Apollo vs. Pardot

Best suited for contact discovery on LinkedIn or for that matter any website, but it works best on LinkedIn. It saves tons of work, you can simply select the complete list of people you want to contact and put them directly into an email sequence. It is a little difficult to find contact info on other websites.

Incentivized

I want to start mentioning some features that make Pardot the best option on the market, I mainly recommend this tool because at present it is necessary that all the tools I use can work together, my use of Salesforce is of vital importance and I have the possibility Being using these two tools that have surprising integration for many people, I feel that it is my duty to recommend Pardot to everyone and I recommend it without thinking twice

Incentivized

• Allows users to easily add new prospects to database without much manual effort at all
• Allows you to make cold calls from different area codes that are relevant to where your prospect is located
• Allows A/B testing for emails so you can figure out which ones are gaining the most traction
• You can also find prospects based off of title, company, technologies, etc

Incentivized

• Pardot enables you to set up different environments via the Pardot Business Unit feature, this is helpful for when decentralization is still needed, but you want all business units working with the same tool.
• Pardot enables you to quickly and easily create automation rules that can clean the database retro-actively.
• Pardot has the ability to have multiple lead scoring models run at the same time.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is just terrible. You get an assigned account manager but 9/10 times they wouldn't know what you wanted and/or how the product works or how to fix it. Vast majority of the time it was a canned response that made you question if they read the message, or if they read it and did not understand a word.
• The software was relatively buggy and lacked features that were promised upon signup. They seem to have some large corporate clients and if you aren't one none of your bug submissions, feature requests, or concerns will be addressed.
• Their growing quickly so they seem to be very understaffed which I believe caused many of the issues above.
• The data, while good, can quickly run out if you're looking for specific types of leads. If you're looking for something generic like Managers at companies between 10-5000 people, you can pull leads all day every day. However if you're looking for a specific industry, specific title, and specific location - don't count on having an endless supply of leads (or even really enough to use month after month).

Incentivized

• Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
• Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

The system has so many features that it does take a while to get spun up on what they all do and how they interact with each other. Once you dedicate the time to training to reach that crucial level of understanding however, it is easy to creatively apply the varied functionality of the program to address issues that would have previously seemed to mandate the use of another system.

There have been a couple of service incidents over the past few months. I'm not sure if it has to do with Pardot integrating their infrastructure with ExactTarget. However, they responded well with proactive communication and a debrief as to what happened.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

I received excellent support at any time I opened up a ticket. But I would add to it that the tool was very self-explanatory, so there wasn't much need for support. With Outreach, we have a closer relationship with our CSM because of the intricacy in things like SFDC task mapping.

Incentivized

Pardot support is tremendous. The knowledge base and in-application targeted help articles and videos are thorough and straightforward. If those don't do it, Pardot has office hours every business day with members of the team available to answer anything. I've called twice and they are incredibly helpful.

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

Love the tool, so much easier to see what our visitors are doing, creating campaigns etc. One recommendation about forms in campaigns etc is to make sure the form is not shared between countries. To send out notifications to responsible, you should have one form per country or question.

I have also looked into and tried Hunter.io and Lusha, and to be honest, I shouldn't compare them with Apollo. I have found Apollo to be so easy to integrate and use with all of my prospecting that I haven't really even tried out the other two. I bet I could find some useful things by using Hunter.io or Lusha as well, but there is honestly no need since I can do everything I want and more with Apollo. I would just be wasting time trying to figure out another platform when I can be focused on growing my own business with Apollo.

Incentivized

We moved from Act-On to Pardot almost a year ago. The way Pardot integrates with Salesforce and is able to report on the communications really drew us to change. We enjoyed the customization of the emails and the easier set up of the emails. Both products are similar but as stated, the reporting and processes were positive to my organization. The upside of Act-On is the ability to make lists and learn the system on your own. Pardot requires much more training on the front end.

Incentivized

• Generated a lot of expectations that were not real when we needed them
• The ROI was positive but we decided to stop using the tool
• We loved how easy to use it was and how easy it was to interact with the Support team
• There is room for improvement in the video tutorials - they were from old versions of the software that would not be useful for the version at hand

Incentivized

• We spent several months and lots of money working with a outside integration partner, only to find out the journey we were trying to automate couldn't really be done and was better suited for Marketing Cloud. We ended up cancelling and switching to Marketing Cloud.

Incentivized