We have a simple premise for you: If you have not implemented any sort of Pardot integration services into your marketing process, you might as well tell your sales team they can go home after lunch. It’s basically the same thing.
Humor us for a moment and picture this:
Your website is humming. Your marketing campaigns are pulling in leads left and right. And yet…your sales team is struggling to close business quickly.
Why is that?
If you are like the majority of companies, your sales team does not have the data it needs to prioritize prospects. In other words — they are WASTING THEIR TIME, because your website and marketing efforts are not delivering hot prospects to them when they are hot.
Instead, your sales team is spending hours nurturing prospects, educating them on your products and services. Frankly, that’s not what you are paying them for—that’s marketing’s job. Your sales team is there to close the deal. To convert the interested parties into paying customers.
So who should be doing this grueling job? Nobody. Or rather, Pardot.
What is Pardot?
Pardot provides a multi-touch automated marketing solution, allowing you to tailor communications to prospects at different stages in the buying process, based on their interactions with your company.
Did you see the part where we wrote “automated”?
That’s right. Automated marketing. So your sales team can focus on prospects that have already been primed, that just need that final push to convert.
Now you may be thinking, but, automated, that is so impersonal. And you would be right—if it were ten years ago. But that’s the magic of Pardot. It’s personalized, customized automation. It’s marketing automation that feels like the attention and responsiveness of your sales team.
Specifically, Pardot marketing integration allows you to:
- Create custom journeys for prospects based on your sales cycle and their responses
- Design and deploy beautiful, impactful email templates scheduled for key milestones in the buying process
- Customize lead capture forms to enhance landing pages and marketing campaigns
- In-depth customer tracking and profiling, building data over time, across multiple interactions
- Tracking engagement patterns and history in real time, alerting sales team to flagged behaviors
- Detailed ranking system of most likely conversion prospects, based on interaction history
- Fully-transparent analysis and reporting of marketing effectiveness and lead behavior
Sounds pretty awesome, right?
So what’s the best way to implement Pardot in your business?
Benefits of Integrating Pardot into Your Sales and Marketing
The 3 Biggest Reasons to Use Pardot
Need more incentive? Here are three of the most useful features of Pardot and how they can help your business.
1. Leads
This is Pardot’s bread and butter.
Here are some compelling stats for you:
- More Opportunity! Nurtured leads average 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads. (DemandGen Report)
- Better ROI! Companies proficient in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)
- Larger Purchases! Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group)
- Increased Revenue! Companies using automated lead management experience 10% or greater increase in revenue within 6-9 months. (Gartner Research)
So, let’s assume for a moment, that you have plenty of cold to lukewarm leads. Marketing is doing its job and letting people know about your product, people are looking at your site, some are even downloading your downloadables. Stuff’s cooking. Now, Sales needs to close.
But, how to prioritize?
It is a waste of your rep’s time to focus on leads in the early stage of your purchasing process. Or someone who hasn’t engaged with any of your materials in weeks. Especially when you have some leads that are actively researching and looking to make a decision NOW.
Your team needs help knowing who to call first.
Pardot simplifies this. Powering your marketing efforts – and connected with your CRM – Pardot develops progressive prospect profiling in real time. So you can know the engagement history of every individual client, while predicting future action.
Before they reach your sales team, leads have been both graded and scored. What’s the difference?
Lead Grading
Think of lead grading as a way to prequalify prospects. Pardot assigns grades to each prospect, ranking their potential based on demographic factors such as:
- Job Title
- Industry
- Company Size
- Location
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a more behavioral ranking, examining which leads have engaged in the most promising behavior and are more ready to buy. Actions such as:
- Downloads
- Email Clicks
- Page Views
- Site Searches
Using this tag-team of lead grading and lead scoring, your sales team just got handed the answers to the test in advance. Pardot helps them know who to call and when, increasing their chances of closing the sale significantly.
2. Landing Pages
First of all, you know you should not be driving leads to your homepage, right? Right!?
You are using landing pages for your marketing campaigns, yes?
Great.
Now that that is settled, we can talk landing pages. There are a lot of great landing page options out there (Unbounce, LeadPages). And honestly, the fact that you are using any of them already is huge. But here’s why you might want to go with Pardot.
Efficiency
First of all, if you are using Pardot for its marketing automation or lead tracking, it’s a no brainer. Save your time and money and leverage all that Pardot has to offer, rather than using multiple redundant services. It’s not a sexy reason, but your bottom line will appreciate it.
Reporting
Secondly, Pardot landing pages are HOOKED UP. Seriously. Every time you set up a new landing page in Pardot, you assign it to a specific marketing campaign. This allows you to record exactly how you acquired every lead.
So, down the line, when that lead converts, you can report that your Facebook campaign in March, with the video of the kittens, focused on new color options drove your sale.
Since it is completely embedded in your sales efforts, reporting is not only simple, but able to record marketing results over the lifetime of a client, rather than just during the length of a campaign.
Templates
Pardot comes prebuilt with a selection of landing page templates that you can use, making it easy for anyone to get started quickly and easily. Small companies that don’t have internal web development teams can pick a template, populate it, change some colors, add a logo and some pictures and BOOM. Ready to go. Your intern could do it.
If these premade templates are not flexible enough for you, Pardot has an answer to that. Build your own custom template. Pardot offers complete design control. So, for more advanced needs, build a template to suit your exact specifications. Then, you can replicate it and use it to create any landing page you want going forward.
3. Email Marketing
This is a biggie. When you hear marketing automation, you instantly think of email. Every company out there already has some sort of email blasting service, but Pardot is different.
Pardot emails are easy to build and blast in beautiful email templates that can be customized to your branding requirements. You can set up A/B testing easily. View how your email text and images appear on all mobile devices.
But almost all of the leading email service providers can do that. Here is where Pardot stands above and beyond.
Through seamless integration with your CRM (Salesforce or other), you can segment your email lists in countless ways.
- Segment out only the top-performing (highest scoring) prospects and deliver emails from their assigned sales rep
- Develop targeted pre- and post-event messaging for in person or virtual events, including registrants and on-site leads. Follow up with valuable content and downloadables.
- Build lists based on location in sales cycle and target more educational messaging to early interest prospects and more urgent messaging to those closer to purchase.
- Create product interest-based funnels. For example, segment out people that have purchased tents in the past and deliver emails focused on other camping or outdoor merchandise.
- Check in with cold leads or lost customers with marketing messaging specifically tailored to re-engage them with your brand.
- Make exceptions easily, so you don’t badger customers who have already performed specific actions
- Send behavior based emails, such as a follow up to someone who spent time viewing your landing page but did not convert. Or someone who downloaded a brochure. Or email people who abandoned their shopping cart with a discount code personalized to their potential purchases.
Pardot Integration Services
Pardot is truly one of the most powerful tools a business of any size can utilize. As a marketing automation platform, powered by the #1 CRM solution, Salesforce, Pardot offers some truly stunning capabilities, as seen above. So you are convinced. You want it.
Now, how do you start using it?
Talk to a company that specializes in Pardot integration services (like CMDS, ahem). Unlike many companies out there, CMDS offers both marketing strategy and web development services. This is an important qualification.
Because Pardot is not just something you can install and expect results. You need a strategy.
As a Pardot integration services expert , companies like CMDS will review your existing marketing efforts, as well as talk through what you want to be doing in the future. Based on an initial strategy session, your Pardot integrator should make recommendations on how to implement Pardot into your current strategy, as well as suggest opportunities you may not have considered.
In addition, a Pardot integration company can ensure that all technical and design best practices are followed. Best of all, they can get you up and running faster–and train you–so you benefit from the full functionality that Pardot has to offer.
When choosing to set Pardot up yourself or hire a Pardot integration service, keep in mind some of the technical hurdles.
Pardot in Technical Terms
Consulting with a web development company experienced in Pardot integration services, like CMDS, will ensure that Pardot is seamlessly incorporated into your sales funnel. Key things to keep in mind when looking for a Pardot integration team:
- Integrate Pardot with Google Analytics
- Add Pardot tracking script to website (Pardot JavaScript tag)
- Embed Pardot forms on website
- Integrate widgets with Pardot
- Ensuring GDPR compliance with Pardot
- Implementing Pardot forms with and without i-frame
- Setting up Pardot dynamic content
Do You Need Salesforce to Use Pardot?
Technically, no. However, Salesforce, the parent company of Pardot, recently announced that they will no longer support connectors between Pardot and SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite.
So, if you are not currently using a CRM, no big deal. Either continue as you are (not recommended) or opt for Salesforce as your CRM when moving forward.
If you are using a CRM besides Salesforce, you can choose to migrate your data. In these circumstances, consulting with an experienced Salesforce integration service is a must. Improper data migration can cost significant time and money, so doing this right is a necessity.
If you are happy with your current CRM, or just don’t want to switch, hope is not lost. CMDS offers Pardot integration services, building custom connectors with whatever CRM you currently use. Your Pardot integration team will be able to help you on an ongoing basis, with regular maintenance service to ensure your contacts and data are importing properly and to troubleshoot any issues that arise as needed.
Pardot – Getting Started
No matter the size of your company, Pardot offers a marketing power-up. With an ideal combination of strategy and technology, sales and marketing are capable of communication in ways previously only dreamed about. That is what we call Smarketing.
When you are ready to kick your marketing into high-gear, contact a Pardot integration services team like CMDS to discuss the best automation strategies, lead nurturing opportunities and ways to make your sales and marketing work better together.
For a free consultation, call CMDS at 732-755-5555 or click to request a call.