Here at nCino, we are very excited about the Pardot Lightning app! This single platform experience has been a game changer and has helped us streamline our internal processes, further aligning sales, marketing and IT.
Follow me as I highlight some of the benefits of Pardot in Lightning from the perspective of four key roles at nCino.
1. The Marketing User
Prior to the Pardot Lightning app, my marketing team would log in to Pardot to manage marketing objectives, while also logging into Salesforce for reporting, ROI analysis and communication with sales. This created a level of disconnect, as most marketing users primarily lived in Pardot while the majority of our sales users only lived in Salesforce.
Now, our sales and marketing users are fully on the same platform! There is a lot of wonderful functionality that has helped to make our marketers’ lives easier, such as customizable navigation with the Salesforce objects users use most. We’ve also enjoyed seeing a fully native Pardot experience in Salesforce, as Pardot tabs are now also included in Lightning navigation. But what I’m most excited about is the new campaign functionality.
We have always used Salesforce to track and manage the details of our campaigns, but there was confusion for users around the Pardot campaign versus the Salesforce campaign. Now, in the Pardot Lightning app there are no more siloed Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, they are ONE!
Salesforce campaigns can now be used with Pardot assets and integrated into everyone’s daily workflow. We also love the addition of Campaign Path which takes the stage of the campaign and visually puts it on a “progress bar” with key fields that should be completed and guidelines on best practices that should be thought about during each stage of the campaign lifecycle. This has specifically helped us standardize the campaign creation process, educate on best practices and streamline the onboarding process as we start to expand our company internationally and open new offices around the world.
By leveraging Salesforce campaign functionality, we can also add custom fields for things we’d like to track, such as whether or not we had a booth at a conference, or financial information such as budgeted versus actual spend on a campaign. We can even add our campaigns into hierarchies of related campaigns to see how they are performing when stacked up against the rest.
With the new Lightning App and everything natively in Salesforce from Pardot, we also get a list of all of the related assets directly on the campaign where we can view how each one is performing. This performance data rolls up nicely onto an Engagement Summary tab that shows things like total emails sent, total emails opened, and click through rate, right on the Salesforce campaign! These metrics are also incorporated into the hierarchy view for a quick overview of performance of each campaign and the overall hierarchy of related campaigns.
2. The Sales User
As noted earlier, living in two separate platforms created a disconnect between sales and marketing. The native, seamless app experience has helped align our marketing and sales teams more than ever.
Our sales team uses Salesforce Engage, Pardot’s sales enablement solution. With Salesforce Engage, our sales reps can use marketing-built content to automate a personalized experience with their leads and contacts. They also receive real-time Engage Alerts when prospects interact with our marketing materials so they know which leads to prioritize and follow up with.
On our contact layouts, we have added the “Send Engage Email” button so that our sales reps can immediately send Salesforce Engage emails that marketing has designed and approved. We have also added the “Add to Nurture List” button to our list views and campaigns which allows our reps to easily drop groups of contacts into Engagement Studio programs.
There is also a fancy new Engagement History component that we added to our contact layouts which is similar to the related list of Pardot Activity in Salesforce Classic, but even better. This component pulls in all of that rich engagement data from Pardot directly onto the record in Salesforce. You can see things like form submissions, webinar registrations, email opens, website page views, and more.
What I am most excited about from a sales perspective is the ability to leverage Salesforce’s collaboration solution, Chatter, on Pardot specific functionality! Whether launching a new Engagement Studio program, adding assets to a campaign or creating new templates that can be used in Salesforce Engage, Chatter helps keep everyone on the same page and in the loop. At nCino, we live off of Chatter and many of our sales and marketing users start their day by reviewing what has been posted the day prior. This has been a game changer for us across the board.
3. The Salesforce Administrator
Before the Pardot Lightning App, nCino’s Salesforce administration was completely separate from our Pardot administration. Users could have access to one or both systems independently. We did have single sign-on (SSO) enabled, but Pardot views were iFramed into Salesforce and the experience was less than ideal. For the best experience, our power marketing users would still need to log in to Pardot directly, and our sales reps would bounce between platforms depending on what they were looking at.
With the Pardot Lightning app, everything is managed in Salesforce just like any other Lightning app. No one has to jump between platforms and everything is natively available in a single platform. Salesforce is our source of truth and with Pardot being on the platform, we now have easier access to other Salesforce objects and functionality, such as Process Builder.
From an administration standpoint, one of my favorite new features is User Sync. Now, Salesforce profiles can be mapped to Pardot roles for the proper level of access!
This feature has been really helpful for us at nCino. We enable all of our Salesforce users with some level of Pardot access, as we want everyone to be able to see aspects of our marketing performance. In our previous process, our Salesforce Administrator would enable a user in Salesforce which would trigger an email notification for me to create them in Pardot. Similarly, when a user left, I would receive another notification to deactivate that user in Pardot. While this might seem small, this process actually took a lot of time and created duplicative efforts across our administrator roles when creating and disabling users. Now, with User Sync, this all happens at one time — seamlessly.
4. The Analytical Executive
Like most companies, our executives are super busy and don’t have time to jump between Pardot to Salesforce to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. We need our campaign efforts to be straight forward, easy to digest, and shareable as needed.
Now, it’s easier than ever for our executives to view all of the information we have reviewed in this blog, such as assets on campaigns, roll up engagement on a campaign level from those assets, and campaign hierarchy metrics.
What I love most is the out-of-the-box reporting with B2B Marketing Analytics! With the multi-touch dashboard, we can visualize campaign ROI across the funnel to prioritize channels and programs that work best. With first, even, and last-touch attribution, we have insight into which channels drive awareness (at the top of the funnel), perform across all buying stages (across the funnel), and help drive deals to close (at the bottom of the funnel). Additionally, we can drill into details at the campaign level to see how they are performing against the rest. We can also share these metrics with others directly via Chatter with a note and snapshot of the dashboard.
At the end of the day, Pardot in Lighting enables us to more efficiently align sales and marketing in a single platform experience. Marketing, sales, admins and executives now have a single source of truth, making it possible to drive performance and determine impact on the bottom line as one unified team. If you’d like to see the Pardot Lightning app in action, check out my Dreamforce 2018 session recording and don’t forget to check out the Pardot Lightning App Adoption Guide.
Interested in learning more about all of the great new features included in the Pardot Winter ’19 Release? Join us for tour upcoming webinar, Pardot Product Runway: Winter ’19 Release Webinar.
