Pardot gives Start-ups that Enterprise Boost.
October 30, 2013
Pardot gives Start-ups that Enterprise Boost.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction
- Marketing Email Automation. Pardot is particularly adept at helping small start ups, automate marketing emails based on user behavior or account status. It took a lot of monitoring work off of our shoulders.
- SFDC Account Status automation. We had a very small Salesforce that was tasked with working a lot of accounts. Pardot's integration API's with Salesforce allowed us to automate a lot of the account status busy work that might have otherwise bogged our sales representatives down.
- Pardot was also helpful for us in looking at our site sign-up process. We were able to track users who stopped engaging through the sign-up process by step. We then sent personalized emails to those with polls attached to them asking what their reasons were for abandoning the process at their respective steps. Given that feedback, we were able to improve the site sign-up flow and increase engagement.
- Our team was fairly technical already, but even we needed help and consulting to get Pardot properly implemented. That level of consulting is expensive and for a small startup, costs like that can hurt. It would be nice if Pardot had a simpler integration process at the time, because our project was delayed by some of those integration hurdles.
- API call management. We were quite surprised by how quickly Pardot could burn through our monthly allotment of SFDC API calls. We often had to end up purchasing additional bundles of API calls. We eventually switched to a batch processing model, but that cost us some real-time processing benefits.
- UI of the portal. At the time, the UI for managing customers was rather weak and sparse in design. It is not like you would spend a ton of time in it but when you had to, you almost wanted to turn your head away as if looking at an accident happening. Its stark environment stood out especially next to the SFDC browser tab I would generally have up next to it while working accounts.
- I would say we got 100% of our investment and probably more from our Pardot integration. We were only 17 people across all departments but were able to operate like 50 or more. We were able to sign up 100's of accounts in our first few months and that volume never seemed overwhelming thanks to some of the tools Pardot provided.
- With most of our sales process automated, we were able to turn our Sales Reps' attention towards large accounts. They could use their valuable time to try and sign the larger accounts that usually require a longer sale process. The communications with smaller accounts was handed off to other team members when relevant, thanks to automatic status triggering in SFDC via Pardot.
- I can't say enough how much we were able to get out of our tiny marketing budget and team thanks to Pardot's ability to integrate with SFDC and MailChimp. We were able to create many highly targeted email campaigns in hours and not days. Coupled with the powerful Open/Click rate analysis tools in MailChimp, we probably got more out of our marketing tools than we would have had we tried to just throw more people at the problem.