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Beginning the Pardot Journey

Published Date
Author Amanda Isaacson

Welcome to the Pardot Onboarding Journey! In this series, we’ll be giving you the tips and resources you will need to plan and map out the steps for a successful implementation. Salesforce's Pardot is a powerful platform—used to power email marketing, automation, and marketing and sales enablement—to help enhance customers' buying experiences. A few reasons you might want to invest in Pardot is to:

  • Power your lead generation strategy by managing the leads from your website, events, or digital ads. For example, setting up Pardot forms on your website or landing pages, and assigning notifications to the sales team when a prospect or customer fills out a form.
     
  • Nurture customers and prospects with engagement campaigns. An automated engagement campaign helps educate prospects and customers via email, and reminds sales teams of when to follow up using activities. Engagement campaigns are also great for programs like webinar programs, customer onboarding, and event registration. 
     
  • Measure marketing influence on sales and attribute ROI for campaigns. Pardot's B2B Analytics module helps marketers and executive teams measure marketing effectiveness and optimize marketing campaigns. 

Now that you have the WHY for Pardot, let's switch gears and talk about getting started with Pardot. An excellent place to begin learning Pardot is on Salesforce's Trailhead. Trailhead is free to access, and you can quickly sign up and start learning with Pardot Trail mixes. (Tip: Find out if you are on Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning or Classic before beginning the learning tracks.) Here are some combinations we recommend:

The Trailmixes are interactive and allow learners to set up their own Pardot Playground so you can test out the features before users go into their own Pardot environment. 

Once you’ve taken the chance to learn and understand the power of the platform, it’s time to start using the platform; but first, you need to configure Pardot with your Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud. Some users and administrators will self-implement Pardot and integrate it with Sales Cloud. However, this is a big undertaking, so it’s also common to leverage external partners (like Lev) for overall strategy and implementation to ensure you’re maximizing the platform and setting your team up for success.  As you prepare for implementation, here are some considerations for implementation—whether you’re self-implementing or working with a partner.

Data Integrity: Do we trust our data input and sources for CRM? Do we need an opt-in or consent management before sending an email? Is our Salesforce Sale Cloud set up correctly using the Object model?

App Connectors: What apps need to be connected? Webinar apps Like On24, GoToWebinar, and Zoom all have connectors. Pardot also has connectors to Twilio SMS, Wistia, Vidyard, Facebook, Google Ads, and now that Pardot fully integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can broaden your connectivity.

Lead Lifecycle Strategy: This is the most detrimental configuration and shows the most value of using Pardot and measuring ROI and attribution. How do you want your leads to be qualified passed to sales using custom or native scoring models? Do you want to have assignment rules and nurture campaigns so your valuable "leads" do not get left behind? How do you want to measure the campaign effectiveness and report on ROI?

The questions posed above are just a few of the things you should be thinking about when implementing Pardot, but will get you off to a good start in considering how to maximize your use of the platform. 

In future blogs, we’ll share more tips and best practices on avoiding common pitfalls with Pardot, examples of prospect and customer engagement programs that Lev has built in Pardot, and campaign strategies.

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