What was the best part about using Pardot?
Pardot means 'to market' or 'to sell' in Latvian I l just learned and is a B2B marketing software solution which automates daily tasks which streamlines workflows for sales reps and allows businesses to maximize growth of sales pipelines.
Sales teams are always looking for more strategic ways to nurture leads. Pardot automates this process, providing organizations with the ability to grow their pipelines, generate better leads, and improve their close rates from within Salesforce.com. You can do this with email capability, using custom contact forms and landing pages.
Pardot specializes in lead nurturing which differentiates them in the customer relationship management software market. Other software does this but Pardot makes it their priority. You can use the Pardot tools for creating marketing campaigns, execute them and track the results. It's possible to connect to prospects and customers using paid search, video and webinars.
The lead scoring and real time notifications are great features. Which lets sales reps know when prospects are in buying mode by organizing and prioritizing leads while assigning them to the best sales rep for the deal based on the significance of the lead benchmarked against team performance. Pardot is quite comprehensive with a CRM, email marketing, lead scoring and nurturing along with ROI performance reporting features available.
Pardot will save sales reps time with the amount of automation possible in the account to streamline their workflow. It's quite an organized dashboard. Fairly easy and straightforward to begin using. I like the ability to do so much in my sales pipeline using a single dashboard like assigning leads, sending bulk email, and creating contact forms or landing pages for pay per click advertising campaigns.
The email marketing functionality is solid including the drip email feature, which allows users to automatically send a follow up series of email to prospects saving time from doing this manually. It's great to utilize the email tracking also to learn who is opening email, when prospects are opening email, which are the most engaged and so on. This enables reps to prioritize their time and follow up with the best leads first. Pardot integrates with GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting and SalesForce of course as it is a SalesForce owned company.
What would you change about your experience with Pardot?
The user interface is quite intuitive to use and would take one only days to grow accustomed to using. It would take an entire team substantial time to implement Pardot but would be well worth it for the ROI possibilities. The advanced features may seem overwhelming at first if you've not setup this type of software for your company before. I noticed a few redundancies in the UI. For example, when you begin a process and get to the field which asks for a campaign you must exit this screen and enter another to do so. I believe greater use of inline editing may resolve this and other situations like it easily. The reporting is quite extensive but may not be the customizable enough for certain types of companies with specific criteria required. The filter and search functionality customization options could be improved. I think they could find a market for a certification training program for Pardot which I could not find currently.
Overall Feedback
The advanced workflows possible to create using Pardot could overwhelm initially but I feel would become very familiar with time. It's not the most comprehensive, nor the most cost effective platform on the market. But with it's focus on lead scoring and lead nurturing together with a CRM and email marketing integration Pardot provides a solution unique in the market. I have no doubt Pardot would improve communication and bottom line of companies willing to implement this system into their daily pipeline. It's very expensive with additional paid components available such as SalesForce Engage, so all together as long as the end justifies the means it is worth checking to learn if it's the best long term solution for your business.