In the past, B2B marketing and sales teams were often working in isolation. However, technology is unlocking new opportunities to better integrate both teams and build towards a more effective and seamless customer experience.
One of the key challenges is how each can play their key role throughout the conversion cycle while working together and keeping each other updated in pursuing the joint objective: win more customers!
There are a few technology solutions in the market that help address this. Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce Pardot are some good examples. In this article, we will focus on the latter.
Before we look at how to successfully implement a Pardot program, let’s look at some of the benefits and disadvantages of this product.
Everything you need for lead nurturing
One of the biggest advantages of using Salesforce Pardot is the fact that you can design lead nurturing tracks for all stages of the pipeline. You can easily create automated campaigns that allow you to track every step of the customer's conversion process, even from when they initially visit your website and before becoming registered prospects. At any point of the conversion process, the right team can intervene and help the customer move down the next step of the conversion process with the use of progressive profiling and personalization.
Automated campaign process
Apart from creating an easy campaign process, you and your team will also have access to templates for creating landing pages and emails. The sales team can easily reach out to customers as soon as they are engaged and everyone stays updated on where the customer is in the conversion process. Salesforce Pardot also collects information on the customer’s interaction and engagement levels to allow for the sales and marketing teams to better customize each customer’s path for a higher conversion rate. Scores are generated for prospects to help identify customers with a higher conversion rate.
And if you’re already on Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can benefit from its seamless integration. Sales reps can receive their Pardot leads and see Pardot data directly within their Salesforce and can also send Pardot emails from within Salesforce.
How about its disadvantages?
As great as the tool is, we have also noticed some limitations.
Navigating through the Salesforce Pardot’s email builder can be a challenge for those without technical coding knowledge. The email builder feature is not drag-and-drop friendly and while it has a great design flexibility, more complicated designs would require a background in coding. It isn’t the most user friendly to use, especially for team members who might be less tech savvy.
Pricing may be another reason why you want to consider alternative tools. While Pardot is offering an extensive set of features, it may also be a stretch for start-ups or smaller businesses. Pricing starts at $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.
Nevertheless, the advantages of implementing Salesforce Pardot into your company’s operations still outweighs its disadvantages and can bring about significant growth opportunities for your company.
Let’s look at some key strategies to implementing a successful Pardot program.
4 Strategies for a Successful Pardot Programme
Pardot offers several useful features for lead generation or nurturing, so let’s look at strategies to engage these features.
Understand the Business Need
Before integrating Pardot into your campaigns you need to understand your business needs. An understanding of your current processes and how Pardot will fit in seamlessly without too much of a change. An abrupt change in your system may catch your team unawares, so you must also consider training your team to use the tool.
Pay attention to both Lead Grading and Scoring
This is an excellent feature that scores prospects based on the level of activity and engagement. This grade can help you determine the readiness of prospects for more engagement from sales and marketing. Many people new to Pardot don’t pay close attention to both components of this scoring system.
Personalized lead nurturing
After collecting information from prospects using various forms, you can engage them with personalized content such as messages and emails. You must engage your prospects based on personalized data as it can fast track their conversion.
Content, content and… content
The key to a successful Pardot program is having sufficient and relevant content for each of your target audiences at every stage of the funnel. Many companies underestimate this and a significant investment in building up your content marketing capabilities will be key to the success of the program.
Final thoughts
Implementing a marketing automation tool in your company is essential in ensuring sustainable growth through campaign strategies. As one of the more renowned tools available in the market currently, Salesforce Pardot offers various features that make the marketing campaign cycle easy to track. Each team can easily understand when and how they should come into the lead conversion and nurturing process.
Salesforce Pardot can get a little tricky if not implemented properly, so understanding how to implement the tool based on your business use case is a necessary first step to take. If you’re still unsure on how to go about doing this, cmoCre8 has the experience and expertise on Salesforce Pardot to successfully incorporate this tool into your company’s operations.