Pardot solid but has some holes
Updated June 17, 2015

Pardot solid but has some holes

Steven Steier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot Marketing Automation

Pros

  • The interface and work flow for completing marketing tasks like sending emails or designing forms is clean and easy to learn. It allows the people generating marketing pieces to get them completed and in use quickly.

Cons

  • Pardot ties into a number of different CRM programs. In trying to work with all those different products it does not have a great interface with any of them. We used Marketo before Pardot and it is primarily designed to work with SalesForce. In Marketo any field changes made in SalesForce are copied by Marketo with no additional work by the user. In Pardot if you add a new field or add additional values to an existing picklist in SalesForce you also have to go into Pardot and do some additional work to be able to use the new value or new field in Pardot. Pardot also will not allow you to use the custom objects you create in SalesForce to either build lists or as a field on a form
  • We are able to get a email out to the target about 20% faster than with Marketo. Our year over year sales have increased by at least 10% in the 2 years we have been using Pardot
Eloqua and Genius where the other two we looked at.
Genius did not offer the marketing team all the tools they were looking for
Eloqua had more features than we needed and was more expensive than our budget allowed
25,000 to 100,000
B2B
Pardot has a good solid product that works well as long as you are not doing a lot of customization in SalesForce or as long as you don't have a huge database of prospects.

Using Pardot Marketing Automation

94 - We have people in marketing, sales and customer support using Pardot. For sales we have both inside and outside sales.using the data from Pardot. The marketing team we use it for a number of marketing functions so we have graphic designers, website designers, writers and our online marketing specialists using the program on a regular basis.
2 - We have two part-time people supporting the product. The marketing team has a go-to person on how to set up forms and generate emails and I support the product in terms of its interface with SalesForce and in generating lists. The person who works the interface with your CRM needs a strong background in both Pardot and your CRM to insure your fields remain in synch.. The marketing person along with their marketing skills needs to have astrong grasp of Pardot itself
  • We use this to send mass emails, track website traffic, and generate forms for our website to allow prospects and customers to request more information.
We have already made the decision to renew the software. The marketing department is very happy with the tool and is not interested in even looking at something new.

Evaluating Pardot and Competitors

We were using Marketo before Pardot.

Pardot Implementation

Pardot assigned a specific point man for us to work with for the first 90 days and that was very helpful. I don't feel they made a huge effort to understand why we did things a certain way. They had a way to use the software and did not want us to deviate from it.
At that point we had been on Marketo for 3 years and had a very effective process in place and we did not want to make many changes to that process. We just wanted a software that would allow us to make that process run smoother which Pardot had trouble understanding.
  • Implemented in-house

Pardot Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
They did a good job of covering the basics but most of the more in depth functions we had to learn on our own
I would never recommend anyone bypass available training especially when it is free as it is with Pardot

Pardot Support

In general I have been very happy with the support my biggest issue is the fact that they dont have an easy way to call support directly

Using Pardot

This rating is really an average.
The usability of generating and tracking marketing activities is a 10
The usability of the tool to generate lists is a 7
The usability of the interface with the CRM is a 5

Pardot Reliability

We have had very few incidents of the program being down. While I know there have been some I cant remember exactly when the last one occured
In general the software runs a little slow all the time and there have been a few instances where we were waiting several hours for a function to complete

Integrating Pardot

The initial setup was easy to get started but keeping the integration maintained over the long run can get a little cumbersome if you do a lot of custom fields and objects in SalesForce. Now that SalesForce owns them i keep hoping this area sees major improvement but so far we have just seen some minor changes
  • SalesForce.
The integration was not complex to setup. The harder part is making sure the SalesForce and Pardot remain in synch. If you add new values or fields to Pardot or SalesForce you have to do some manual updating in the other program to have both stay in synch. It has gotten a little better since we first started using it but they still are a long way from a total synch
  • None at this time.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
No others that I am aware of at this time
You need to make sure that the person who maintains the fields and data in your CRM is the same person who maintains the fields and data in Pardot.If those two areas don't remain in synch. You can have all kinds of problems hitting your target markets with your emails

Relationship with Salesforce

They have generally been pretty easy to work with both during the sales process and after. The were bought by another company after we did our implementation and from what i have seen and heard it is not as easy a process as it was when Pardot was a stand alone company
They were great until they got bought. Now they seem harder to work with and don't have as personal a connection as they did when they where on their own. Maybe this is caused by them just trying to get used to being part of a new company and once they are completely integrated and comfortable with being owned things will go back to the old way
I was mostly involved in the purchase as a product evaluator. I did not have much to do with hammering out the final agreement.

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