If you’re looking for a suitable marketing automation platform, you can’t avoid Salesforce Pardot. The automation of marketing activities is the trend par excellence. With Salesforce Pardot, these processes can be designed either with or without the Salesforce CRM.
If you are involved in B2B marketing and want to make the associated sales activities more efficient, you should take a closer look at Pardot in conjunction with the Salesforce CRM. These two platforms offer real added value in the area of lead and customer acquisition. By the way, the counterpart for the B2C sector is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Lead generation with Salesforce Pardot
With the marketing automation Salesforce Pardot, companies can generate sustainable leads and forward them to Sales. Targeted marketing activities enrich potential customers (known as prospects) with relevant information and qualify them as leads. A prospect is simply a visitor whose e-mail address is known to the Pardot system. As soon as the visitor fills out a form, for example, he is classified as a prospect in Salesforce Pardot.
The e-mail address is queried or assigned on the basis of content that is linked to forms, landing pages or drip campaigns, for example. Through a scoring and grading defined in advance, prospects and, in the further course, specific leads can be quantitatively classified for the sales team.
This approach means that the sales team only receives pre-qualified leads, so-called Qualified Sales Leads (QSL or SQL). This means that only those leads that are really relevant or promising for the company are processed by the sales team. The criteria for an SQL are defined individually for each company that uses Salesforce Pardot in conjunction with the CRM.
Regular marketing campaigns are used to constantly increase trust in the potential customer and to establish a relationship. For example, email campaigns that are perfectly tailored to the prospect are designed and dynamic content on specific topics is provided in order to pick up the prospect with the right content at any time.
These processes make marketing activities and ultimately sales processes in the B2B sector much more efficient and successful.
The 5 stages of the Salesforce Pardot Funnel
If we now look at the lifecycle pipeline or funnel in detail, there are of course very different stages, whereby we have already become familiar with the prospect and the qualified sales lead (so-called SQL).
Overall, the sales funnel can be broken down into five stages:
- Visitors
- Potential customer whose e-mail address is known (Prospects)
- Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
- Sales-qualified lead (Qualified Sales Lead – SQL)
- Won customers or closings (Closings)
The entry point from an online marketing point of view is initially the website, on which an unknown visitor initially moves from a Pardot point of view.
If a visitor is now interested in a service or a lead magnet, such as an e-book (so-called gated content), webinar or download, and fills out a corresponding form in which the e-mail address must be entered, this is a prospect from Salesforce Pardot’s point of view.
In the next step, the marketing activities mentioned at the beginning of this article enrich the prospect with further information. Now we are dealing with an MQL, i.e. a qualified lead from a marketing point of view.
Based on the scoring and grading, the MQL is then transferred between marketing and the sales team from an individually defined value or a certain level. From Salesforce Pardot’s point of view, this is now an SQL. As soon as a deal is closed by Sales, it is a won customer.
The functions and prices of Salesforce Pardot in detail
Salesforce Pardot can be booked in different editions. Currently (as of August 2019), there are three editions of the popular B2B marketing automation:
- Growth Edition
- Plus Edition
- Advanced Edition
Prices start from €1,250 with the standard version. Those who need more details on Salesforce Pardot’s pricing model will find them here.
Basically, the Salesforce Pardot platform offers me as a marketing automation manager a variety of features.