Pardot Marketing Automation Software

Salesforce integration oversold, but excellent in its own right

Pros

Pardot is one of the better marketing automation/nurturing product aimed at mid-sized businesses. It's greatest strength is its integration with Salesforce (which will be discussed more in "cons"). With relative simplicity, it can be connected to the CRM, so that contacts can easily sync two-ways, and even custom objects can be brought through for segmentation purposes with just a couple of clicks.

Tracking and automation is very well thought out and easy to use. The product has a straightforward method of tracking campaign results and attribution, all of which can then be pushed into Salesforce for comprehensive reporting on prospect-to-purchase management and measurement.

Pardot's greatest strength lies in its ease of use. No marketing automation software is going to be SIMPLE, but Pardot shines in the consistency between its many functions. Nothing feels tacked-on or different from other tools. If you can create a campaign, you can create a complex segmentation rule, and you can manage your social media posts, as it all works identically.

The marketing automation function, Engagement Studio, has gone through substantial recent updates and I consider it best-in-class for ease of use and functionality. If true automation is your #1 concern, this is a great choice.

Lastly, support is excellent. Salesforce Trailblazer is fantastic for self-guided-training, the documentation is up-to-date and accurate, and support tickets are answered promptly and knowledgeably. If you are experienced in systems of these sorts, you will quite likely not need to take advantage of any external training (or SF's accelerator options).

Cons

Pardot is a Salesforce product, and its integration is excellent, but it is just that - an integration. Pardot works like a third party service connected with Salesforce, as opposed to a native extension. Lists are synchronized, along with the sort of bugs and frustrations that come with bi-directional synchronization, and some Salesforce functions (notably custom objects) are not as fully fleshed out as one might hope. In some ways, other solutions do a better job synchronizing with Salesforce. That said, Pardot's setup is the simplest I've used, and having unified support for CRM and marketing automation is also a tremendous advantage when I do run into any hang-ups.

Also, while Pardot's feature set is great, some of its tools are in need of substantial upgrades to keep up with the competition. Its WYSIWYG email and landing page tools aren't responsive and are far outclassed in ease of use by Mailchimp and other lower cost options (although if you're comfortable with HTML and developing your own templates, it's not bad at all). It is progressively being updated and modernized, but it obviously takes time, and there can be minor frustrations when you see other tools that are smoother or more approachable. But I have never found this to set a limit on what's possible, only an opportunity for things to be faster and easier for less-expert users.

If you're in Sales, you need this!

Pros

The amount of data presented by Pardot is astounding. With proper data entry during your sales process, this product can help you monitor so many metrics your head will spin. With ROI measurement, lead scoring, and many more perks, it really will help you close deals.

Cons

The sheer amount of info you need to enter is overwhelming and set up is really tedious, but it pays off in the end for sure.

Pardot Review

Pros

Regardless of how the sales team and sales process is set up in any given company, pardot still works well and can be adapted to your needs.

Cons

I wish it wasn't a separate Salesforce product and was more integrated.

Pardot could be better

They offer little support. Their functionality and ease of use is challenging. You can find better CRM products for your marketing efforts, like Hubspot and Marketo.

Pros

The engagement studio feature makes it easy to build campaigns.

Cons

The ease of use is challenging. You have to open several tabs just to keep one campaign organized with all the different items you need to build in Pardot at the same time -- so they are connected when you launch. The reporting and campaign functionality is not stellar. Marketo and Hubspot offer better tools, and limit our marketing.

For emails, you'll need a code developer to help build out templates and such. It's not like MailChimp.

Too expensive

We just quit our Pardot contract and moved to a competitor that was half the price and that so far has hands-on customer support.

Pros

I mainly used Pardot for sending emails and adding forms to our company's website.

Cons

Once Salesforce bought Pardot, the customer service experience got very bad. It was incredibly hard to find answers to y questions or to get live support. I had to create a Salesforce developer account in order to even see the Help area for Pardot. I don't use Salesforce for our CRM, though. It was very awkward and cumbersome.

Solid features, but steep learning curve and horrible UX/UI (unless you're used to Salesforce)

Pros

- Abundance of features
- Easy to customize to fit your needs
- Super scalable
- Integrates well with nearly every software and platform out there
- Backed by the huge brand of Salesforce

Cons

- Very difficult to learn
- UX/UI nowhere near as good as competitors like HubSpot (though if you're used to Salesforce, you might be at home)
- Submitting a help ticket is a huge pain

Helpful information but hard to use

Pros

It was great to have the information ready at hand and it was easy to keep in touch with customers based on the information I received.

Cons

The software was cumbersome to use. It required a lot of manual checking of accounts to get the information that I needed.

Pardot for Marketing Automation

Pros

Pardot provides easy to use marketing automation for my team. We've used this to increase our leads and build our product sales pipeline. The ability to align marketing and sales has made for easier and more robust conversations. The team likes the ease of use and the great user interface, as well as, the integration with Salesforce.

Cons

The team has not yet identified any cons.

Definitely a great way to sort leads

Besides the functionality of using Pardot on the sales team, I know the marketing team and exec team loved the dashboards. The marketing team was also able to capture many prospect details from the easy to create beautiful, customizeable content where most of our leads came from. It's definitely an added bonus to help create the pipeline and sort it effectively.

Pros

I really liked how the leads were sorted into ones that were immediately "hot" and with Salesforce mobile, I could even do it on my long train commute home. It was also a good indicator of which leads to focus on. Since our sales cycle can also be really long, it also was helpful to see how long the prospect has been in the system and how knowledgeable they might be about us. As a newer salesperson it was helpful.

Cons

I wish some of the pro features were available at the standard price. If we could see the Google Adwords that led our prospects directly to the site easier, it would be much helpful. It is available, so it's not too bad of a downside, however, it is if that feature is too expensive for your budget at the moment.

Good

Generally good and efficient, somewhat cumbersome at the beginning but good

Pros

It is a good tool for sending campaigns, stable and efficient

Cons

At first I found it somewhat cumbersome to use.

Too confusing for us

We use this to help manage leads that come from a variety of online sources and get them into SalesForce.

Pros

It links with SalesForce which is the main reason we are using it.

Cons

We've had to implement multiple work arounds to get things working properly and even then we run into issues pretty regularly. Requires a lot of setup time and is going to be difficult for a standard user to implement. Support is difficult to reach and often times doesn't solve the issue because so many features simply aren't offered or don't work well.

Great Marketing tool

It's a good software with tons of features and easy to use

Pros

Ease of use and out of the box customizable email templates

Cons

Expensive and small companies cannot afford. Email reports are not that great

Helpful Insights

Pros

I like that we can see visibility on who is looking at the site and what they are looking at.

Cons

I have no run into any issues with the software at this time

Marketing Automation Genuis

Pros

Easy use of customer tracking via IP address
Comprehensive email marketing tools
Ability to nurture customers from first capture all the way to the closed sale

Works perfectly with Salesforce CRM

Cons

It's time to get set up and load customer base into the tool

Pardot marketing automation tool

Pros

The user interface is fairly straightforward for my needs as a user administrator, I can quickly add/remove users to the system and am able to clearly see what's going on.

Cons

As a user management administrator for our instance, I feel that I have 'too much access' to all areas of the tool, rather than having a limited view.

A decent marketing automation platform for the price

Pros

Full featured marketing automation platform that does the basics acceptably. For the price you can do well.

Cons

Surprisingly poor sync with Salesforce.com, given that that is its parent company. A bit clunky of UI compared to Eloqua or Marketo

Pardot rookie admin

our business practices are a bit different from most. we had to make numerous modifications to make it work for us. which is a reason we went with Pardot/Salesforce: very customizable.

Pros

seamless integration to salesforce and just introduced: lightning app!!!

Cons

some of the terminology is a bit confusing. and the order of operation required a change in our processes.

My preferred lead generation tool

Pros

1] Really easy to use lead generation tool when working with Salesforce
2] We can send a different email to the different user. That's a really cool feature.

Cons

1] Its quite expensive. But if we understood and use its power so it would be cheaper then.
2] There should have product demo video easily available on site, should not have a need for registration.

Pardot Campaigns

I've helped clients create and implement campaigns onto their websites. When logging into the back-end of Pardot it is jarring at first and hard to navigate. I also have to implement the basic HTML code onto sites for my clients and finding the code is hard to find/navigate.

Pros

That it has the ability to create campaigns.

Cons

Creating campaigns can be a little confusing, and difficult for when you need to implement any web forms digitally.

Can Change Your Marketing Funnel

A really good way to level up your sales team

Pros

Conversion on leads is crucial to a healthy sales funnel. If your team is struggling to turn leads into dollars this is an excellent place to start.

Cons

Implementation is not as easy as you might hope. Also dedicating someone to owning this is crucial to getting it to work.