Month: April 2022

TLDR: Pardot is one of the more powerful marketing automation platforms available, but is it the right fit for your goals and organizational maturity?

Pardot is one of the more prominent marketing automation platforms available to businesses. While its capabilities are more sophisticated than others on the market, Pardot requires a certain level of organizational maturity, goals that align with the functions that Pardot provides, and realistic expectations about what it takes to get up and running with the platform. If your leadership is interested in implementing Pardot, this is a conversation you need to have.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll unpack:

• what Pardot offers
• how to assess if your business is compatible with the platform, and
• the practicalities to account for if you decide to go ahead.

 

Why Pardot?

Pardot differentiates itself from more basic email service providers (e.g., MailChimp) with its support for more complex campaign structures.

The benefits of Pardot:

You can send mass email blasts and build landing pages and forms, but you can also use Pardot to create:

• lead scoring models
• lead lifecycles, and
• lead nurture campaigns.

You can use templates to clone and reuse these more advanced systems at scale.

How does Pardot compare to Marketo?

Compared to platforms of similar stature, like Marketo, Pardot offers a more accessible UI that users can navigate with relative ease. Pardot also has less complex backend configurations to establish compared to Marketo.

Pardot is owned by Salesforce, which brings some notable benefits if your company uses Salesforce as its CRM. It’s a more seamless integration than other marketing automation platforms, and a discount on purchasing Pardot.

Implementing Pardot

Before onboarding any marketing automation platform, your CMO needs to communicate a clear direction for the near future.

• What strategic plans do they have for the next year or five years?
• How suitable are Pardot’s functionalities to help the company achieve them?
• Is Pardot the platform most compatible with those goals?

These are the level-setting questions leadership should answer to determine whether Pardot is a sensible choice.

You don’t want to spend the time, money, and energy onboarding a complex platform only to switch direction in a couple of years.

The clearer your CMO’s strategic intent, the better your chance of making an effective decision about Pardot. Read our post ‘How Strategy Changes Impact Tech‘ for more.

 

Know your maturity

Another essential consideration to ask yourself is: Is your company mature enough to handle the cost and complexity of Pardot?

The general growth journey that companies follow with marketing automation starts with an email platform at an early stage. Then companies generally progress to a mid-range tool like Hubspot at a medium size. To make the jump to Pardot, you’ll need to have more substantial resources.

The least expensive subscription option for Pardot comes at $1250 USD a month—and that doesn’t include the cost of hiring at least one dedicated expert to own the platform.

If you already have Salesforce or are considering Salesforce then bundling both can lower the price significantly.  The financial difference can mean $1000s of dollars in savings.

$1 million in revenue is a healthy approximation for when the investment makes sense, but your database size is also crucial. A database with hundreds of contacts is better served by a lighter and more economical email platform—scaling your tech upwards while your database is still in its infancy is putting the cart before the horse.

At a ballpark of 10k prospects and customers, you can take advantage of Pardot’s more advanced features.

For leadership: Evaluating whether you as a business are ready for Pardot is just as important as sizing up the opportunities the platform’s functions can provide. Encouraging your CMO to think clearly about where you are, and where you’re heading, will help your company make the right decision.

 

Expectations vs. reality

The complexity of the technical infrastructure that powers marketing operations is often lost on leadership. Lead lifecycles look nice and simple in diagram form, and campaigns of just a handful of emails can seem like little work.

If your CMO expects to quickly get up and running with more ambitious projects and see fast results, this is where you offer a reality check.

Completing the likes of advanced lead scoring models and lifecycles can take months of work on the backend, not including the organizational dependencies at play.

Web and IT also require close involvement to build the necessary systems and load Javascript code onto your site so that Pardot can capture visitor data. The turnaround time here is wildly variable, depending on how robust your approval process is for technical changes.

The most sensible advice to offer leadership here is that your requirements should start small. Templates for landing pages and emails can be created in days – or minutes using Knak.

And with that support, your Marketing team can progress from simple campaigns to more advanced projects in several months. This is how success becomes achievable.

 

Is Pardot right for you?

Key takeaway: Pardot’s applicability depends on your maturity and goals as a company.

If you’re a Salesforce organization with healthy revenue and a large database, that’s a good start.

If your CMO has also expressed a clear strategic intent for the platform’s functionalities and will invest in the expertise required to run it, you’re in a position to seriously consider Pardot.

If any of these pieces is missing, there’s probably a more suitable solution for your needs.

For any advice you need with assessing marketing automation platforms, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Revamping your tech stack is rarely an easy task. A tech stack overhaul can take 18 months, so set realistic expectations with leadership. Assess the current state of the tech stack, gather information from different departments, and build a case for change. Present the tech stack as an interlinking diagram and position the project as a technological and cultural change. Finally, a tech stack overhaul requires an ongoing time investment.

It’s easier than you think for a tech stack to get tangled. Maybe each department chooses tech in silos, acquiring tech without regard to the overall strategy. Or your company has grown through acquisitions, bringing tools together that don’t sync well.

Either way, the results are bad: Lagging campaigns, reporting errors, or an inability to show marketing’s contribution to revenue.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to set realistic expectations for revamping your tech stack. Creating and pitching a successful plan means taking a consultative approach around your company, so we’ll advise you on how to approach the discussions you’ll need to have along the way.

 

Set fair expectations

The VP and CMO don’t see all the work MOPs does to keep things working. They just know you get things done.

When they tap you to overhaul the tech stack, they’re doing it with an optimistic view of the time and effort involved.

A core piece of tech alone — your CRM, CMS, or marketing automation platform — can take 3-6 months to overhaul correctly. It can take up to 18 months if your workplace is particularly complex or slow-moving to get all the pieces together.

What leadership needs to know: turning your stack around is a gradual process.

It’s a project of finding the roadblocks that stop your team from working well and unearthing opportunities to improve your tech use.

Putting your assessment into action can help marketing gain revenue, reportability, and productivity — you just need time and space to do a thorough job. 

 

Build your case

Your first step is determining just how messed up your tech stack is.

Start getting friendly with people in different departments, chiefly marketing, sales, and IT.

Ask them to walk you through their processes with questions like:

• How do lead flows work between marketing and sales?
• How do you get campaigns off the ground?
• What features do you use (and not use) in the tools you have?

 
These questions will help you determine how your stack interlinks and which tools are essential versus substandard. 

This is how you frame a case for change to leadership. The heart of your tech needs to be healthy and additional tools should sync well with your core tech: CRM, CMS, and marketing automation platform. 

If not, each tool should be best-in-class at what it does, fulfill a relevant need for your business, and have strong momentum in the market.

Tech you can eliminate: Tools that duplicate functions, lack useful integrations, or are no longer relevant to your business only add costs and put pressure on your infrastructure.

 

Influence the outcome

Overhauling your tech stack will impact more teams beyond marketing. Leadership needs to believe in your assessment to push it through. Illustrate how all the pieces gel and clash to your bosses to get their support.

Present your tech stack as an interlinking diagram that maps out how:

• your tools sync
• how each set of features contributes towards revenue and productivity, and
• redundant, siloed, and poorly-utilized software bloats your stack.

 
Some of those suboptimal tools will be popular with the teams that use them. Naturally, removing or replacing these solutions can create tension. So, position this project to leadership as equally about refreshing the culture of your workplace along with the tech. Read our advice column on choosing the right martech stack for more info.

What to tell your boss: Now we know the flaws in how our teams use tech to build landing pages or host webinars, we can rethink how to do those things for the better. Partner with MOPs to change the culture here, and we can implement procedural and technological changes that help to create better outcomes for the business.

MOPs should own new tech: Propose that MOPs be fully involved with evaluating and signing off on new pieces of tech. As you screen apps for quality, market momentum, and complementary fit for the business, your input saves the company from repeating past mistakes.

Once you have untangled the knots, the next challenge is keeping your tech stack healthy.

 

Turn your tech around

Untying the knots in your tech stack isn’t an easy task.

Make it clear to leadership what is involved — ongoing time investment, holistic evaluation, behavioral change with tech — and you’ll stand the best chance of partnering together to succeed.

For any guidance you need throughout the process, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

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TLDR: Last-minute webinar requests often arise from a lack of awareness of the work involved. A little education and extra time can significantly improve the results of your webinars. 

If you’re in MOps you’ve seen this request before:

“Hi Marketing Ops Friends, we need to host a webinar next week, so can you get me the landing page link so we can get the invite out?”

Put your stress on hold. It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we cover how to have a conversation with your friends and colleagues about how to get the most out of a webinar.  A little extra time can make the difference between a webinar that’s mediocre and one that’s great.

 

Tip 1: Plan for education

They really mean well.  Truly.  What we’ve found is that there often isn’t any education around building a webinar program.

They haven’t seen what’s under the hood.  Like many things we can’t fully appreciate how hard things can be (e.g. skateboarding tricks, memorizing lines in a play) until they are explained to us. Take your stakeholder on a journey with you by taking the time to show them all of the ingredients for a successful webinar, including its promotion.

Ask the right questions and let them know all the elements you need before you can even start building the registration page. Sharing is caring, right?

 

Tip 2: Gather the basics

Here is a list of what’s required as a starting point for any webinar conversation:

        1. Speakers and presentation

        2. Webinar software integrated into a marketing automation system

        3. Promotional budget

        4. Promotional copy & assets

        5. Promotional channels

This list on its own can help get things on track. It’s a far cry from the webinar request that we saw above.

 

Tip 3: Webinar blueprint

Now we start to get practical. You’ll need a friendly guinea pig to start.

Get a stakeholder to work with you to develop a webinar blueprint or briefing form that gets at all of the pertinent information.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can help translate the scale of work that is involved in building a successful webinar.

This friend/victim can also be an advocate for the process, moving forward.

 

Tip 4: Look at the big picture

There are two key questions to start with here.

        1. What is the objective of the webinar?
        2. Who is the target audience?

This may seem like table stakes for some but it’s overlooked or assumed knowledge in many instances.

We can get into logistical questions like where and when will the recordings be available, later on down the list.

 

Tip 5: Be a partner that adds value

Shift roles from order taker to collaborator. Consider providing advice such as:

• Promotional channel suggestions.
• Typically subject lines in this format have performed better.
• Conversions by channel, by segmentation.

If you have data to back it up, it will give your advice some extra weight.

 

Tip 6: Visualize

There are certain members of the team at Revenue Pulse that love a good process flow.

They can often be seen in real-time playing around with sequences in Lucidchart, just for fun!

A good process flow can help show your colleagues the steps and complexities in a single snapshot.

The magic happens when you can communicate clear timescales and dependencies against the sequences, as well as who is responsible for what. “I need x weeks to deliver this from when I get the assets. If I only get them next week, I will need x weeks from that.”

 

Tip 7: Templates

Program templates will definitely save you some time.

Most often we find that a couple of templates can address 90% of the need.

If you have a system like Knak, you can create a series of modules that will allow you to assemble templates in minutes.

 

Tip 8: Test

Once you have the templates and the details uploaded, it’s time to find a friend to test things out.

Testing is often overlooked. But, if you can sign up for the webinar, get all the right emails flowing into the right lists, and have a link to access the webinar, you are golden.

 

Tip 9: Self-servce

Here’s one tip that can make your life easier after you start the program: self-service updates.

Create a shared space where relevant teams (e.g. Sales) can see registrants/attendees (e.g. SFDC campaign). This saves you time from having to provide updates.

 

Tip 10: Follow-up

Make suggestions on what to do after the webinar has taken place. You might suggest that a nurture program be set up for engaged audiences.

You could also ask if a follow-up email with other webinar suggestions, might be helpful.

 

Tip 11: Share the results

Once you have the form and process smoothed out and underway, it might be time to bring the team together to share results.

Show how the process worked and share data on the results. This is the fist bump/high-five moment. Don’t skip this one.

There probably isn’t much we haven’t seen when it comes to webinars at Revenue Pulse.

We know that some patience and education of internal stakeholders can go a long way in improving results and quite frankly the quality of work-life for those in MOps.

As always we’re ready to chat whenever you need a hand.