“Pardot Me? We Need That AND Salesforce?”

We get this question a LOT and it’s understandable. 

Salesforce remains the premier CRM and already offers seemingly limitless potential for a business. Add in the constant addition of new features, the AppExchange for magically enhanced functionality and a platform which is top-to-toe customisable, Salesforce would appear to be all you need – along with imagination – to enhance your business. 

But it isn’t. Pardot should also be considered as part of the bigger picture. 

Hear us out. In integrating Pardot’s marketing automation capabilities with Salesforce’s dynamic CRM, what we have are features which create automation for targeting more leads with vastly superior content. This intelligent approach to marketing improves cost-effectiveness, increases customer conversion and – this being one of the major pluses – decreases wasted man-hours. 

Whether or not your business is ready for Pardot depends on how you answer the following.

The four key questions we ask potential clients to determine if Pardot will be of benefit to their business: 

1. How would you grade the quality of your leads? 

Marketing often has specific targets for quantity and quality of leads generated. Sales is measured against hitting revenue goals. Sometimes there are conflicts. 

What Pardot does effectively is bridge the two, supporting the goals and figures of both sides. The platform completely reconfigures the “more is less” approach through which sales receives all leads and wastes time finding the prospects with selling potential. 

Overspending on campaigns to generate substandard leads also becomes a thing of the past with Pardot. Instead, the system aids marketing to nurture leads through ongoing targeted communication to identify highly qualified prospects worthy of your sales departments’ time.   

Using the system’s grading and scoring features, Pardot allows your teams to establish lead quality control. Grading assigns each lead with a grade based on the ideal customer profile, including characteristics like geography, industry, or company size. 

Scoring assesses a value based on a lead’s interest in the product or service. Scores derived from lead engagements like requesting a demo, visiting a certain webpage, opening an email etc. As a result, sales teams gain valuable time for pursuing good leads while marketing narrows their focus to create them. 

2. How do you evaluate campaign performance? 

Typical campaign results include the number of visits, click-through rates, open percentages, and volume of leads generated. These are all good metrics, but something very important is missing from the list – ROI. Pardot, integrated with Salesforce, translates clicks into revenue. 

Prospect tracking starts immediately from the first introduction with a business all the way through to the sale. Because each interaction gets traced, marketers can directly evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign in terms of pipeline growth and revenue. 

3. How effectively are you nurturing your leads? 

It’s important to realise many companies operating without marketing automation send email communication to a prospect distribution list on a predetermined cadence. When operating this way, customised messaging is limited and companies do run the risk of sending meaningless content to qualified individuals. Pardot solves this problem by increasing the value of every send made. 

Many companies without marketing automation send emails to a prospect distribution list on a predetermined cadence. When doing it this way, tailored messaging is limited and companies risk sending content without value to qualified individuals. Pardot fixes this issue by increasing the value of every send. The system intelligently segments databases and sends relevant emails at the right time. Pardot goes beyond off the peg marketing by offering a tailored approach, sending content relevant to the recipient. 

Research shows that good lead nurturing generates more sales leads at a lower cost. According to The Annuitas Group: 

• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases 

• Win rates can improve by as much as 20% on nurtured deals 

• Nurture emails are opened two times more often than one-off emails.

4. Do your marketing and sales teams work together? 

For too long marketing and sales teams have operated in isolation. We’ve always felt this is a mistake. After all, both sides are on the same team and are interdependent on each other to make the business a success and to keep that success going. Integrating Pardot with Salesforce breaks down the communication barriers that have traditionally conspired to divide the teams. 

Marketing gains are slid into the sales cycle through Salesforce. By seeing how and which prospects are engaged, the team can respond with further sales support. On the sales side, the team sees all marketing activities from Pardot – indeed, before every interaction with a potential lead, the salesperson has invaluable marketing data to help drive the conversation. 

In general, adding Pardot to Salesforce brings a great deal of synchronicity and cohesion to the combined work of marketing and sales. The technology creates collective metrics between the teams and unifies thinking around target audiences and benefits from each other and the pipeline. 

To find out more about Pardot, Salesforce and discover how Consleague could help introduce these exciting systems into your business, why not get in touch with one of our Solution Experts and schedule a 30-minute call to discuss the options.

Source: https://galvintech.com/