Would love real-time integration with Salesforce!
April 11, 2013

Would love real-time integration with Salesforce!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction

  • Marketing Automation in general can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Meaning that these applications do so much, so where do you start first. Here is a quick glimpse into what Pardot does well for Advantix:
  • Integration with CRM's. As I shared earlier Salesforce is one of Advantix' main operating platforms and with the use of this system over the last 10 years has become highly customized. Integration for us was important as we wanted to be able to drive specific account/contact records into Pardot. With the support of some minor code, Pardot + Salesforce met our need to be able to automatically send any new contacts created in Salesforce to Pardot.
  • Identifying Implicit Behavior - Out of the 4 MA's apps we researched, Pardot was one of the applications that included Prospects Activities CRM integration as part of the monthly subscription fee. There is something to be said about the analytical data you receive from Google which is quite high-level (quantitative data about interaction with a corporate website), it's a whole different thing to get in-depth feedback as to your prospects 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why) and be able to build out marketing campaigns, dynamic content, etc tailored to prospect segments based on their behavior. Pardot allows us to do that. The possibilities to connect become endless.
  • Supporting Sales & Operations marketing efforts - Building brand awareness is important for any business and while you have sales reps prospecting, operations staff supporting, Pardot's engine provides businesses with a way for us to duplicate our efforts to support marketing initiatives across multiple depts.
  • Not sure if it is on Pardot's road map; however, the only downfall I see with this application currently is the ability to specify mutiple url's within an email (drip program or list email) that if clicked will allow the action to send that prospect to another drip program. For example, you have created an email that contains 3 urls for three different products you sell. If the prospect clicks on Widget A link and Widget C link I would like to send a follow-on email or send that prospect to both a drip on Widget A and a drip on Widget C.
  • Today, Pardot only allows you to specify a single url to add a completion action.
  • Marketing Automation as a whole instantly brings quantifiable benefits to any business. Initially, Pardot provided something that Advantix was lacking, more visibility and insight. The follow-on to that was the growth of knowledge, better communication, lead identification and development, etc...
  • With the business won from utilizing this application it has more than paid for itself.
The old saying: If it ain't broke, why fix it.
Marketing Automation is a healthy choice for any growing business. It is important when evaluating that you define your core goals and objectives of what your business wants to gain from such a technology. From there you will be able to better understand which application best fits your needs. For us our core goals and objectives were met by selecting Pardot and as Pardot develops and grows in their applications capabilities so do we.

Product Usage

10 - Marketing, Sales, IT, Executive
3 - Marketing, IT/Development
  • Pardot is used to accomplish a plethora of items not visible to Advantix prior to our two year engagement including, but not limited to:
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Capture
  • Implicit and Explicit Activities
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Data
  • Detailed reporting and Analytics
  • Connectors to 3rd party apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Online Meeting Apps

Evaluation and Selection

Not applicable
For over 10 years, we have been utilizing Salesforce as our core businesses operating system, so when evaluating Marketing Automation apps we went to the App Exchange to search for the best. Our search included Marekto, Eloqua, Manticore, and Pardot.

Implementation

When implementing any new application I would recommend that you have folks that understand your business processes, tools and systems and IT/Development represented.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
When we implemented Pardot I was impressed to see that they used Project Path (Basecamp.com) to on-board new clients (training was part of on-boarding process). On-going, I have been extremely impressed by our Client Advocate.
The topics and content are well thought out, but Pardot I have to be honest the last webinar I attended the guy sounded drunk. My team and I continue to attend the webinars as knowledge is key and who best to put on a clinic than that of the folks working within the company!
Yes and No. As I have shared already this application is very intuitive; however, due to the sophistication of our CRM environment I have found myself needing to work with online support and/or our client advocate specifically on complicated scenarios.

Configuration

Advantix has 60K+ account/contact records within our CRM and we did not want to load all of that data in Pardot. So custom code was built so that accounts/contacts associated with a specific record type would automatically load in Pardot.

Support

No - As a Pardot customer I have experienced support via online to live chat and have been very happy with the SLA's.

Usability

Pardot built an intuitive application.

Reliability

Over the past two years, I have experienced high availability of this application.
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.

Integration

Vendor Relationship

On a scale of 1-10, 9 for during and post sales.
There was really no need to negotiate as the pricing offered was extremely competitive and comparable to the other 4 MA apps we evaluated (Marketo, Pardot, Manticore, and Eloqua). Advantix leadership likes month to month contracts and Pardot was on the only one offering such a term so that resulted in Pardot receiving a slightly higher evaluation score.