Conversational Marketing: What is it & What Does it Mean for Pardot Customers?

Hey Pardot friends, Maura here from the team at Qualified. I’m excited to have the chance to connect with this group of Pardot superfans!

Today I want to dive into the hot topic of conversational marketing and what it means for the world of Pardot. 

Let’s start from the beginning.

Conversational marketing: What is it? 

For decades B2B companies have invested tons of time and money to find, nurture, and drive qualified leads to their corporate website. And as readers of this blog well know, they’re using B2B Marketing platforms like Pardot to make that all happen.

But when these hard-earned website visitors arrive, companies have to hold their breath and hope that visitors will find a form, fill it out, and patiently wait for sales to contact them. Marketing teams are doing an awesome job getting sales-ready prospects to their site, but it’s not easy to get them across the finish line and handed over to sales. This is what Adam Blitzer, the founder of Pardot, calls the “last mile problem”. 

Enter conversational marketing.

Conversational Marketing opens up an entirely new channel for your sales team: your corporate website. This new technology empowers your sales reps to have real-time conversations with your most qualified prospects, resulting in more leads and more opportunities. 

Check out our post all about Conversational Marketing to dive in further.

Qualified is a conversational marketing solution built natively on the Salesforce platform

Here’s a quick breakdown of how Qualified works: 

• Identify your most qualified website visitors based on a set of custom rules that you create, like which webpage they’re exploring or if they meet specific criteria in Pardot (more on this below)
• See a LiveView of exactly how visitors are exploring your site and engage with them at precisely the right moment 
• Jump into a sales meeting right on your website using a suite of online meeting tools including chat, screen-share, and voice-calls 
• Set up bots to connect with unqualified visitors or schedule sales meetings when your reps are offline
• Last but not least, instantly create leads and opportunities in Salesforce 

Now for the fun part: Integrating Qualified with Pardot

With Qualified for Pardot, you can qualify website visitors based on Pardot prospect data before routing to sales. This makes your qualification engine smarter and helps your sales team have contextual sales conversations with your most important prospects. 

For instance, you could qualify a website visitor if:

Pardot grade > B+

Or you can qualify a prospect if 

Pardot grade > B+ AND they visit your pricing page

The second someone is “qualified”, a magic door automatically opens right on your website for your sales rep to have a conversation with your Pardot prospect. 

You can leverage Pardot to qualify visitors in a bunch of different ways: 

Pardot email campaigns:  

The second someone clicks through a Pardot email campaign, use a completion action to add to their Pardot score, qualify them based on a scoring threshold, and instantly kick off a live sales conversation. 

Pardot landing pages:

Qualify prospects when they land on Pardot landing pages, like ABM landing pages or landing pages tied to a particular campaign.

Show dynamic content based on field values in Pardot:

Notify your reps when known Pardot prospects return to your site and greet them by name, because you have all of their prospect data at your fingertips.  

You can also route that person differently based on data you have in the system. When someone fills out a Pardot form, for example, you can instantly qualify that prospect based on the data they submitted.

For example, if the form asks for title and the prospect completes it as a VP, qualification rules can immediately fire and prompt your reps to jump in and engage with them.

You can also qualify / route visitors directly to sales who have a healthy score or grade.

The possibilities here are endless. Beyond score and grade, you can qualify prospects based on any standard or custom Pardot prospect field.

Campaign-level UTM parameters:

When you’re running highly targeted marketing initiatives, in some cases, ANY interaction with a particular asset or campaign can instantly qualify a visitor to talk to sales. 

Examples of these campaigns can include: search marketing campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, social media campaigns, ABM campaigns, paid placements, and Pardot email marketing campaigns. You can use campaign names or IDs as parameters in your URLs to trigger instant qualification of prospects engaging with these targeted initiatives.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some helpful resources if you want to dig further into the integration: 

• Qualified for Pardot Demo Video
• Qualified for Pardot Overview
• Qualified for Pardot University

What are your thoughts on conversational marketing? 

We want to hear what you think about Conversational Marketing and what it means for the Pardot ecosystem.

How do you think this will bring value to your sales teams and your lead nurturing process? What questions do you have?

Let’s hear it in the comments!