Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Zach Lancia

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot Marketing Automation

Pros and Cons

Pros

Pardot is great in that it has many connections to external services that give you better insights into your contact's digital body language. From the Wistia connector (which allows you to see which videos & how long your contacts are viewing) to the Google Analytics connector (which allows you to see interactions with your web properties) it's awesome to be able to segment based on very granular interactions. This gives our sales & marketing teams incredible insights on our prospects and customers.
I can't say enough about the Pardot support team. They are almost always available through chat and they always followup on cases in a timely manner. It's great to be able to get answers to questions as you are actually in the product working.
As a client I have good visibility of the Pardot product roadmap. My client advocate checks in with me on a regular basis and always loops me in on the latest and greatest improvements to the product.

Cons

I mentioned the connectors earlier. One thing I would love to see is the ability to segment users based on their interactions with Wistia videos.
It would also be helpful for more comprehensive lifecycle reporting. It would be awesome to be able to pull Google Analytics goals in Pardot.
This is not necessarily a need for improvement, but just a point of concern. Pardot has recently been acquired by Salesforce, and they are already are making many improvements for Salesforce users. My company uses Sugar and I expect their support of Sugar to become a lesser priority as time goes on.

Return on Investment

Pardot has allowed us to segment our audience not just based on demographic information but on behavioral aspects as well. This allows us to target more efficiently.
Our sales team has become a more real-time sales team. Page view alerts & the general ability to see people interacting with pages as they are viewing it allow us to always keep the most active prospects in our sights.
A new subscriber drip has helped us reduce our cancellation rate.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

First thing I would do is ask them to define their goals and why they think they need a marketing automation system like Pardot. We would then have to examine their current marketing practices and where they want to grow in the near future. If they are looking for a good email marketing system only, Pardot is probably not the system for them. But if they want the ability to gain intelligence into their prospect's actions with their company's email, website, online advertising etc. then Pardot is probably the way to go.

Using Pardot Marketing Automation

Likelihood to Renew

At this point, we've invested so much time and resources into making our Pardot-Sugar integration work that it would be counter intuitive to not renew. The only thing that would impact this would be if they considerably drop support of Sugar since they are now a Salesforce.com company. With that said, we owe it to ourselves to explore all available alternatives.

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