by Nicola Hodd 
So you’re up and running with Pardot, what’s next? Mastering it from a marketing point of view is one thing, but taking your marketing automation strategy to the next level means working more closely with your sales team.
Ensure you reap the full benefits of Pardot by creating automations and communications that are aligned with your sales process.
Align your goals
Before you get started, discuss your goals and how you are going to measure success against them. For example, an overall goal may be to increase the flow of sales-ready leads over the next quarter and the metric to measure this will be the number of marketing qualified leads in Q1, compared to the previous quarter or the same period last year.
Generate leads
Drive visitors to your site from your marketing channels and convert them with targeted landing pages and Pardot forms. From there consider what happens to them – What do you know about them already? What do you need to know? What communications should they receive? Use Engagement Studio to build a personalised and targeted journey for your prospects, building in progressive profiling on your forms and fitting in relevant content throughout your program.
Qualify leads
Work with your sales team to define a marketing qualified lead. What makes them sales-ready? What information do your sales team need to start conversations with your prospects? At which point are they most likely to be open to a sales call? And make sure this is before they go elsewhere. You may choose to qualify leads after key activities such as submitting a ‘Request a demo’ form or after a series of activities once they’ve met a certain scoring threshold.
Automate the sales process
Once you determine a sales-ready lead, pass it onto sales by assigning the lead:
- To a specific sales rep
- To a group of sales rep i.e. round-robin assignment
- To a queue in Salesforce i.e. first-come first-served assignment
- To an active assignment rule in Salesforce i.e. more complex lead routing based on territory or industry
Further automate the sales process by creating Salesforce tasks for the sales team to follow-up on the lead or offer them one-to-one email templates to send direct sales emails from Pardot.
Close the loop
Ensure that sales are following up on the leads you qualify by agreeing a suitable Service Level Agreement (SLA). For example, a new lead must be followed up within 4 business hours and if no contact is made, attempt again within 24 hours, or follow-up within 3 days of a proposal being sent. To align with your processes in Pardot and for accurate reporting, ensure data is being fed back such as lead status, opportunity open, closed or lost.
Make it easy for sales to push leads back into the marketing funnel by making specific Pardot segmentation lists ‘CRM visible’. They can then add disqualified or inactive leads to a relevant nurture program that you are running.
Continuously improve
Report on your key metrics and work out where you can make improvements to your process. Also ask sales reps for feedback on the quality of leads and what would make their job easier. Which marketing qualified leads are converting to won business and how can you attract more like them? Use this information to build a grading model and further optimise your lead qualification process.