Pardot is great for teams from 1 to 50 and has tremendous flexibility
May 09, 2019

Pardot is great for teams from 1 to 50 and has tremendous flexibility

Shannon Johlic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Pardot

Pardot is the central platform for marketing. It serves as our engagement hub to target and engage our prospects and customers across multiple channels (including email, social, website, and more). It was first seen just as a "marketing tool" by much of our org, but I proved it out to be a valuable center of insights for sales and now our CS team. Sales uses it to see history of engagement, quality and lead scoring. they can walk into a call or meeting with the most up to date engagement data so they know what that account is most interested in hearing about. For CS, we now have the full tracking on our platform so that they also have an extra layer of insight into the customer needs and interests. We also use it to message to our customers with newsletters, releases, updates, and best practices. it is truly our engagement hub. and all the data porting into Salesforce is fantastic.
  • Tracking tracking tracking... we track everything across every channel we have.
  • Nurture and re-engagement programs for leads, accounts, lost opportunities especially via email.
  • Segmentation. As long as you set up tracking well, you can segment to your heart's content.
  • Multi-channel marketing - many see this as a weakness of Pardot, yet, we use it extensively across channels.
  • Lead routing and scoring.
  • Landing pages -there isn't a marketing automation platform that does this well. We use a 3rd party (and it is far from the worst).
  • Reporting... it's hit or miss here.
  • Better personalization - the "dynamic" part of it is great in theory, but like its main competitor seriously lacks.
  • Attribution - it only allows for a single type of attribution for campaigns... we have to use other platforms.
  • Not the best for ABM (but that is a Salesforce FAILURE, that overflows into Pardot).
  • It has decreased our time to response and opportunity dramatically.
  • It has enabled us to truly nurture and re-engage prospects AND customers across the entire journey.
Pardot is a VERY flexible tool. Most have thought of it as a very adolescent tool, but it holds its own against Marketo in the VAST majority of areas. You DON'T need a near full-time developer to keep it working (unlike Marketo). Act-on was limited in what it could do, HubSpot was overly simple and limiting compared to Pardot's flexibility...

If there is a direct competitor, it is Marketo.
I used it as the sole marketing team for quite a while. It is VERY easy to use but packed with more power than you can imagine. BUT it does require familiarity with marketing automation platforms already in order to get the most out of it. I would recommend someone who owns it full time and that's ALL they do, there is enough in there. (on a note, we tore out Marketo for Pardot to match our needs and company growth projections. Marketo is great if you have a TEAM owning it...) Pardot is great for growing companies.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
8
Dynamic content
3
Ability to test dynamic content
3
Landing pages
1
A/B testing
7
Mobile optimization
Not Rated
Email deliverability reporting
5
List management
8
Triggered drip sequences
8
Lead nurturing automation
8
Lead scoring and grading
9
Data quality management
2
Automated sales alerts and tasks
4
Calendaring
4
Event/webinar marketing
8
Social sharing and campaigns
2
Dashboards
2
Standard reports
3
Custom reports
2
API
7
Role-based workflow & approvals
7
Customizability
8
Integration with Salesforce.com
9