The first-ever ParDreamies awards, which were presented during the ParDreamin’ 2021 VIP After Party, celebrate solutions marketing and IT professionals built to reach their goals using Pardot. These solutions are especially impressive because they each rose to solve a specific challenge while utilizing technology to automate their way to greatness. Winners of the ParDreamin’ awards get bragging rights for their team and company, a sweet swag pack, and a fancy trophy to remind them how awesome they are every day.
The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:
- Personalization Perfection: Right-time, right-message marketing
- Social Impact: Creating positive change through Pardot
- Grassroots Innovation: Scaling small business with Pardot
- Extending Pardot: API-driven solutions
- Best in Show
Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Grassroots Innovation category, which recognizes small teams with a big impact using Pardot. The ParDreamies Grassroots Innovation award went to BrandEd, and Pooja Goel submitted the solution along with Alessia Imola.
Grassroots innovation with BrandEd
The team at BrandEd Holdings successfully migrated from siloed data systems to implement Pardot at their organization with a team of only two full-time employees in 60 days. The project is especially impressive because they also changed the way their department handles leads to optimize their entire marketing process and strategy. They did this all while using the Pardot Sandbox and implementing multiple business units and multiple product interests for each business unit.
Quick Facts:
- Complicated requirements – multiple business units, multiple products within each unit, tailored user journeys based on business unit/product choices, and tracking path for each customer-business unit-product combination
- More than 70% of their prospects select more than 1 program of interest, so communication needs to be coherent and unduplicated as much as possible.
- Some Pardot features did not meet our requirements, so they devised creative solutions.
- Utilized Pardot Sandbox to validate functionality
Challenge the team wanted to solve
BrandEd works with non-traditional educational brands to turn their knowledge bases into educational offerings. The company has two sub-entities within one umbrella organization. Data for the sub-entities needed to be segregated for tracking purposes and day-to-day management, but it ultimately needs to be aggregated.
BrandEd also has multiple products within each sub-entity, which means a lead could be interested in more than one. As a result, communication needs to be coherent and unduplicated, as much as possible.
Additionally, teams were completing a great deal of work manually that could be automated through Pardot. For example, the teams were using Outlook for sending emails when they could send marketing emails through Pardot and capture valuable reporting metrics.
Hurdles they overcame during the project
The team at BrandEd implemented Pardot Business Units, a relatively new concept, as well as figured out a way to capture, track and manage multiple product interests for the same lead record (i.e., allowing prospects to select more than one program of interest upon form submission), and map them to Salesforce. And they did all of this in-house with no consulting help, besides Sercante Training coursework.
- They had two full-time employees; one who had never worked with Pardot.
- There was limited material for the Pardot Sandbox and Pardot Business Unit set up.
- The team reimagined their marketing strategy as they were implementing.
Results after implementing the solution
After the 60-day implementation, the small-but-mighty team celebrated their successes. They implemented Pardot so that it would work seamlessly for multiple business units and products, and their Pardot instance allows them to track the user journey in Salesforce and Pardot.
After implementation, the team enjoyed the confidence of knowing everything will work as expected. That’s because they utilized the Pardot Sandbox to validate functionality.
And finally, they discovered how important their work is to optimize the process for selecting more than one program of interest. The BrandEd team found that more than 70% of their prospects select more than one program of interest. If they had not designed a creative solution (sans code development), they would have had to create multiple lead records in Salesforce and prospect records in Pardot to solve that issue.
Learn more and keep it going
The project was a huge success, but it took several people and a great deal of expertise and resources to make it happen. Here are resources you can use to replicate the project in your own Pardot instance or get inspiration to do something similar.
- Pardot Implementation Guide
- Planning for your Pardot Business Unit Implementation
- The Pardot Sandbox: 9 Need-to-Knows About this Critical Feature
- How to Test in Pardot Sandboxes, Training Orgs… and Even Production
Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.
