Simple, reliable, but with some limitations
May 09, 2019
Simple, reliable, but with some limitations
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Ultimate
Overall Satisfaction with Pardot
Pardot is a cornerstone of our Sales and Marketing program. We use it for the typical marketing automation functionality like email automation (drip/nurture programs, auto-responders, etc.), and also make use of automation and workflows to handle more complex tasks like CASL management, advanced lead grading (beyond what comes out of the box), and advanced sales enablement workflows. I think of Pardot as the glue that binds together a bunch of different processes and technologies in our Marketing Tech stack. While Pardot is primarily used by Marketing, the insights and notifications that it provides are used daily by our Sales team as well.
- Simplicity - I can't stress this enough. Pardot does a very good job of making marketing automation manageable for one person, but scalable for multiple if you have a larger demand-gen team.
- Automation workflows - Pardot has a great selection of workflows out of the box, making it really quick and easy to set up some cool automation that will save a lot of time.
- Salesforce compatibility - Being a Salesforce product, you aren't bound by an API call limit, the sync is really quick, and excluding data integrity exceptions, there's almost never a hiccup with ensuring that your data is properly synced over.
- Emails - Pardot's email builder is really easy to use and comes with some very useful templates out-of-the-box which can be customized to get the look you're wanting. There's a good set of instructions for how to build email templates that are compatible with Pardot's builder.
- Lots of nuances are present - Pardot is great, but there's a TON of little things that it probably should do better being a product that's been around as long as it has. For example, You cannot create drip program emails without an unsubscribe link! That means that if you've automated the emails that go from your Sales team when someone fills out a form asking for a demo, it WILL have the ugly unsubscribe link and additional address tag that Pardot emails require.
- You cannot have automation that will set the value of one field to be equal to another field or variable - only pre-defined values can be used. For example, you cannot have a date field set to equal today + 180 days (useful for Canadian Anti-Spam Law automation). You cannot set one field to equal the value of another field.
- As nice as the email builder is, it's certainly no MailChimp. It would be nicer to have better compatibility with mail clients out of the box and a larger variety of templates. The email builder isn't drag-and-drop like other dedicated email systems, so you're usually stuck having to go into the code and cut+paste the section into the new area where you want it to go.
- There's no option to automate personal emails sent from a team members Gsuite or Outlook 365 account!? Nowadays Marketing is playing a role that goes much farther down the sales cycle - if you are automating emails from your sales team, the email is still sent from Pardot's email server (which has mediocre deliverability compared to Gsuite or Office 365). A simple addition of the Zapier-like ability to trigger emails from a salesperson's actual email account would be a gigantic benefit.
- No built-in calendar functionality like that offered by Hubspot. I love Pardot, but it does feel like they've been slipping in their product development as I haven't noticed any major addition to the platform that has made a difference to my workflows in probably two years.
- Pardot saves sales hundreds of hours per year by automating the lead follow-up.
- Gives the Sales team more visibility into what their leads are doing.
- Ultimately, sales and marketing would be a lot harder if we didn't have Pardot. It's the glue that pulls everything together, and the amount of work and data processing that goes on behind the scenes thanks to the platform means that our sales team can focus on conversations rather than email followup, lead grading, etc.
I found Marketo to have stronger, more granular functionality around automation. However, Pardot is MUCH easier to use, and thus more manageable for one or two people. You don't need to have a developer on your team to be able to put out some great looking content. Pardot is also cheaper than Marketo.
Compared to Autopilot, I found Pardot to be much more reliable and to have a broader variety of proper Marketing automation functionality. Autopilot had some really innovative features that Pardot does not have like being able to trigger custom greeting cards being printed and sent to a lead. Pardot's emails had a slightly lower rate of deliverability (like 0.5% less), but the automation and workflows in Pardot were significantly better. I found the data sync with Salesforce in Autopilot was not at all what I wanted, works much better in Pardot.
Compared to Autopilot, I found Pardot to be much more reliable and to have a broader variety of proper Marketing automation functionality. Autopilot had some really innovative features that Pardot does not have like being able to trigger custom greeting cards being printed and sent to a lead. Pardot's emails had a slightly lower rate of deliverability (like 0.5% less), but the automation and workflows in Pardot were significantly better. I found the data sync with Salesforce in Autopilot was not at all what I wanted, works much better in Pardot.
10,000 to 25,000