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Community, Community Spotlight, Events, Industry News
November 23, 2021

ParDreamin’ 2021 Demo Jam recap: Products to Extend Pardot

Ambre Juryea-Amole

The final day of ParDreamin’ 2021 kicked off with the second annual Demo Jam, which highlighted sponsors’ products by showing how Pardot customers can extend the capabilities of their technology stack through integration.

Each participant had three minutes to present their product demo. Then, demo jam attendees weighed in with their votes at the end of the session. We crowned the Demo Jam Champion at the end thanks to everyone’s votes and sent a trophy to the winner.

This year’s Demo Jam winner was Feedotter, which was presented by Feedotter Founder Andy Thiemer.

ParDreamin’ Demo Jam rules

Each participant had 3 minutes to demo their product and wow the audience. Then at the end of the Demo Jam, the audience voted for their favorite product. Since Sercante won the 2020 Demo Jam, Adam Erstelle had 5 minutes to present but was not eligible to win the 2021 competition.

2021 ParDreamin’ Demo Jam participants

Sercante’s own Richard Feist and Courtney Cerniglia shared Demo Jam hosting duties and provided welcome comic relief while giving away swag to attendees throughout the competition.

Here’s who presented their products to compete for the best Pardot solution:

SaaScend: Craig Jordan
Qualified: Jeff Ostenson
FeedOtter: Andy Theimer
GetFeedback: Alan MacDougall
Sercante: Adam Erstelle

SaaScend

SaaScend empowers go-to-market teams to hit their ultimate revenue potential by combining revenue operations domain expertise with cutting-edge go-to-market technologies so teams can focus on scaling revenue. With over 300 clients in the last four years, SaaScend is creating a SaaS-plus-services platform for revenue operations, partnering with clients to guide, coach, and manage their go-to-market technology stack for years.

Craig Jordan is the Founder of SaaScend, the RevOps Consulting Firm partnering with SaaS startups to scale and grow their businesses with systems, data, strategy, and people. A revenue operations expert who has worked with over 300 companies, his background includes over 10 years of experience as a marketing leader, entrepreneur, coach, and a technology strategist. Craig is fueled by his passion for guiding go-to-market teams to success and has been a guest speaker for several industry webinars, conferences, and events.

Qualified

Qualified is the conversational sales and marketing platform for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Leading B2B brands like Adobe, Bitly, SurveyMonkey, ThoughtSpot and VMware trust Qualified to grow their pipeline by tapping into their greatest asset — their corporate website — to identify their most valuable buyers, understand their intent, and instantly start a sales conversation. Qualified runs natively on Salesforce and is ranked #1 in its category on the Salesforce AppExchange.

FeedOtter

FeedOtter allows you to create personalized email newsletters and send automated blog emails from Pardot. With built-in templates for newsletters, blog digests, and employee emails, and easy-to-use interface, you can create and send emails in less than 15 minutes.

Andy Theimer is the founder of FeedOtter and enjoys building tech companies, marketing strategies, and anything radio-controlled. Specialties: tech, seo, saas, content marketing, influencer marketing, and marketing automation.

GetFeedback

GetFeedback is an agile CX platform for Salesforce that enables your team to start fast, and think big, so they can focus on what matters most — your customers.

Alan MacDougall is an engineering manager on the GetFeedback platform team handling their most high-value integrations.

Sercante

Sercante offers Pardot and Salesforce consulting, support, and development services. We support growth-minded companies with strategy, technology and execution across every step of the lead-to-revenue process.

Adam Erstelle has 20 years of software and development team leadership experience and a knack for diving into new technologies and learning them quickly. At Sercante, he is the driving force behind all product development initiatives and works with Pardot, Sales Cloud, and Heroku, among other platforms.

ParDreamin 2021 Demo Jam full video replay

You can relive the ParDreamin’ 2021 Demo Jam and all of Rich and Courtney’s regional colloquialisms by watching the full video replay below.

Learn more about extending Pardot

Watch the Demo Jam Replay to see the demos and learn more about using integrations to extend Pardot functionality. However, the ParDreamin’ 2021 Demo Jam includes only a small portion of the seemingly endless ways you can get Pardot to do more so you can reach your goals.

Here are more resources to learn about extending Pardot through integrations:

Have something in mind that you wish Pardot could do but you haven’t found the solution yet? Tell us about it in the comments below or reach out to Sercante Labs to see if we can help.

Community, Community Spotlight, Events
November 16, 2021

ParDreamies Best In Show Pardot Award Winner: Destined

Ambre Juryea-Amole

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.

ParDreamies Categories

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Best in Show category, which recognizes the overall winner among all ParDreamies award submissions. The ParDreamies Best in Show award went to Destined, which was submitted by Tammy Begley and Claudia Hoops.

Best in Show with Destined

Understanding who your prospects are and how they might interact with your brand presents a challenge to even the most seasoned marketers. The team at Destined saw opportunities in that challenge.

The ParDreamies Best in Show award goes to the team at Destined for building a fun icon-driven landing page prospects can use to profile themselves. Prospects use the landing page to provide information about themselves so Destined’s clients can take them on a personalized journey through a Pardot Engagement Studio Program.

Quick Facts:

Automates prospect profiling
Enables easy prospect segmentation
Empowers prospects to tell brands what they’re looking for
Combines Pardot forms, landing pages, scoring and grading, and engagement studio programs

About the award-winning solution

Destined is a premier Salesforce consulting partner based in Australia. They do great work in the Pardot space and have several amazing marketing champions.

With a client from the property industry, the team at Destined workshopped the criteria of an ideal client and put a Pardot grading profile together. As a result, we built an engaging, icons-driven profiling landing page for prospects to self-identify and build their own profiles. Anyone who signs up for the newsletter is added to a welcome journey within Pardot Engagement Studio. The objective of this journey is to build rapport and trust so the prospect profiles can grade them.

They built an easy and engaging way to automate the collection of information rather than for a sales team member to ask these questions over the phone to then find out that the person they are talking to wasn’t ready to buy.

Challenge the team wanted to solve

Australia’s property industry is very competitive. As a property developer, you want to collect as much information as possible about your potential buyers. It is imperative that sales teams can quickly follow up with clients who are ready to buy, have finance approved, and are high budget investors.

At the same time, it likely makes sense to send prospects who are still saving and might be looking to buy in 12+ months on an educational nurture campaign. The profiling page automates the gathering of this information in an engaging way.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

There were no major hurdles to overcome other than coming up with the idea in the first place on how to build an engaging landing page that prospects actually want to complete.

Pardot forms and landing pages helped the team to build an engaging profile page. They used Pardot’s profile feature to build the criteria of the property developer’s ideal client profile. Then, they built automation rules to trigger the grading. And finally, they built a welcome journey as a Pardot Engagement Studio Program with the profile page as a call to action to gather the information from our prospects.

Results after implementing the solution

To date, the team has seen a 34% conversion rate on average. This is for customers who have been put onto the welcome journey and who have profiled themselves and have met the MQL threshold of being the right client.

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.

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.

Community, Community Spotlight, Data Management, Events
November 16, 2021

ParDreamies Social Impact Pardot Award Winner: Lexipol

Ambre Juryea-Amole

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Social Impact category, which recognizes teams that utilize Pardot to affect positive social change. The ParDreamies Social Impact award went to Lexipol, which was submitted by Miriam Childs and Julian Janssen.

Lexipol is a Texas-based company that provides policy manuals, training bulletins, and consulting services to law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and other public safety departments.

The team at Lexipol sprang into action in March 2020 and utilized Pardot to launch a Coronavirus Learning & Policy Center. This was a resource designed to give public safety agencies free access to industry-specific COVID-19 online learning courses, policies and news to assist in their response on the front lines of the pandemic and to help their communities during a particularly challenging time.

To add an extra hurdle, the company was evolving from a recent merger. This project represented one of the first times they offered these solutions under one brand, which in turn helped demonstrate how the merged entities could add value and deliver on their brand promise.

Quick facts:

Pardot was critical in promoting and tracking success.
List emails and social posts informed the market of the site, highlighting critical information via dynamic segmentation.
Pardot files hosted and tracked policy documents available on the microsite.
Scoring and connected campaigns allowed leveraging of interaction data.
Per Einstein AI campaign influence, these efforts influenced 2,445 opportunities to date.

Challenge the team wanted to solve

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lexipol, the leader in policy, training and wellness support for public safety and local government, recognized the urgent need for pandemic-related resources in public safety agencies who were tasked with executing many of the public health responses necessary in the pandemic. The team at Lexipol investigated opportunities to help public servants safely succeed in helping their communities during a particularly challenging time.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

Internally, Lexipol innovated by pooling relevant resources across product lines, consolidating them in a unified place and providing free access to any agency, whether or not they were a current customer. Evolving from a recent merger, this project represented one of the first times they offered these solutions under one brand. In turn, the project demonstrates how Lexipol uniquely provides comprehensive solutions to help agencies serve their communities in times of critical stress.

Results after implementing the solution

Compiling resources across systems and unifying access through a free online environment presented a challenge. However, the product was incredibly successful in helping first responders access critical resources to address the challenges of the pandemic.

List emails and social posts informed first responders of the site, and they highlighted critical information via dynamic segmentation. Additionally, scoring and connected campaigns allowed leveraging of interaction data to help sales and services teams follow up with agencies that benefited from the resource. This process contributed significantly to converting prospects to customers while helping existing customers adopt additional solutions.

Over the course of the campaign, over 13,000 courses were accessed, 17,000 policies downloaded, and 1,700+ agency leaders requested online learning access be set up for their agency. Per Einstein attribution’s campaign influence model, these efforts influenced 2,445 opportunities to date.

Learn more and keep it going

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.

Community, Community Spotlight, Events
November 15, 2021

ParDreamies Grassroots Innovation Pardot Award Winner: BrandEd Holdings

Ambre Juryea-Amole

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

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

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.

Community, Community Spotlight, Events
November 15, 2021

Nonprofits on Salesforce: How to Leverage Pardot for Marketing and More

Ambre Juryea-Amole

Nonprofits that are using Salesforce have much to gain by incorporating Pardot into their marketing strategy.

But, isn’t Pardot only meant for teams following a B2B marketing strategy? While Pardot is built in a way that’s ideal for B2B marketers, lots of nonprofits follow a strategy that’s similar to deliver a diverse range of services to communities.

Here’s how nonprofits of many shapes and sizes use Pardot to drive marketing, fundraising, and volunteer management strategies.

Why use Pardot instead of other marketing automation platforms?

Missions of all nonprofit organizations of the world are as diverse as the communities they serve. With that in mind, the marketing automation platform you choose must meet the specific needs of your team. You may already be using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or HubSpot. And migrating to Pardot may be the thing you’ve been looking for to scale your marketing efforts and open departmental silos at your organization.

Pardot is a lead generation and nurturing tool that falls under the Salesforce umbrella.

Here are three main questions you should ask yourself when determining if Pardot is right for your organization.

Does your organization already have a Salesforce org in place?
What is your marketing team trying to achieve?
What resources are available to your organization?

Take a few minutes to consider these questions. Pardot is a powerful tool, but it can only make teams successful when it’s the right tool for the job.

Pardot for nonprofits on Salesforce

If your organization is already a Salesforce customer, then using Pardot for marketing may be the right choice for you. Pardot is built on the Salesforce platform. That means, it’s fairly easy to pass data from Pardot to other Salesforce clouds that are connected to your org.

One of the advantages of using a combination of Salesforce clouds is the ability to view Salesforce as the single source of truth when checking on the health of your organization. It also makes it easy to gather valuable reporting data you can use to show the results of your work and the impact your organization has on the community.

You can see Pardot data inside other Salesforce products, like Sales Cloud, Nonprofit Success Pack, Nonprofit Cloud. Philanthropy Cloud, and Education Cloud. This creates a connection between marketing and other teams at your organization, whether they’re fundraising, sales, or volunteer recruiting teams.

For example, content from Pardot is available inside Salesforce. That means your marketing team can control branding and content usage in other departments and create consistent experiences for everyone.

However, you can still use Pardot at your nonprofit organization if you’re not on Salesforce. Check out this article to learn more.

What Pardot does for nonprofit marketing teams

Pardot works great for small teams, which means it may be ideal for smaller nonprofits with limited resources. Beyond connecting teams that use Salesforce by eliminating data silos, Pardot provides nonprofits with the tools they need to nurture prospects throughout long engagement cycles.

Marketers at nonprofits use Pardot for many reasons. But here are the main ones:

Fundraising and donor communications

Many nonprofits rely on individuals and companies to provide the funding they need to accomplish their organizational mission. Pardot allows nonprofits to track engagement with prospective and existing donors so they can see the results of specific marketing campaigns. They can adjust their marketing strategies to focus on the types of campaigns that result in the greatest fundraising success.

The engagements these nonprofits track are related to content and email marketing efforts. Nonprofit organizations leverage their website, social media, Pardot landing pages, paid advertisements and other marketing channels to generate interest in their organization.

Pardot collects engagement data as people interact with the organization’s content. After nurturing prospective donors for an extended period of time, fundraising teams can use the engagement data reporting to pinpoint the most interested individuals and companies. Then, they can swoop in at the perfect time because they know when prospective donors are most likely to make a donation. And, they have rich data they can use for impact reporting and budget justification.

Volunteer recruitment and management

Recruiting volunteers and managing the day-to-day operations of a nonprofit organization is no easy task. In general, the teams at nonprofits wear many hats and do what they do more out of passion than pay grade. That’s where Pardot comes in. It’s a versatile tool built to ease the burden for small marketing teams with limited resources.

Pardot can help to recruit and manage volunteers for nonprofits similar to the way it tracks prospective donors. You can pull volunteers into Pardot by uploading their information through a .csv file or syncing to a custom field in Salesforce.

You can also gather prospective volunteer data in Pardot. To do that, you create a conversion point, like a form on a ‘Become a Volunteer’ page on your website. Then, create a Pardot campaign for that form so you know people in that campaign have interest in volunteering for your organization.

Once they decide to start volunteering, you can use Pardot for onboarding and to keep them informed and engaged after they join. Pardot Engagement Studio allows you to create automated journeys for your volunteers. Then, they get the communications they need in the right place and at the right time based on engagement activity.

You can even track whether or not volunteers are getting proper training. For example, using a Pardot Engagement Studio Program, you can send emails containing training sessions recorded through Zoom over a 30-day period for new volunteers as they join your organization. The Pardot-Zoom integration allows you to see whether or not new volunteers watch the training videos. Then, you can understand the effectiveness of the training and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Fundraising events

Nonprofits use fundraising events to get the community involved by promoting a culture of giving. These events are often the culmination of all the hard work teams endure throughout the year, and they drive budgetary allocations for the entire organization.

Things have changed in recent years for nonprofit organizations that use event-based fundraising tactics. Giving the option to participate in events virtually has become commonplace and essential for many organizations. That’s where Pardot becomes a game-changer.

Pardot is ideal for all types of events — in person, virtual, or hybrid. You can track prospect engagement in all of these situations using Pardot, and marketing automation makes it easy to build a journey that builds excitement while providing essential information for your event.

But how can you track in-person event attendance, you ask? Since Pardot is built on the Salesforce platform, you can enlist the help of a Salesforce developer to build custom apps. Then, in-person attendees can use the app to check in to the event and specific presentations. Or, you can use a third-party event platform to host a hybrid event. This allows you to pull engagement data from the platform into Pardot through integrations.

Resources for nonprofits marketing with Pardot

Now that you know how Pardot works for marketing teams at nonprofits, you can start thinking about your next steps. Evaluate your current marketing processes to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where there are opportunities for improvement. Then, you can start to explore Pardot to weigh it against other marketing automation tools available and see if it’s a good fit.

Keep it going with these resources to learn more about nonprofit marketing with Pardot:

Tell us how your organization is handling marketing and donor communications in the comments. And reach out to Sercante to see if Pardot is the right option to take your organizational goals to the next level.

Community, Community Spotlight, Data Management, Events
November 12, 2021

ParDreamies Extending Pardot Award Winner: LexisNexis Canada

Ambre Juryea-Amole

The ParDreamin’ team created five categories to honor the teams behind the magic:

Here’s the solution that won the ParDreamies 2021 Pardot award for the Extending Pardot category, which recognizes API-driven solutions.

Extending Pardot with LexisNexis Canada

The team at LexisNexis Canada, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics tools, was encountering the problem related to siloed data. So, they developed a solution to pull product subscription information into Pardot. This allows the team’s marketers to pull their own campaign lists, which reduces list turnaround time and miscommunication errors. They can now see fresh data for 12 products, and drill down to “module level” subscriptions for their two flagship products.

Quick Facts:

The Pardot v4 Batch Import API
Pardot custom fields
Developers delivered work in four waves
Automated QA testing
Formal refactoring phase
Navigated Pardot switch to OAuth

Challenge the team wanted to solve

For as long as LexisNexis Canada had a marketing automation tool, they relied on an external data team to pull campaign lists. However, 30% of their requests were simple product status updates, like “I want a list of everyone who cancelled their subscription to Product X, within geography Y.” The team’s marketing director, Collin Smith, wanted to put product subscription information into Pardot, thus allowing marketers to pull their own campaign lists. The team aimed to reduce list turnaround time and decrease miscommunication errors.

Hurdles they overcame during the project

The main obstacle: handling risks and complexity. Prior to this project start, this exact mission was attempted in the past. And it failed. The systems at LexisNexis Canada are complex because they’ve been in business so long (since before 1995, which is ancient for a software company!).

The team handled the risks and complexity of the project by delivering work in waves with close involvement from marketing stakeholders.

Other major obstacles included discovering which non-obvious data points were vital for the project, handling the Pardot switch to OAuth, and dealing with users who change their email addresses.

Results after implementing the solution

The team at LexisNexis Canada unlocked the ability to see 81,000 additional subscription data points inside Pardot. Marketers from the company can also see 45,000 “subscription modules” and 32,000 extra demographic details about Pardot prospects. This is information that was hidden from them before the solution implementation.

Marketing managers and coordinators can now create lists on their own in under ten minutes. This is in contrast with the old way that took three days and involved an external team.

The Pardot v4 Batch Import API was key to getting this work done.

The project was submitted by Jacob Filipp, and the team handling the project included:

Programming – Alla Fradkin
Database work – Corey Heasley
Marketing director – Collin Smith

Learn more and keep it going

Going to try this on your own? Tell us about it in the comments or reach out to Sercante for help along the way.

Community Spotlight

ParDreamin’ Demo Jam rules

2021 ParDreamin’ Demo Jam participants

SaaScend

Qualified

FeedOtter

GetFeedback

Sercante

ParDreamin 2021 Demo Jam full video replay

Learn more about extending Pardot

ParDreamies Categories

Best in Show with Destined

About the award-winning solution

Challenge the team wanted to solve

Hurdles they overcame during the project

Results after implementing the solution

Learn more and keep it going

Social Impact with Lexipol

Learn more and keep it going

Grassroots innovation with BrandEd

Learn more and keep it going

Why use Pardot instead of other marketing automation platforms?

Pardot for nonprofits on Salesforce

What Pardot does for nonprofit marketing teams

Fundraising and donor communications

Volunteer recruitment and management

Fundraising events

Resources for nonprofits marketing with Pardot

Extending Pardot with LexisNexis Canada

Learn more and keep it going