The Power of SalesForce and Pardot
It’s more important than ever before to make the most of every lead and potential opportunity in your business. Every interaction your business has with a customer goes towards building a profile.
Tracking and recording each and every sales and customer service transaction as well as recording some behaviour of visitors to your website, helps to profile a customer for marketing purposes which can lead to more successful repeat sales and/or cross selling.
We now live in world where you can tailor your marketing campaigns in such a way that you target your exact market with campaigns which appeal directly to them. Not only that, you can begin to track your marketing RIO to the $ for each and every individual on your customer list. And it gets even better, you can have this, without expensive infrastructure or an IT and Marketing degree.
Welcome to the marriage of SalesFore and Pardot.
SalesForce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool and which manages the relationships you have with your customers or potential customers.
SalesForce stores and manages your customers information and tracks any sales or other activity against their profile. Your website forms for example, may feed customer information into your SalesForce system and/or your outbound call centre may key customer information and activity directly into the system.
Depending on your type of business and the types of activity you conduct, this can all be actioned and recorded in SalesForce, forming a ‘profile’ for each customer. Typically a Lead is the entry point of potential customers into the SalesForce CRM system. Leads are then “Qualified” to determine if they match a certain set of criteria. Once qualified, for example, they live in Australia and have potential need for your business services; they can be converted into an Account. Your business can then generate and manage Opportunities from this account whereby they may be sold particular products and services and/or can be flagged to be managed by a certain staff member. The other powerful component SalesForce offers is the reporting it can generate for your business. You get to decide your goals and measurements and have customised reporting built in.
This may be tracking your sales teams activity, the amount of new leads from a particular website form or campaign or the dollar figure of a particular product your customers have purchased for example.
Now lets look at how Pardot can play a role to enhance this further for you.
Pardot provides tools and reporting which allows you to create deeper and more detailed profiles of your customers and includes powerful marketing campaign building tools and reporting.
Pardot allows business to nurture and generate leads from the beginning, so rather than a standard “one size fits all” campaign landing page on your website, funnelling every lead into the same bucket, you can customise your landing pages to qualify and direct customers down different channels, depending on their preferences.
This type of functionality doesn’t require much IT knowledge, as Pardot provides tools and templates to guide you through. Forms can be built with simple drag and drop functionality. Most importantly though, you can set scores for particular inputs and conversions, and use progressive profiling to gather data on your customers over the course of their visit to your website landing page and forms. So using the example above, we can track and score a potential customer who lives in Australia AND lives in NSW differently to how we track and score someone in Victoria.
This is achieved by using Pardot’s automation rules builder which allows you to segment potential customers and send targeted emails, or assign leads to relevant team members based on the actions or inputs, in this simplified example case, the customers residential state. Pardot includes easy to use email campaign builders and can manage the sending of emails, there is no need to export your marketing lists to a 3rd party product.
You can create and target your email content based on the user profile gathered from your landing pages and forms. Pardot can also track and record email open rates and clicks through statistics, if you set up the rules to do so. Combining Pardot and SalesForce gives you a very clear window to view all of your prospect and marketing activity from within your CRM.
Leads and contacts can be synced between the systems and all opportunity and marketing campaign information can be pulled in to the CRM for singular location report generation.
Pardot de-duplicates records so there is never a worry of double records or becoming out of sync. A single sign on is all that is required for users of the combined systems.
A marriage made in sales and marketing heaven, wouldn’t you say?
