Pardot Implementation and Marketing Consulting for Market Research Firm

The client has a complex, non-flexible system of transferring data between CRM and different marketing systems and tools — all the current customers and new leads data is held in Sales Cloud and synchronized with marketing systems via API every few hours. The lack of a single "source of truth" for customer data leads to many sync errors, duplicate leads and contacts, and has an impact on reporting and forecasting.

Because the system architecture did not allow the client to see complete engagement and interaction information about customers, leads, and prospects, marketing is unable to segment audiences, personalize communications, respond to clients activity in real time, or qualitatively influence the pipeline.

As a result, it was not possible to accurately understand the role of marketing in generating profit, to calculate the ROI, conversions and the effectiveness of marketing activities. The client is forced to manually collect all the data, calculate metrics and generate reports in a separate Excel file.

Main tasks:

With the client, we decided to keep all the information in Salesforce, and make Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) the main operational marketing center. All the data about interactions with customers and their engagement will be tracked, collected, saved automatically, and will be visible for the sales and marketing teams.

Using out-of-the-box B2B Analytics solutions in Pardot and customized reports in Sales Cloud we will create evergreen reports that will automatically collect customer interaction and behavior data, calculate conversion, engagement metrics, and ROI on every campaign and each stage of the funnel.

The scope of work was divided into 4 stages of 2 weeks each and included:

During the first stage, we held several sessions with stakeholders and key employees to discover their expectations, the current marketing workflow and lead flow. We proposed to implement automatic campaign attribution for leads and develop a logic for assigning leads with different intents to different Regional BDR or Marketing queues. In parallel with the sessions, we installed Pardot and synced it with Sales Cloud.

At the second stage, we were engaged in migrating the existing marketing assets (forms, email templates, landing pages, gated content, design files), drip email campaigns, sales cadences, outreach flows from other services, integrating Pardot with the client's external services, advertising platforms and launching the MVP.

During the asset migration, we found and solved critical errors in the code of emails and landing pages used by the client and redesigned the emails according to the brand book, thanks to which the letters began to display correctly in any browser, and landing pages in any browser and resolution.

We have also developed new email drip campaigns for the participants of webinars, events and for customers downloading white papers.

After the launch of the MVP, we began the work of the third stage — the migration of user data from other systems, the gradual shutdown of previous systems, the configuration of reports and employee training.

The migration of customer data was carried out from three different platforms, so we determined how we would combine the data into one database to get rid of the outdated and incorrect data.

We developed 24 custom reports that, based on the data from Pardot and Sales Cloud, automatically calculated the necessary metrics, ROI, the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and could clearly demonstrate to stakeholders the impact of marketing on the sales pipeline and the generation of company revenues in various sections: by product, by region, by type and volume of opportunity, etc.

At the last, fourth stage, we launched Pardot in its final form in accordance with all the requirements and policies of the client's security and changes. We also provided post-production support, which consisted in training employees and resolving possible onboarding issues

With the implementation of Pardot as a marketing automation platform, Salesforce became the only source of truth with all the commercial data about customers and the history of their interactions and engagement in marketing campaigns.

Automated reporting and calculation of the necessary metrics will allow stakeholders to analyze the effectiveness and impact of marketing at all stages of lead generation, nurturing, pre-sales, sales and service flows in real time and make data-driven decisions, allocate budget more efficiently and increase ROI.

The client's existing email campaigns, sales cadences, outreach and lead generation flows were successfully transferred to Pardot, and training was conducted with employees, which made it possible to avoid stagnation and disruption of business processes due to the new platform implementation and, as a result, did not cause interruptions in the new deals generation process of marketing and sales departments.

— Stakeholder, Chief Marketing Officer at Client Company