Let’s face it, marketing automation is really expensive. Pardot is a marketing automation tool that is owned by Salesforce. Companies everywhere need to drive ROI out of all their purchases, this post is focused on Getting the Most ROI Out of Pardot.
Most companies are using marketing automation tools, like Pardot, to increase revenue, increase conversions, measure performance, and decrease costs. If you aren’t really sure what Marketing Automation is, I’ve written a post about it called What is Marketing Automation.
Pardot can be used for a lot of things like Email Marketing, Lead Generation, and Lead Nurturing. This means that it’s possible identify the best leads which should result in your sales team selling a lot more with a lot less effort. So, how do we do that? Well first, we need to understand all of the things that Pardot and it’s competitors can do.
Integrate With Your CRM
Get as much of the data from Pardot into your CRM whether it’s Salesforce or something else. By integrating your marketing automation into your CRM, you will be able to create a good sales process and produce good quality reports that will be useful for Sales and Marketing.
Pardot uses a connector that creates contacts and leads in Salesforce based on the prospect that’s found in Pardot. Every few minutes the connector checks Salesforce for new or updated records and when it finds some syncs it as a prospect.
For example, your Sales Reps need to know about any recent activities that are being done by leads as they are being nurtured. Sales has a much greater chance of connecting and selling to someone that has recent activity like visiting the pricing page, opening emails, or filling out a form.
For Sales staff, Pardot has visualforce components that can be added to the Lead, Opportunity, and Contact page layouts that load an iframe that has all of the related activities that the prospect has done. In addition, it’s possible to setup Pardot in such a way that it can update fields when the prospect visits the website or opens an email so that staff can immediately target the prospect with a phone call.
Lead Generation
Having sales staff spending most of their day doing cold calls is no longer effective. Having sales staff spending most of their day doing cold calls is no longer effective. For most businesses, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on billboards or doing direct mailing either.
Before leads contact your company or fill out a lead capture form, there’s a very good chance they will have already spent a significant amount of time doing research on your company and the solutions you are offering. I’m a huge fan of using content to generate leads this done through a technique called Inbound Marketing.
Lead Nurturing
Companies spend a lot of money to generate new leads. Companies really can’t afford to constantly spend money on pay per click advertising to have a lot of the leads never do anything. Nurturing leads is all about getting leads that aren’t quite ready to buy to get ready to buy.
Typically, lead nurturing is done by reviewing the sales pipeline and creating content that will excite the leads and cause them to start visiting your website or interact with your company.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing in Pardot can be done a few different ways, there’s the option of doing normal email blasts or doing personalized emails based on your Salesforce Data. Both ways have advantages, and should be considered as part of your email marketing strategy. Traditional email blasts have the advantage of being able to be put together quickly with very little data analysis required.
Personalized emails have the potential to increase revenue six times higher than regular bulk and non-personalized emails.
In closing, Pardot has the potential to significantly enhance your sales process and produce easier to close deals. I’ve provided just a few tips on how to increase your usage of pardot and reduce the amount of time sales staff are spending on leads that aren’t yet ready.
