We Bought Pardot, Now What?

Pardot is a marketing automation system that enables marketing teams to attract, convert, and retain customers. It works quite similar to the b2b lead generation services, which is what the top brass company prefer. Pardot is comprised of a variety of automation power tools including automation rules, completion actions, and engagement campaigns. People are stored in the Pardot database are termed prospects. In order to be created in Pardot each prospect must have an email address.   

Pardot works and is integrated with the majority of paid advertising platforms including Google Adwords. This is great because it allows you to track the ROI of your Google Adwords campaigns. Pardot pulls in both the cost information from Adwords and the revenue information from Salesforce to give a complete picture of marketing performance.

The heart of Pardot is it's advanced email marketing and lead scoring capabilities, and it's robust CRM integration with Salesforce. Pardot recently released Engagement Studio which allows you to craft personalized prospect journey down the funnel to become a customer. Feeding these journeys are different lists of prospects you can slice-and-dice in Pardot, with its advanced demographic capabilities.

Below is a video for Pardot Salesforce Engage, a tool that gives sales users the power of Pardot inside of Salesforce. With this tool, marketing can create pre-approved templates (and lock them down, if desired) and expose these to sales users. This functionality can be used in place of the standard Salesforce email templates. The benefit to using Engage is the ability to track if an email has been opened or clicked. In addition, you can receive alerts for your Leads or Contacts on your desktop or mobile device, and can also score the prospects based on these emails.

The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is really tight and extends beyond Engage. Sales people can view marketing activities actions taken by prospects from within Salesforce. In addition, marketing can feed the sales team new leads and leverage Salesforce assignment rules or round robin packages to assign out new prospects by state, region, or product line (or a combination of both).

In summary, Pardot is an amazing lead generation and nurturing tool for marketing departments, and now extends even further to sales departments with the Salesforce Engage.