Overall Satisfaction with Pardot
- Simple and straightforward set-up and implementation.
- Easy to use interface.
- Excellent support and very easy to do business with.
- Reporting is still a challenge, even with the OEM from GoodData. There are some nice default reports built-in, but you need to be a DBA to edit those default reports or build anything on your own in GoodData.
- Email creation is still a little kludgy. If you want to reuse or edit an email, you need to first create an email template then create an email to send. I understand Pardot is doing some work here to simplify.
- Drip logic is less granular than competing solutions like Marketo, i.e. shortest wait time in Pardot is 1 day. In Marketo, I could trigger workflow in an drip program by the minute.
- Sync time with SFDC is every 10 minutes. It would be really great to have real-time sync with the CRM.
- We did not need a dedicated person to manage the system. All members of the marketing team were able to use Pardot to do their jobs with pretty minimal training.
- We were able to end a subscription to Spredfast to manage our social posting once that functionality was built in to Pardot.
At the time, Pardot was the only other marketing automation system that supported SugarCRM.
10,000 to 25,000
Using Pardot
20 - The Marketing team uses the product as well as the sales team to review prospect activity.
- Email marketing.
- Lead management (scoring, routing, follow-up, prioritization, nurturing).
- Visitor/prospect behavior tracking.
- Social media message delivery/engagement.
Evaluating Pardot and Competitors
We switched from Loopfuse as we were completely dissatisfied with Loopfuse's functionality.
Pardot Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Pardot Training
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
Yes, the product was easy to learn if you're the type of person who likes to jump in ang play with a product. The Knowledge Base is very thorough and covers the basics well. However, I think one of the key reasons folks select Pardot is that they do not have a lot of marketing automation expertise. For those users, training is a must.
Pardot Support
Using Pardot
Pardot Reliability
Integrating Pardot
- Pardot provides pre-built connectors that we used for Webex, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google AdWords. They also offer connectors for other web event platforms, EventBrite, Wistia, etc.
- I also worked on consulting projects where we were able to use the Pardot API to connect to an organization's product and send data bi-directionally.
The custom integrations were very challenging, but we received excellent support from Pardot during the process.