One of the biggest challenges faced by organizations involves alignment of sales and marketing for delivering seamless customer experiences. Marketing automation tools like Salesforce Pardot have appeared as a powerful solution to bridge this gap. While Pardot which is also known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has proved to be phenomenal, its integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud enables businesses to create an integrated ecosystem where teams can work together, share real time data and drive optimal business outcome.
Let’s explore through this article how Pardot works with Salesforce, understand its technical architecture, and explain the mechanisms of data synchronization that influences this integration.
What is the Significance of Pardot?
Understanding how does Pardot work is crucial. Besides helping businesses capture leads and take care of prospects, it empowers marketers to streamline email campaigns, track prospect behavior, and grade leads based on their interest and fitment. Additionally, Pardot also enables the creation of forms and landing pages besides aligning marketing ingenuities with sales objectives. This provides detailed analytics to track ROI effectively. In other words, Pardot acts as the magic bullet that assists in demand generation – ensuring only high-quality leads are abdicated to teams using Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Check one of our Salesforce Pardot Success Stories for Education Business in Australia
How does Pardot Works with Salesforce & What are the Benefits of this Integration
The integration of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Pardot paves the way for a hassle-free customer journey across different departments. Listed below are some of the advantages of this integration:
Enables real-time sharing of data between marketing and sales teams
Improves lead management and tracking for optimal follow-ups
Provides augmented visibility into the entire client journey
Fortifies alignment between sales and marketing efforts
Helps conversion rates through timely engagement
Ensures that leads generated by marketing flow into Salesforce – allowing sales teams to act on them.
Pardot + Salesforce Sales Cloud: Understanding the Technical Architecture
The technical architecture of this Integration is designed to allow seamless flow of data while ensuring system performance and data integrity.
1. Core Components
Pardot Application: Handles marketing automation, tracks the activity of prospects, and efficiently runs campaigns.
Salesforce Sales Cloud: The management of contacts, leads, accounts, and sales opportunities are managed by it.
Pardot Connector: It acts as a conduit between Pardot and Salesforce – enabling seamless synchronization of data.
2. Data Model Overview
It describes the integration of Pardot with Salesforce. Key objects such as a Prospect in Pardot equate to a Contact in Salesforce, while opportunities, accounts and campaigns align directly. As prospects move through the lifecycle, they change into leads or contacts. This enables seamless tracking and supervision across systems.
3. Connector Framework
The connector ensures seamless integration of the platforms. It validates interaction between systems, orchestrates data at different intervals, resolves conflicts, and ensures data consistency. The connector uses APIs to exchange data between Pardot and Salesforce.
Explaining Synchronization of Data
One of the key aspects of the Salesforce sales cloud and Pardot integration is data synchronization. Here’s how it works:
1. Sync Behavior
Data synchronization between the two platforms is:
Bi-directional: Changes occur in both the directions between systems
Near real-time: Updates occur every few minutes
Field-level: Only aligned fields are synchronized between the two platforms
2. Sync Triggers
Data synchronization is started when a new prospect gets created; a field value is updated, a lead is assigned to a user, or a prospect reaches a scoring threshold.
3. Field Mapping
Field mapping regulates how data is relocated and allied between Pardot and Salesforce systems.
4. Sync Rules
When data inconsistencies occur, sync rules determine which system would become dominant. There are two main approaches: One where Pardot Succeeds when its data supersedes Salesforce data, and the other when Salesforce Wins, where Salesforce data takes an edge. Choosing the right behavior is crucial to ensure data precision and uniformity across the systems.
Comprehending the Capabilities of Pardot
Automation Capabilities
These features of Pardot are core to its functionality.
Engagement Studio: Marketers can create automated journeys depending on their behavior.
Automation Rules: Trigger actions such as:
Assignment of leads
Sending emails
Updating fields
Dynamic Content: Delivers tailored messaging depending on prospect data.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
When Pardot integrates with Salesforce, reporting becomes powerful.
Reporting Features include:
Tracking of Campaign performance
Measurement of ROI
Pipeline influence reporting
Multi-touch attribution
This integrated reporting helps businesses comprehend which marketing efforts drive revenue.
Security and Permissions
Security plays a vital role in this integration.
Key features include:
Role-based access control
Field-level security
Data encryption
These measures safeguard sensitive data besides seamless collaboration between Pardot and Salesforce systems.
What are the Obstacles Faced in Integration?
Despite the capabilities, the integration puts forth several challenges:
Data Duplication
Misconfigured sync rules may result in duplicate entries across the systems. Besides impacting data quality, such a flawed configuration can lead to confusion for teams across sales and marketing. This impacts reporting accuracy, campaign effectiveness, as well as inclusive decision-making within the company’s CRM ecosystem.
Field Mapping Errors
Misaligned field mappings can lead to discrepancies in data between Salesforce and Pardot – impacting accurateness and reporting.
Sync Delays
Even though harmonization is almost real-time, minor interruptions can impact processes and workflows that are time sensitive.
User Adoption
Sales teams might not make the most of the insights and data offered by Pardot. This limits the efficiency of integration.
What Does the Future Lay Ahead for this Integration?
As AI advances, the integration of Pardot and Salesforce is becoming more powerful all the time. Evolving trends such as AI-powered lead scoring, advanced CRM integration, data-driven predictions, tailored user experiences, and orchestration of customer journey in real-time are reshaping how businesses connect with prospects. These modernizations are set to fortify the alignment between sales and marketing – enabling smarter and more data-driven decision-making.
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The business landscape is constantly evolving. Organizations should thus lookout for new ways to grow their business. One such option, which organizations should leverage to remain competitive, is a ‘Marketing automation software that can help organizations streamline and automate their workflows and marketing activities. Marketing automation software can help improve operational efficiency, which further translates to greater ROI. However, it is crucial to select the right marketing platform that can power up your marketing efforts.
According to a research report shared by Frost & Sullivan’s, revenue generated from global marketing automation software stands at $550.7 million and is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020
Before zeroing in upon the right platform, businesses need to consider their specific needs. Salesforce Pardot and Marketing cloud are two powerful marketing platforms organizations can leverage to streamline their marketing activities. But before making a choice, it’s essential to delve in a bit deeper to know more about each of them:
Users: While Pardot is positioned for B2B organizations, Marketing cloud is designed for B2C use cases. Since, Pardot caters to the b2b segment, it primarily revolves around lead management as a result of a longer sales cycle. Consequently, Pardot users focus on preparing email campaigns with an objective of lead nurturing. To support lead nurturing, Pardot offers a set of lead grading and scoring tools, which allows users to allot scores basis the actions of customers and their engagement with the emails, website, etc. The features of the Salesforce marketing cloud allow users to offer a completely personalized experience to every customer. From creating roadmaps of the customer journey, planning campaigns and promotion to data management and cross-channel messaging, SFMC with its array of features offers support to different marketing segments. Though the Salesforce marketing cloud has a more powerful and comprehensive marketing suite than its counterpart, it misses out on the sales-and-marketing alignment part i.e. lead scoring. However, it is possible to integrate lead scoring in the Salesforce marketing cloud.
Channels: Since, Pardot caters to the B2B space, users can expect complete support when it comes to channels such as emails, website, and social media. However, cross-channel options are limited in Pardot. The SFMC platform supports various channel engagements as it has in its arsenal several tools that help users to provide support to its customer via every channel including web, SMS, advertising, social media, and email. Each of them can be managed via separate applications on the platform.
Integration: It’s important to know that to leverage the full potential of Pardot and SFMC, a database is required. Though Pardot is commonly integrated with Salesforce’s Service or Cloud (CRM), it also integrates well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sugar CRM, and NetSuite. Offering a full marketing suite, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be integrated with Salesforce solutions such as Sales, service or Community Cloud besides other CRM systems. Though, the platform doesn’t offer a database as a part of the package, a Data Management Platform (DMP) can be integrated into your Marketing Cloud by paying some extra cost.
Price: Since, Pardot and Salesforce marketing cloud serves two different models i.e. (B2B and B2C), they have different pricing structures. For Pardot, the pricing is available online and is segregated in three different categories i.e. basic, intermediate and advanced, basis the automation features one wishes to access. However, there are no standard pricing options available online for the Salesforce marketing cloud. Though the cost will certainly be more than Pardot, it’s more likely calculated basis the volume of data as B2C companies deal with daily customer interactions and transactions. The pricing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud also takes into account the cost of implementation and the number of users using the platform.
Which is the Right Fit for Your Business?
Both Pardot and marketing cloud have their share of pros and cons. However, the right platform for your business would depend on your specific business requirement and business type. So, it can be inferred that while the Marketing cloud is ideal for B2C customers, Pardot is appropriate for businesses looking to nurture their sales process by aligning the sales and marketing teams. If you are still on the fence regarding the best fit for your business, you must consider partnering with a reliable Salesforce consultant.
Girikon – A reputed name in the IT space offers end-to-end Salesforce consulting services for businesses looking for reliable Salesforce implementation and consultation.