It’s 3x in a row now, and something to celebrate: Gartner positioned Salesforce as a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management!
Gartner on Salesforce & Pardot
Here are some highlights of the report analysis and findings:
- Salesforce is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant.
- Its Pardot product focuses on aligning marketing and sales teams through personalized lead management and multichannel engagement. Salesforce Pardot serves customers in every region.
- Customers overwhelmingly use Pardot for B2B use cases in large organizations managing lead databases with enterprise scale.
- In 2020, Salesforce added Einstein Attribution, an ML-based model, to help marketers better allocate campaign touchpoints.
- On the roadmap for 2020, Salesforce plans to enhance the ability of large, complex organizations to view consolidated engagement insights for customers of multiple business units.
- It also plans to add native integration with Salesforce CMS and bolster account-based personalization with new analytics applications.
Gartner on Salesforce (Pardot’s) Strengths
- “Marketing strategy and execution: Salesforce targets a wide range of roles within organisations, conveying its understanding of how technology can align often competing marketing, sales and IT team goals. It effectively communicates Pardot’s appeal to companies across multiple verticals, including industry-specific solutions for financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and media.”
- “Pragmatic AI: Pardot Einstein predictive models infuse Pardot’s feature set, powering lead and behavioral scoring, as well as delivering real-time engagement insights to help marketing and sales optimize campaigns.”
- Workflow capabilities: Engagement Studio, Pardot’s journey design tool, facilitates the creation of customer communications through an intuitive UI. Einstein AI-driven insights can help marketers make dynamic changes to in-progress journeys.”
Even better if…
Gartner also mentioned a few of Salesforce / Pardot’s short-comings. While we do not disagree with these insights, we also have ways around them, minimising their impact for customers:
- Service and support: Gartner clients and Peer Insights users reported inconsistencies in terms of customer success, both pre- and post-implementation. In particular, they were critical of the quality of technical support and the timeliness of the vendor’s response.
- Reporting capabilities: Gartner Peer Insights users and Gartner clients noted challenges with Salesforce Pardot’s reporting and analytics functionality, pointing to hurdles they experienced around flexibility, dashboard customisation and overall usability.
- Sales execution/pricing: Salesforce Pardot offers three-tiered, edition-based pricing, each starting with 10,000 database contacts. As with other vendors, purchasing additional contacts significantly drives up the cost of large implementations, particularly among the enterprises with sizeable databases that Salesforce targets.
CloudAnalysts’ Commentary on Gartner’s mentioned shortcomings
Re 1. As Salesforce Pardot consultants, we are somewhat unique in that we focus on your business success rather than merely the technical implementation. That’s why we aim for longer term relationships with our clients, and help them to progressively build out functionality on a roadmap, while creating a manageable rate of change for its employees to ensure good adoption.
Re 2. With Pardot being increasingly under the Salesforce roof, the issue of reporting is mostly resolved. Past clients may still need to set themselves up with the new tools and functionality that enables this improved reporting in Salesforce. Contact us to discuss your reporting needs. We can help you get more of the reporting you want.
Re 3. I was shocked recently to see how expensive some of the way-more basic, standalone email packages (ConstantContact, Mailchimp etc) get, when you have a sizeable list. Yes, they do at times cost more than Pardot. As well, as consultants we have become verrry clever on how to manage prospects in Pardot so as to minimise your cost. Let us tell you about it in a consulting engagement. Ask us about Pardot savings and help you bring better ROI from your Salesforce investment.
Share Their Success
Want to learn more about how CloudAnalysts can help you use Pardot to ensure your sales and marketing teams achieve their goals? Contact us.
Update: Pardot is renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement as of April 5, 2022.
