Andrea Tarrell

Last week was ParDreamin’ 2020, the first Pardot specific conference ever. The event brought together 3600+ members of the Pardot community from 65 countries for 4 days of content. Day 1 hosted five deep dive paid workshops led by Sercante experts. The free portion of the event took place on days 2 – 4 and comprised over 40 different types of sessions, including keynotes, panels, breakouts and (we believe) the first Pardot demo jam ever. 

Community event

It has been a crazy year, but without its unique challenges ParDreamin’ may never have happened. We at Sercante were missing a sense of community and one of the places we often find it is at the Dreamin’ events.

We wanted to create a space for those connections and learnings again and end the year in a positive place. After all, it has been a transformative year for digital marketing and there’s always so much more to learn about Pardot. 

Keynote highlights

One of the best things about ParDreamin’ was how much positivity the speakers brought.

In the opening keynote Mike Kostow, SVP and GM of Salesforce Pardot, spoke with Carrie Pena from BuildOn and Gail Moody-Byrd from Noodle.ai about dealing with multiple crises at once and confronting problems that were never considered before. Both highlighted how their companies are using Pardot as a problem solving tool to forge connections that they previously would have made in person and relying on it for sharing information in an efficient and engaging way. They also talked about how Pardot can help bridge the gap between development, sales, and marketing teams, and prevent those groups from working in silos. 

Meeting your customers where they are

The importance of meeting your customer where they are was another big theme of ParDreamin’ and in the year 2020 we were reminded about the importance of bringing empathy to your marketing.

Jill Carpenter reminded us of this during the Marketing’s Role in Digital Transformation Panel when she said, “marketing is empathy for the consumer’s situation matched with whatever your company is offering.”

The panel members all talked about how the digital transformation offers new opportunities for marketers to expand the definition and role of marketing across the entire customer lifecycle.

2020 was also a lesson in the importance of breaking out of the mold. It’s very easy to rinse and repeat ideas in digital marketing, but it’s essential to try new things and not be afraid to fail.

Fireside chat with Salesforce team

Friday’s closing Keynote with Neha Shah, Director, Product Marketing at Salesforce and Meredith Brown, VP Product Management at Salesforce Pardot, discussed ABM and the Power of the platform and included a Fireside Chat with Adam Blitzer, EVP & GM, Salesforce Digital.

They all reflected on the things we’ve learned about digital marketing this year that will help us going forward. In Q1 of this year businesses were paralyzed and not taking any chances, and at first there was the concern that would continue into Q2 but the opposite actually ended up happening. Businesses began to realize the potential longevity of the pandemic situation and knew they had to act and act decisively.

The result was a huge amount of digital transformation crammed into a very small period of time. With no other way to get in touch with customers, companies had to amp up their digital presence and try new channels and techniques to foster connection. 

Digital transformation in 2020

As we enter the final stages of the pandemic and look to 2021, it is obvious that while some things will return to normal, other significant changes will be enduring. The myth that people would be unproductive while working from home has been disproven and companies are much more accustomed to it now. Consumer patterns have changed forever which means digital marketing has changed forever as well. This year forced everyone to look at their marketing differently and forced digital transformation to center stage and we think this is just the beginning of our ParDreamin’ conversations.

Check out our most popular breakout sessions:

Benchmark your Pardot database health – Matt Lincoln

A hands-on session where we look at key health metrics of your Pardot database, why they matter and follow along click-by-click to see the performance of your own org.

Video Recording

Deliverability vs. Mailability – Nightclub Guide for Pardot Marketers – Lucy Mazalon

Email deliverability is a universal challenge, or concern at the very least, for all marketers, however, it can become mixed up with another measure: mailability. In this talk, Lucy shares her favorite analogy for explaining the differences between deliverability and mailability: the upscale nightclub.

Video Recording

Leads in Salesforce: And why you may be doing it wrong – Erick Mahle

This session goes over the proper definition for the Leads object in Salesforce, what it’s there for, and discusses how it aligns with Pardot and a Lead Nurturing Process (including Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads). 

Video Recording

11 Key Insights About the New Pardot Email Builder – Jen Kazin

What is the new Pardot Email Builder? How does it work? This session will teach you powerful and interesting tips that will give users a better experience.

Video Recording

How to Show Marketing’s Influence on Pipeline with Salesforce Campaigns – Ben LaMothe

This session gives an in depth look at campaign naming conventions, member status values, influence reporting in Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, campaign influence models in Salesforce, a demonstration of the Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities report type in Salesforce and a demonstration of how data can be used in a Salesforce dashboard effectively.

Video Recording

Designing Pardot and Salesforce solutions that track ROI off all your online channels – Kristina Alexandra 

This session tackles designing Pardot and Salesforce solutions to make sure you are working as efficiently as possible.

Video Recording

We want to say a final huge thank you to our sponsors, we couldn’t have done it without them! A few of them shared their final thoughts on ParDreamin’:

From Salesforce Pardot:

From Marketing Chats to #wherespardragon to ParDreamin’ together, we are so grateful for our Pardot Community. 

Special thank you to the ParDreamin’ community for helping raise funds for BuildOn to help build a school. 

From FormAssembly

FormAssembly had a great time interacting with attendees at the ParDreamin’ event! There was an abundance of great sessions to learn from along with an interactive chat area to mingle with others in the field. And we can’t forget our personal favorite – the demo jam! Overall, this event was a great way to virtually connect.

From Workato

The Workato team had a great time meeting other Pardot practitioners and sharing how users can leverage Pardot and other Martech stack to achieve successful metrics. Creating valuable connections and sharing insights with others in this field, is the reason ParDreamin’ is a huge highlight for our team.

In fact, Workato aims to empower marketing professionals to make their lives easier with integrations and workflow automations when using Pardot and the rest of your tech stack.

To allow marketers to enjoy the holidays without facing a backlog of tasks, on December 16th join RevOps leaders as they discuss how they’ve automated manual tasks which helped them stay up to date and prepare themselves to fully enjoy their holidays!

Register to get the secrets on how RevOps leaders are automating their tasks for the holiday here:https://bit.ly/36Q1Zk5 

From LeanData

ParDreamin’ reminded us that common to all B2B companies is the investment of an extraordinary amount of organizational resources – time, energy and money – into creating demand for products, solutions and services. However, in too many instances, go-to-market strategies to connect those buyers to revenue teams unravel into siloed efforts across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, leading to ineffective and inefficient processes, and a sub-optimal customer experience. 

Winning in the space requires seamless coordination among all go-to-market functions, and it all starts with leads and the pipeline, the very lifeblood of all revenue operations teams. Holistic lead management strategies require end-to-end processes that include consistent data cleansing and unification, effective campaign execution, timely and accurate data routing, actionable insights and meaningful performance metrics. Fortunately for today’s go-to-market professionals, technology stacks and automated solutions empower revenue teams to deploy customer-centric, customer-first motions and, in turn, drive increased productivity, optimized conversion and reduced time-to-revenue.

Did you attend ParDreamin’ 2020? We want to hear from you! Please take 5 minutes to take our survey to help us improve and deliver even better events to you in the future.

Ready for more Pardot? Sercante is hosting Mini Bootcamp: Pardot Basics Workshop

• January 18, 2021: 1pm – 5pm ET (US, East Coast)
• February 1, 2021: 1pm – 5pm GMT (UK)
• February 15, 2021: 11am – 2pm PM AEDT (APAC)

Learn more at sercante.com/pardot-training/

Day 4 of ParDreamin’ kicked off today with a Demo Jam. Sercante’s own Celine Newsome and Mike Creuzer helped to lead us through 3-minute demos from our sponsors.

The demo jam was, to our knowledge, the first ever Pardot focused demo jam. The chat was rowdy and fast and everyone loved the “golden hook” for sponsors who went over! That’s right, we cut off those who went over!

Sercante was crowned winner by the attendees and we handed out Dragons to participants who chatted it up at the demo jam! It was a great, high energy session to start the 4th and final day of ParDreamin’!

Session Highlights

Demo Jam

Check out awesome demos from our sponsors including: 

Form Assembly: They took us through the power of Form Assembly with a great demo of the tool! 

Sercante Labs: Adam Erstelle from Sercante showed off 4 apps created and built by Sercante. Adam did it with just 2 seconds to go! He showed us the power of Automated Opportunity Contact Roles, Campaign Influence Starter Pack, Creuz Your Data, and Email to PDF for Pardot. 

Lean Data: Jay Vira took us through the Salesforce native tool that helps to route incoming leads and capitalize on fuzzy matching to get them to the right account and the best sales rep to support them and getting them enrolled in nurture programs to keep them engaged. Hot tip: it even integrates with Slack allowing you to Slack your reps and be sure your SLAs are met. Reporting eliminates the black box for admins! Jay made it through thanks to some forgiving judges, he went 1 second over! 

Speed to Lead from Workato: Integrate anything, automate everything! David Kreitter aspires to automate his job but took us through speed to lead. This allows us to route to sales rep, check to see if prospects exist in Salesforce, and alert the SDR through Slack notifications. The Slack bot is built on Workato. The tool integrates with Clearbit, Zoominfo and others. It also allows you to add leads to nurture programs. David finished up in 3 minutes flat! 

Qualified: Let’s you know when a decision maker is on your site through a conversational marketing platform. Sean Whitely takes us through the situation room in Qualified, shows us how to message our target account. He starts selling right on the website, switches to the phone, and sets a meeting with the AEs, and updates the Salesforce record RIGHT in Qualified! Sean got cut off because Demo Jams keep moving! 

Appinium: Steven Jacobson, CEO, of Appinium took over and talked us through how video data can flow into Salesforce to help us see not only how leads are converting but how they are learning and moving down the funnel. Steven shouted out Mike Creuzer for his help. Appinium has given away 6 months of Appinium FREE! Zero cost for Pardot, Sales Enablement, Implementation, and unlimited storage! 

And The 2020 ParDreamin’ Demo Jam Winners Are……

• Third Place: Form Assembly
• Second Place: Sean Whitely from Qualified
• First Place and Demo Jam Winner: Sercante

View Session Recording

Bad Data is the Plastic of the Marketing Ecosystem: How much should we pay to clean it up? 

Skip discussed the hidden cost of bad data and gave the attendees some simple techniques for identifying bad data, cleaning their database and keeping the bad data out in the first place. Interesting fact, 40% of session attendees said they had bad data in the session poll! 

The key takeaways were:

• Cost of bad data increases the cost of your sales team by 131%.
• Bad new lead data impacts sales trust in marketing.
• How to fix:
  • Completeness – does the field have the correct “parts” (ex. “@“ in email field)
  • Accuracy – is the data correct?
  • Consistency – is the data the same in every system?
  • Conformity – is tall of the data in standard and understandable formats?
  • Uniqueness – no duplicates in database
  • Integrity – is your data valid across all relationships? Is data mapped properly between Salesforce and Pardot?
  • Intention – will you ever sell to this record?
  • Timeliness – is the data available when you need it?
  •  Freshness – has the data gone by its sell by date? How are you keeping it update to date?

View Session Recording

Pardot Automation Rules to the Rescue

In this session, Thimuth Amarakoon, covered the need for Pardot Automation Rules and how Admins and Marketers can build customized processes using it. Thimuth had attendees take a step back and revisited the basics of automation to demonstrate the power of Pardot Automation Rules. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Use automation rules to custom score when dealing with large batches of third-party and imported prospects, both increase and decrease scores
• Use automation rules to bulk update prospect field values ie grouping country fields to populate region value 
• Use automation rules to clean up your data. Remember you can add actions like ‘do not sync with CRM’ to reduce bad data from going to sales. 
• Reminder to clean up your unused automation rules. You can set-up ‘inactive automation notifications’ to monitor running automation rules that have not matched any prospects within the past 30 days. 

View Session Recording

Snippets: Connected Campaigns Power Tool

Snippets are one of the best tools you can have in your Pardot/Salesforce org. With minimal planning and few prerequisites you can drive engagement with specific details that are maintained by stakeholders within your organization. Snippets can set your Pardot free from verifying details managed by others.

Key Takeaways:

• Snippets are an undiscovered gem when it comes to tools for your Pardot/Salesforce org
• Snippets provide visibility, accessibility, versatility and availability

View Session Recording

Deliver richer personalization leveraging Pardot and Interaction Studio

This session was a deep dive into how you can bring together Pardot and Interaction Studio to supercharge ABM experiences. Interaction studio helps you build anonymous and account based website personalization, provides the optimal next step to engage prospects and changes content dynamically to help you personalize your marketing content. The session includes a full demo of the solution.

View Session Recording

Key Takeaway: 

Interaction Studio and Engagement Studio work in parallel together to meet customer expectations (Interaction is more focused on customer and Engagement is focused more on brand).

View Session Recording

Pardot Sync Errors: Diagnosing, Solving, and Preventing them

When Pardot syncs with Salesforce life is good. When it doesn’t sync with Salesforce, life is bad. In this session, Lara Black showed attendees how to diagnose, treat, cure, and even prevent Pardot/Salesforce sync errors. She discussed common problems, solutions, and some fun Pardot tricks on how to make sure the records that are syncing with Salesforce are actually valuable, not just junk. 

Key Takeaway: 

Instead of spending hours manually cleaning records, automatically detect bad prospects and mark them as junk by using automation rules to run in realtime.  

View Session Recording

Content that Converts

Ashley talked about content that converts and how to build a nurture program. She covered the importance of personas, the three phases of the nurture funnel, what to do with personas once you have them, and she gives participants a handy checklist to use! 100% of emails need content created for them. That’s a lot of new copy! She discussed how to create content specific to KPIs and the funnels starting with the awareness phase and following best practices, like ensuring your CTA is above the fold. Using the buyer persona Ashley talked about using profiles, scoring categories, and segmenting. The session is wrapped with an engagement program build checklist. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Importance of persona development (keeping in mind they are still people)
• Three phases of the nurture funnel (awareness, consideration, decision) and how the emails correlate with each other, but keeping it at a basic level for those who may not be as familiar with engagement programs
• How to develop content for each phase and things to consider
• Possibility of tying profiles and personas together in Pardot
• A few key email takeaways and checks before you start your program/send your email

View Session Recording

The Future of Marketing is Conversational: Using Pardot + Conversational Marketing to Engage with Buyers in Real Time

During this session, Sean Whiteley highlighted how B2B companies are using Conversational Marketing technologies to convert leads at unprecedented rates by delivering highly-personalized experiences at scale. The old process of form fills and follow-up emails is now an obsolete way of connecting with buyers. By combining Conversational Marketing with other martech tools like Salesforce and Pardot, you can identify and engage high-intent visitors with real-time conversations directly on your website. You can even set up alerts so you never miss when a target account is browsing! Watch the on-demand session to get an inside look at the power of Conversational Marketing and why this movement is taking the B2B market by storm.

View Session Recording

Transform ABM with the Power of the Platform + Fireside Chat with Adam Blitzer

We wrapped up a fantastic 4-days of ParDreamin’ with our closing keynote. Neha Shah, Director, Product Marketing at Salesforce, talked about the power of the platform for ABM and how marketing transformation is not an option. We’ll see marketers double down on ABM because it’s successful. 80% of marketers say it improves customer lifetime value and 86% say it improves win rates. Customer 360 helps to connect sales, service, and commerce to help keep everything centered around your customer needs. 

Meredith Brown, VP Product Management at Salesforce Pardot talks about how Salesforce and Pardot helps you meet your customers where they are. Advertising Studio delivers relevant ads at the right time. Salesforce CMS serves as a way to provide dynamic content based on buyers needs. Interaction Studio serves up personalized web content, and Pardot delivers relevant and timely emails. Combining all of these tools helps align teams with the ABM strategy, and KPI tracking to give ROI. 

History of Pardot

Michael Kostow, SVP & GM, Salesforce Pardot, and Adam Blitzer, EVP & GM, Salesforce Digital, sat down for a fireside chat and talked about the origins of Pardot.

Pardot started in March 2007, and then went through multiple acquisitions. Pardot was built organically with about 150 employees when it was sold to Exact Target, which was then acquired by Salesforce in 2013.

Exact Target became the underpinning of Marketing Cloud, and Pardot became part of Sales Cloud. Now they are working together. Adam has worked on a variety of products including Marketing, Service, and Sales Cloud. Now he’s leading digital where he can talk about the digital journey and digital transformation as it sits just above the Cloud products.

Thriving from home

Adam talks about how we’ve continued to thrive as marketers while working from home and growing businesses online. Asked what’s next Adam suggested that marketers need to dive into the data and create the “golden record” for their customers. He also thinks omni-channel personalization is next so that you are always seeing the right thing no matter where you are.

Looking toward the future

To close out their chat, Michael asked Adam about Pardot and what he’s most excited about. Adam talked a lot about the community and how he’s most excited about the push into enterprise space with deep cloning of assets and campaigns as well as sandboxes to create a more sustainable environment.

He’s also excited about integrations and the work that has gone on to bring marketing into the platform including the new email editor. Adam also shared his love of the Peloton and the Pardot group, #KeepPardotWeird and join Adam at #judojew for your next ride! 

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who joined ParDreamin’! Join us for encore sessions of our pre-conference workshops. We’ve included some time-zone friendly options and PARDRAGON will give 20% off. Register now at https://www.sercante.com/pardot-training/.

ParDreamin’ sessions kicked off today bringing in over 3,400 people represented across 65 countries. Over the course of the week, we will hear from 58 speakers as they share their Pardot knowledge, telling stories how they utilize the tool to grow their business and keep up with the changes.

Session Highlights

Opening Keynote: Marketers Leading Through Change

Our keynote presenter, Michael Kostow, SVP and general manager of Salesforce Pardot, kicked things off to share how Salesforce is helping customers lead through change by leaning on Salesforce’s core values of Trust, Customer Success, Innovation, and Equality. Carrie Pena, BuildOn, and Gail Moody-Byrd, Noodle.ai, joined Michael Kostow to talk about their journey with Pardot and how it helped lead them through change.

View Recording

Pardot & EDA: Solutioning for Higher Ed

In this session, Michelle Littlefield, 8x Salesforce Certified & Solution Architect, reviewed how Pardot and the Salesforce Data Architecture can work together to bridge the gap between marketing and admissions teams. She discussed strategies for solutioning EDA with Pardot to ensure that segmentation goals can be achieved to establish just-in-time nurturing programs, and how native Pardot tools such as lead scoring and grading can set your recruiting and admissions teams up for greater success and increased yield.

• Lead Strategy: How to decide which architecture model is right for your institution. When thinking about to using leads & contacts or just contacts only, you need to think about what your volume looks like and what your process looks like.
• The Opportunity Object, USE IT! Using Opportunity, Application, and Affiliation Objects cohesively can be extremely effective. Why? You can then use this data for segmentation and automation inside of Pardot.
• Customer Object Integration, consider it. Why? Some of the most valuable information in the recruiting and admissions process lives on the Application object. This data can be used in segmentation, lead scoring & grading, and is likely desired as dynamic content. Pardot cannot see this data without Custom Object Integration.
• Cohesive Solutioning, Gotta have it. Given the challenges in segmentation, and because we know that Pardot can’t see some valuable information on EDA child object, implement automation around your student lifecycle to ensure your records are always aligned at the Contact level for access in Pardot.
• View Session Recording

More than Martech: Wall-to-Wall Automation

Sara McNamara, David Kreitter, and Mike Creuzer took us on a technical journey as they explored how integrating teams & tools can increase the impact your team is making and the visibility you are earning across your business.

• Account Based Marketing. How can we enable easy-to-maintain target account identification in Pardot without a major ABM platform? You might have tools that have native connections that aren’t giving you everything you want, there are ways to dig deeper into the code to connect what you need to give you more powerful ABM data in your platform.
• “Increase speed to lead” by utilizing tools, like Slack, to send out alerts on contact forms or other activities with all the information from Salesforce. Bonus points, you can accept or deny leads, assign leads, and more in Slack directly by integrating Salesforce directly.
• View Session Recording

Syncing Salesforce Custom Objects with Pardot

In this session, Dan Umbro, 3x Salesforce Certified & Co-leader of NH Pardot User Group, took a dive into syncing salesforce custom objects with Pardot.

• Standard Salesforce objects still count as Pardot custom objects.
• So, Pardot Custom objects are any Salesforce standard object that doesn’t natively connect. Pardot natively connects with Leads, Contacts, Campaigns, Campaign Members, Accounts, Opportunities, Tasks, and Users. Worth mentioning again, not all of those are bi-directional syncs as we discussed previously.
• Pardot Custom Objects would be considered any true Salesforce Custom Object or any Salesforce Standard Object that isn’t native to Pardot. So, any standard object not listed to the left.
• View Session Recording

11 Key Insights About the New Pardot Email Builder

Everyone was excited, as Jen Kazin gave attendees an interactive demo of the new Email Builder. Jen reviewed the basics of the builder as well as gave attendees key insights on how to get more out of this impressive, new functionality.

• Pardot users have been clamoring for a more flexible, drop-and-drag, email editor and Salesforce has responded.
• The new Lightning email builder rolled out in October and is now available in all Pardot versions. However, you must have Pardot Lightning, Connected Campaigns, and HML enabled to use it.
• This is the first release of the email builder and it only supports list emails at the moment. It is not available for Engagement Studio, automation rules or Salesforce Engage at the moment. It also does not support snippets, A/B tests, dynamic content, Litmus, or brand styling – yet. It includes some new features like an “Undo” button, sharing across multiple business units, the ability to send the same email multiple times, and a Content Delivery network to efficiently deliver emails at scale.
• You can use the new Email Builder and traditional builder simultaneously, so it’s definitely worth setting up to get a look at current capabilities and get a look into this new experience.
• View Session Recording

Full Funnel Marketing

In this session, Auseh Britt, VP of Growth Marketing at Terminus, talked about the importance of focusing on the entire funnel and shared tips and tactics to help create more opportunities, accelerate deal cycles, and maintaining and growing customers.

• Full funnel is even more important now than ever. We have new tools and capabilities that make this even more actionable.
• Link to State of ABM Report
• View Session Recording

Closing Keynote: Marketing’s Role in Digital Transformation Panel

Andrea Tarrell was joined by panelists Natasha Wetten, Liam Taylor and Jill Carpenter to discuss the unique environment marketing teams are living in due to the current climate. Panelists discussed how digital transformation offers new opportunities for marketers to expand the definition and role of marketing across the entire customer lifecycle, offered tips for articulating the importance of marketing’s role, and shouted out some of their favorite tools. It’s important to really understand the role of marketing in your business and in the client’s journey, to ensure you are leveraging your tools to their full capacity and getting the most out of your data.

• Break out of the mold – it’s very easy to rinse and repeat marketing cycles, but you have to roll up your sleeves, try new things and not be afraid to fail.
• Do your homework – when trying to get higher-ups to support your marketing initiatives, make sure you’ve done some research and can outline all the potential benefits of the changes you are suggesting.
• Ownership. Ownership. Ownership.
• Look at the big picture – As Jill so eloquently said, “Marketing is empathy for the consumer’s situation matched with whatever your company is offering” so remember to look at how marketing touches every part of the customer journey. If it’s not clear to you how marketing touches an area of the customer journey then that’s an area you should be focusing on to figure out how marketing can be infused.
• When it comes to tools, it’s quality not quantity.
• View Session Recording

There are still two days jam-packed full of amazing sessions. If you have not yet registered, don’t worry, we saved you a seat. You can head over to Pardreamin’ website to register and join in on the upcoming sessions as well as access recordings to the past sessions.