Dive Brief:

• Pardot, Salesforce's marketing automation solution, tripled its customer acquisitions last month by adding 1,128 new customers compared to the average 200-400 a month. 
• When factoring in customer loses, Pardot still comes in ahead of competitors HubSpot and Marketo in net acquisitions — the number brought in minus customers lost.  
• Pardot lost only 104 customers last month. 

Dive Insight: 

Most marketing automation providers offer a free trial, so the loss of customers is a very important number for companies in the market to buy. It's plenty easy to bring in a large number of customers in a month, but then lose a large amount that same month from those ending their free trial. The fact that Pardot was able to grow sales by nearly triple and then retain so many is impressive. Companies in the market to buy should pay attention to the net number of customers when considering. That being said, this was just one month. A more long-term view of data will tell if it was simply an outlier.