, and one team can orchestrate both worlds.
How we would approach it at Horizon CX
We start by reviewing your Account Engagement instance and organising the data in Data 360: prospects, leads, contacts, accounts and consent by channel. We then align marketing and sales on what a qualified lead is and launch a pilot in Next, measured in pipeline. With real results, we gradually move new use cases to Next until it becomes the centre of your marketing.
Mistakes we see
- Stopping halfway. Without a plan to keep moving forward, the pilot remains an isolated test.
- Expecting AI to fix the data. With duplicate prospects, AI makes bad decisions faster.
- Leaving sales out of the equation. If the sales team is not involved, they will ignore the leads, however good they are.
Let's talk about your case
The marketing of the coming years, B2B and B2C, will be built on unified data and AI, and the sooner you start, the sooner you will see the results. At Horizon CX we are a Salesforce Summit partner and we help you, transparently, design your path to Marketing Cloud Next without putting at risk what already works for you.
Write to us and we will tell you where we would start in your case.
