Great at prospect tracking; tough to pull data for reporting.
December 17, 2012

Great at prospect tracking; tough to pull data for reporting.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • It does a great job of lead scoring before connecting with our CRM. However, the three systems we use for our CRM, CMS and marketing automation are more or less duct taped together. Meaning, while they are great tools, they were either implemented incorrectly from the get go and have not been able to be easily changed as we have grown rapidly...or...they just aren't made to work together.
  • What it does extremely well is track our prospect activity incredibly well. I am thoroughly impressed with the ability to track social media activity alongside email and web activity too.
  • It is terribly cumbersome when it comes to trying to pull information from it for our reporting needs. Every asset we have on our website (white papers, webinars, etc.) is linked to a segmentation list. This list keeps record of every person who hits a landing page and thank you page for a particular asset. However, in order to take a snapshot of the unique responses from each asset for any specific period of time requires a few hours of list pulls and a few more spent in Excel, merging together this exported information.
  • I like that it has the ability to post to social channels, however, the connectors are not that useful. So when I try and post a blog post to our Facebook page from within Pardot, it doesn't give me an option to choose the correct thumbnail to use. Just little quirks like that.
  • We use Pardot to build out the top of the sales/marketing funnel. The records of prospect activity and the number of individual responses per asset are used to build out the top of the funnel.
  • Full disclosure: I have not used any other marketing automation tool so while the ROI is great from being able to do my job, I cannot say if the amount of time I spend using Pardot is above, below, or on par with other marketing automation tools.
The amount of time it would take to move to a different platform right now would not be an option. Pardot is familiar and useful for what we use it for but I think we would be better suited moving to either a fresh re-install of Pardot or a different platform.
I am mostly concerned with reporting and social media/inbound traffic, not automating marketing emails. We use that aspect of Pardot extensively and from what I know, it works just fine.

Product Usage

5 - CMO, Marketing Analytics Consultant, Inbound Marketing Manager, and two other mid-level marketing managers. This represents the entire marketing team.
1 - I say 1 because while it's a marketing owned system, we have an IT consultant that we use if we need to make any major changes to the code.
  • The tool is used to capture responses on both our website as well as serve as our email automation for our marketing team. The information captured here is based on a point system that we set up and as unique prospects come back to our site (or receive emails from us), their activity is logged and ranked. Once a unique prospect reaches an appropriate threshold level, their user information is pushed over to our CRM where the inside sales pick up on the lead.

Evaluation and Selection

Did not switch from anything. Was already in use when I joined the company.
Was already in use when I joined the company.

Implementation

I cannot verify this, but I have a suspicion that our implementation was not done correctly the first time and as we've grown into a larger company, it's becoming more noticeable that things might need a refresh.

Training

Since this was the first marketing automation tool I've used, it was easy to pick up. However, others on my team coming from Marketo or Eloqua have said that it's difficult to transition just because things look the same, but have slight variations that make it a bit confusing.

Configuration

We use Clickability/Limelight for our CMS and Sugar for our CRM. Paired with Pardot, these systems need some special care when working together. This is predominantly where our custom configuration is located.

Support

Customer/technical support is great when it comes to basic platform issues that come up. But when it comes to variables/things we've done within Pardot, it's more difficult to get a problem solved as fast.

Usability

It's a very usable product. Nothing jumps out to me as being difficult to understand. However, that being said, the amount of steps it takes to do my reporting is much higher than I would like it to be. Again, I have no exposure to other marketing automation tools and Pardot accomplishes the tasks and responsibilities that are required of me.

Reliability

I find that during the week, it takes longer for me to pull the segmentation lists (responses per asset on our website), but that their servers are less trafficked during the weekends.

I have not experienced an outage in the almost two years I've used it.

Integration

  • Clickability/Limelight CMS
  • Sugar CRM
Was already in place when I joined the company.
  • I would LOVE to switch to using Wordpress or Joomla for our CMS and Salesforce for our CRM. I think it would solve a lot of our grief.
Yes, they are supported.

Vendor Relationship

Our reps are very nice to talk with and I have not had a bad experience when them.