Salesforce Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that syncs seamlessly with your Salesforce CRM. It is packed with features that allow you to track engagement with your marketing collateral from first touch through to closed deal. Even better, it lets you build completely automated marketing pathways so your marketing team can deliver large scale prospect nurturing efficiently and effectively.
Have you ever wondered just how much monetary value you’re deriving from your social posts? Have you ever wanted to clear your calendar of all those reminders to send the next email in your various nurturing programmes? How about wanting a clear view of what marketing materials lead to sales for your company? Or, let’s face it, as a marketer have you ever wanted to be able to prove exactly how important marketing is to your sales team?
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, if this sounds like you then Pardot will be right up your street. Let’s take a look at the key features that will supercharge your marketing activity…
Salesforce Sync
We work with a lot of clients who use a market leading email application. Let’s call it PostApe. The guaranteed complaint we’ll get about PostApe is that the sync with Salesforce is very basic and doesn’t paint the complete picture they’d like to see in their CRM. This is one place where Pardot can really deliver.
Pardot is a Salesforce native product. You can set it up as a standalone product, or standalone but using your Salesforce login or within Salesforce itself, so you don’t need to switch between applications. You can view the full engagement history from your Pardot prospects against their Lead or Contact record in Salesforce. This activity also links to any Opportunities your sales team is working on with those Contacts so suddenly you can see exactly how much revenue your marketing activities generate. This will let you focus your efforts on the areas your customers respond best to, rather than doing the same old, same old, and hoping for the best.
B2B Marketing Analytics
Pardot has fantastic reporting built in throughout the platform. Whether it’s seeing exactly which elements of an email people engaged with the most, or campaign performance over time, the data is all there at your fingertips. But what if you wanted to take this further…. How about combining marketing and sales data from multiple systems? Perhaps more importantly, how would you like to get an insight into how multiple touches from marketing campaigns influence sales, allowing you to build engagement programs that actively nudge prospects along the sales pipleline?
If you have Salesforce Enterprise, you get the B2B Marketing Analytics add on for free with Pardot. It is built on Salesforce’s phenomenal Analytics platform and provides out-of-the-box dashboards, including the multi-touch attribution one. You can plug in additional data sources, instantly share insights and check it on the go using the mobile app. It’s a fantastic bit of kit.
Campaign Tracking
Pardot logs interactions with your marketing collateral, including web pages, emails and social posts. With its many plug-and-play connectors you can track even more, such as webinar and event attendance. Suddenly, you can go from manually trying to match up your Google Analytics trends into something that tallies with buying behaviour in Salesforce to actually just seeing exactly what each prospect is doing at what point.
The business intelligence this provides will allow you to focus your energies in successful strategies rather than throwing everything at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
Lead Qualification
That old classic from sales teams: “but marketing never give us any good leads!” is no more. Pardot lets you assign a score to prospects based on their interaction with your marketing materials. If you see in your B2B Marketing Analytics dashboards that clicking a link in an email is a key buying behaviour, you can assign it a higher score.
Pardot also grades your prospects on what information you hold about them according to criteria you set. So, if the only people with purchasing power for your product are C-level executives, you can assign them a high grade, and everyone else a lower one.
Combine these two measurements to set thresholds for when to assign someone to sales, making sales happy and your customers even happier.
Engagement Programs
We’ve saved the best for last here – Engagement Programs are one of the most powerful tools within Pardot. This is where you set up your nurturing activities to be 100% automated and free up time to work on additional projects.
Engagement Programs send emails on your behalf at time intervals you specify. You can have a complex pathway that sends different emails depending on whether a recipient clicked a link, opened an email, filled out a form, etc. From a customer point of view it will appear as a personalised series of communications rather than getting lost in the general monthly newsletter noise.
Here in the UK we’ve done a lot of cultural exchange with our nearest neighbours over the centuries. As a result, we tend to automatically pronounce some things with a French inflection. So, is it Par-dot or Par-dough?
Par-dot! Pardot is an American product, not a French one. If you don’t believe us on the pronunciation, give Salesforce a call and they’ll confirm. Alternatively, check out some of the fantastic Pardot videos and trails available over at Trailhead.
Once you buy Pardot, contact us to see how we can help. Our experts not only implement Pardot, but also support it and can create customised training for your team. If you are looking to learn more before you buy, why not start by taking some hands-on training? We’d recommend starting with the Essentials of Pardot for Digital Marketers (PDT101).