What is Pardot and why is it useful?

But before we look at the best practices of Pardot implementation with Salesforce, let’s put some clarity into notions. Pardot is B2B marketing automation by Salesforce which allows businesses to automate marketing operations and deliver results, faster than ever before.

CloudIdeas experts admit time-saving benefit as the number one reason to use Pardot. The reason being that it allows to automate the whole sales and marketing process from lead generation to customer retention. It’s a great platform to set up customer communication with your company keeping track of what pages they visit, what emails they open and what videos they watch. To discover more, see how a customer of Real Consulting, Bewotec is using Pardot for their marketing activities.

We took a closer look at several Pardot implementation practices. Read about them below:

What are the 4 main Pardot implementation best practices?

1. Set the objectives

Implementing Pardot can feel quite painful if you don’t have a definite vision of your objectives.

Do not underestimate how marketing automation can benefit not only to your marketing activities but also to sales and service funnel.

Review all the Pardot solutions and decide on something that will work specifically for your business.

Ask yourself a question: how do you want to nurture your prospects?

Do you need them to go through a long sales pipeline?

Or was your ultimate objective to generate new leads through newsletter, blog, or social media tools?

In any sport, you need to know where the goal is, how to score and what constitutes a win.

2. Plan appropriately

Pardot offers a plenty of marketing automation and Salesforce integration features, but it does not hasten all the process much. Begin with making up an appropriate planning, and instead of implementing all the possible changes, go with a basic functionality and enhance it further step by step.

It enables your team to get used to the new configuration, to test it in a proper way, and provide a thorough training not overloading the minds of your people.

Cloudideas suggests coordinating your IT and sales departments with marketing. This is because a new solution requires the involvement of all of the above participants to make sure the process goes according to a timeline.

Double-check the information in your Salesforce ecosystem, starting from the Leads to be up-to-date and accurate to the fields of Contact information to be consistent.

If you are deploying Pardot simultaneously with the Salesforce organization, it is a great opportunity to map both Pardot and Salesforce to your business pipeline at the same time.

3. Synchronize smoothly

After all the planning is done you can launch the synchronization process.

As mentioned above, almost half of your marketing automation success is in smooth alignment and coordinated work of all the departments involved. That’s why marketing reps should share all the data on leads and content they create with the sales department and vice versa.

Only with common effort you ensure that you will not lose any information after Pardot is implemented. Don’t be afraid to request any missing data which can be improved or set up in a more efficient way with Pardot.

Besides interdependence of the marketing and sales team, you should also consider your IT department. If your Pardot and Salesforce admin is not the same person, it becomes especially vital. For example what if you want to sync only a part of leads from Salesforce to Pardot?

There can be a situation where one other department is involved – HR. Say, you need to synchronise your sales & marketing leads leaving out employee prospects existing in lead records. You can even use Pardot to source the best candidates for your company.

4. Maintain and enhance

Going back to the benefit of saving time, it’s worth taking some actions to make sure you use this advantage to the fullest.

1. Proceed with sales and marketing team alignment and try Salesforce engage to enable both of your teams to run marketing campaigns and exchange the necessary data.
2. Enhance your reporting to review the progress and build a better way to increase your ROI.
3. Grade existing profiles to provide effective communication with customers and focus on the key prospects.
4. Use Tags to become and stay organized. Create tags manually, use table action, automation rule, completion action, or do it while importing data. Get the work done and benefit from having a picture of the best content, most responsive leads and properly filtered instances!

Questions?

It goes without saying that Pardot implementation is accompanied by tons of questions which arise at each every stage of the whole process. The Pardot Marketing Automation Group is the answer. You can connect with other users, admins and even Pardot product managers. They will consult you on how the solution should work and, in their turn, will be happy to hear from you and use this feedback for the further improvements.

If you have read this article and still in two minds about Pardot implementation, this may be because of the complexity of your Salesforce instances. Cloudideas have dealt with cases where wrong permissioning or inappropriate  engagement of the departments created reasonable delays in Pardot+Salesforce deployment.

To avoid this, remember that  the more complex your Salesforce ecosystem is, the better chances of successful Pardot implementation would be with an expert implementation partner.