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Yes, you pronounce the T in Pardot
August 09, 2014

Yes, you pronounce the T in Pardot

James Heckman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot

This is our primary communications and outreach tool in marketing - email, drip campaigns, lead scoring, websites, etc. It syncs with Salesforce. Overall it provides an easy-to-use tool to manage our outbound communications and measure response/interest from prospects. Marketing is the primary user, although sales is involved by receiving various alerts or having the ability to look into recent prospect activity levels before calling.
  • Dynamic lists - We can build logic strings to run up-to-date prospect lists
  • Website tracking - In particular it tracks anonymous visitors and applies historical activities when that anonymous prospect completes a form or otherwise positively identifies himself
  • Forms - We use these extensively on quite a few product-oriented websites. These have several completion actions to alert relevant reps, tag prospects, etc.
  • List building - This sometimes requires thinking around corners to get a list together. It would be nice if it matched the report-building structure in Salesforce. Or even better, have a button in salesforce to build a report and convert that logic string to a Pardot dynamic list.
  • Reporting - It looks at individual emails, but often it's useful to look at a broader perspective - how have our pre-tradeshow emails performed over the past six months, and what works or doesn't work. It's not easy to export everything to analyze that data.
  • Organization - With so many forms, lists and emails it can quickly become a mess. Tag and keyword filtering helps, as does the new folders system.
  • Definitely helps shorten the sales cycle by providing rep information
  • Form and email completion actions help keep new prospects from falling through the cracks.
  • Newer features to track video activity through a connection with Wistia improve frequently.
  • Act-On,Marketo Marketing Automation
Difficult to say. I used Act-On several years ago so my knowledge of it is too far out of date to fairly compare the two. We had Marketo previous to switching to Pardot. That was before I arrived, but I heard the reasons for the switch were Marketo's complexity and higher cost.
The service from Pardot is great. It has a chat client built into it to reach out to the support staff. On the occasions when the issue is more complex than a chat it transitions easily to a service ticket and longer-term communication by email or phone. That also means follow-up has been excellent.
Pardot uses email as a primary identifier. In some of our small business industries we have several individuals sharing an email address. So Pardot only "sees" one of those people when it comes to things like website visits. We've also struggled a bit to differentiate between pre-customer sales efforts and aftermarket. Pardot is built well to track the stranger-on-a-street through to becoming a customer, but it gets more difficult to track what's going on with aftermarket sales.