Why Pardot Is the Right Marketing Automation Tool for Sales and Marketing Alignment in SMBs

With inputs from Rajesh Subramanian, Digital AE, Mid-market

Businesses all over the world are quickly digitising to stay relevant. For B2B businesses, the use of the right tools and technologies is particularly important to clinch new, bigger opportunities. This is because B2B selling involves multiple decision-makers, longer sales cycles, and the need for highly-targeted client communication. 

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often have limited resources. Hence, they are unable to to set up large, dedicated sales and marketing teams, equip them with premium automation tools, and incur capital expenditure (CAPEX) on setting up an elaborate IT infrastructure. But what if they had one powerful B2B marketing automation tool that could align and enhance their sales and marketing strategies without the need for extensive investment or large, specialised teams? They could then:

• Create 1-to-1 engagements at scale with personalised emails
• Attract more sales-ready prospects
• Reconnect with inactive leads
• Enable sales teams with complete marketing context to quickly move prospects through the pipeline
• Drive data-backed marketing and sales campaigns to maximise ROI

How Pardot helps small businesses

Salesforce Pardot ticks all these boxes. It is a B2B marketing automation tool that can accelerate an SMB’s growth by integrating and enhancing the two most essential business functions: sales and marketing. Pardot automates critical marketing and sales activities, so sales and marketing can work as one team with one dream: to sell more effectively.

Here’s how Pardot can help small businesses find and win more customers:

• Create beautiful, branded landing pages and forms with easy landing page templates and drag-and-drop builders to capture new leads
• Display targeted offers on your websites and landing pages
• Set forms to trigger notifications and score leads automatically, so you always have a steady flow of high-quality leads in your pipeline
• Build rich profiles over time using engagement and social media data for progressive and social profiling

• Better understand the customer journey by visually mapping out and testing every asset and touchpoint before launch
• Use one powerful, flexible builder to create customised experiences through dynamic campaigns that adapt to customers’ buying signals
• Automate lead management using Pardot’s blended lead scoring and grading system, so reps can identify and interact with the hottest leads first
• Enable lead nurturing by automatically triggering emails and notifying the right reps based on prospect activity for prompt follow-ups
• Give sales reps marketing powers by enabling them with marketing-approved mini-campaigns for their customers
• Perfect marketing to sales handoffs with built-in business rules, real-time alerts, and assignment triggers, so sales reps never miss great opportunities

• Automatically segment audiences based on specifications like age, location, industry, etc. and run targeted email campaigns at scale
• Build personalised emails with an intuitive email editor, customisable signature, and dynamic content that resonates
• A/B and spam test each email and dynamically change them based on each lead’s score, grade, industry, job title, etc.
• Set triggers and autoresponders to automate email delivery based on prospect activity
• Empower sales reps with visibility into customer engagement history, insights, and access to marketing-approved content to drive more relevant conversations

• Leverage visual reporting and graphical dashboards to gain insights into the performance of every sales and marketing campaign
• Identify the top performing emails and templates to maximise ROI
• Use Engagement and Lifecycle reports to understand your sales cycle’s health and identify where in the sales funnel prospects are getting stuck
• Enable marketers to successfully track and demonstrate marketing influence across sales cycle by using off-the rack attribution modules (first, last touch, even)

Pardot enables sales-marketing alignment

SMBs that wish to grow need to think long-term. They need to find customers and build meaningful relationships with them. But they also need quick wins and fast results for continuous cash flows.

Pardot is a simple and cost-effective marketing automation tool that SMBs can start using straight out of the box — no additional CAPEX or special skills needed. The tool is extremely intuitive and templatised, taking only a few minutes to become a part of your marketing and sales processes. With a single command centre, it seamlessly ties your marketing efforts with sales goals, resulting in higher revenue inflow.

Find a Pardot edition that suits your budget and needs.

This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the Salesforce blog.