Using Salesforce Pardot integration to drive ROI

When it comes to sales CRM and marketing automation, Salesforce and Pardot are consistent leaders in their fields. So it comes as no surprise that Salesforce Pardot integration is transformative for both sales and marketing.

In this post we’re going to share our expertise as a Salesforce Partner to help you get the most out of connecting Pardot and Salesforce campaigns.

If your marketing and sales teams recognise any of the challenges below, we know you’ll see the value of Salesforce Pardot integration.

Challenge 1: Clashing communications

Your marketing and sales teams are working to the same end — getting potential customers over the line. But without proper coordination, they can step on each other’s toes. Your marketing team might send an email to a hot sales lead, for example, distracting them from the sales message.

This misalignment can create friction between sales and marketing, which then causes communication to decrease. This is a prime scenario to solve with Salesforce Pardot integration.

Solution: Using suppression lists

By connecting Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, you can give sales control over which leads marketing can reach out to. Your sales team just has to create a suppression list of hot leads in Salesforce. Then that list will prevent marketing from unintentionally emailing those leads. In this way, your sales team chooses exactly which content goes to the leads they know best.

Challenge 2: Defining qualified leads

A marketing qualified lead is different from a sales qualified lead. This can lead to a perception that marketing is sending sales “bad leads”. If only there were a way to reach a standard definition of lead quality. Yes, you guessed it — there’s a way of doing this with Salesforce Pardot integration.

Solution: Lead quality grading

Once you connect Pardot campaigns to Salesforce campaigns, you can create standardised “grading” for leads. This is a shared definition of lead quality between marketing and sales.

First you create profiles with factors determining different grades of lead. While an A+ lead will tick all your boxes, an F ticks none — with many grades in between. And thanks to Salesforce Pardot integration, these profiles are updated across both systems as soon as anything changes.

Let’s say you’re a loan provider, for example. You might create a profile for an investor, a borrower, and a broker. Then you’ll use default and custom fields to determine the ideal characteristics for each profile. So the loan provider might have fields such as “Annual turnover” and “Years in business”, while the investor might have “Portfolio size” and “Risk capacity”. These fields are entirely up to you.

Recap: Salesforce Pardot integration benefits

The major advantage of connecting Pardot and Salesforce campaigns is keeping all your marketing and sales data in sync automatically. This applies to custom fields as well. You can create a field for any lead action or attribute, from “attended a webinar” to “plans to upgrade within a year”, or anything you like, and these fields will be replicated in Salesforce.

Most companies choose to make Salesforce the dominant half, meaning changes there are pushed into Pardot. You might want to change this for certain fields, however, so marketing can pass information through to sales. The business benefits of this synchronisation are as follows:

• Instant alignment — information from marketing forms is accessible to sales, and sales interactions are visible to marketing.
• Avoid clashes — sales can prevent leads from being sent marketing material that might push them in a different direction.
• Nurture leads — when a lead says, “Call me back in a month,” sales can send them into a marketing nurture program that keeps the lead hot.