The Secret to Sales & Marketing Alignment in Pardot

Either they’re butting heads, or working in complete siloes, neither of which is going to yield the best results. But sales and marketing alignment is possible if both teams can focus on what matters: showing measurable campaign impact through reliable reporting and attribution.

The better Marketing can showcase the quality and volume of leads passed to Sales, the more likely it is that the sales team is receptive and responsive to those leads. If they know they’re likely to close, they’re going to spend their valuable time following up. The goal of any sales team is, naturally, to make sales!

But it works the other way around too.

The better Sales can correctly record and allocate sales value and other key metrics to Marketing, the better informed the team is to review and adjust what classifies a qualified lead (or not) in the first place, and which campaigns and channels are delivering the best ROI. Likewise, any feedback on why leads aren’t closing is invaluable for the marketing team to change models like lead scoring.

Doing all of this is simpler than ever, thanks to automation software that removes the need for manual labour via email communication or spreadsheets.

So what’s at the root of the disconnect?

It’s easy to paint a perfect picture of sales and marketing alignment but in reality, if it were easy to achieve, there wouldn’t be a problem!

All marketing managers are hellbent on showing impact and justifying the necessity of their marketing team and, importantly, marketing budget. Demonstrating positive return on investment is the ultimate goal of all their activities and they’re under pressure from the board to show it.

However, in an age of digital marketing technologies, the right skillset is needed to ensure web tracking, lead scoring, attribution modelling, and reporting processes are in place to allow for reliable measurement. These skills are difficult to recruit for, and new processes can be tricky to implement.

On the flip side, sales teams aren’t purposefully withholding information from Marketing. More often than not, they’re just as time-poor, often travelling long hours for events and meetings, and have demanding targets to hit.

With leading CRMs such as Sales Cloud, it’s straightforward for salespeople to input basic information after interacting with a contact and some of this can be automated too, but providing detail or metrics in a way that is useful to Marketing and can be linked to marketing campaigns requires extra thought.

What’s the secret to sales & marketing alignment?

For businesses already using Pardot and Sales Cloud, there’s no better way to align teams than using B2B Marketing Analytics; a Salesforce CRM app that combines Pardot and Sales Cloud data in a single place.

B2BMA is available to Account Engagement customers with Plus, Advanced, Premium editions, and Salesforce Enterprise edition or higher.

The caveat is, B2BMA is only useful if you have the foundations in place and the data you need to power those reporting dashboards you create.

To get a true picture of your marketing landscape, you need to be able to confidently say that the data you’re pulling into reports is right. No more awkward meetings with contradictory metrics.

This means:

• Getting campaigns and Salesforce Lead data in good working order - with consistent values, campaign tracking, great data segmentation, and reliable Campaign Member Statuses.

• Qualifying and assigning prospects correctly - using lead scoring, grading, and lead assignment to handle your prospects and marketing-qualified leads in a timely but tailored manner.

• Putting in place attribution modelling that’s dependent on reliable tracking - optimising all customer touchpoints with UTM parameters, capturing multi-touch data, and alignment in tracking between paid and non-paid platforms.

• Tailoring default dashboards - minimising the need to create custom dashboards if out-of-the-box reports will do the job.

• Creating custom dashboards in B2BMA - where needed, shaping custom reports to display easy-to-read visuals of lead lifecycle, sales, and other KPIs that both marketing and sales teams rely on.

• Keeping the future in mind - there will always be an opportunity to streamline or scale further so any work you do to get B2BMA working perfectly needs to account for potential changes i.e. Business Units.

Oh, is that all? You might be eye-rolling at your screen right now.

Get started with B2BMA Nirvana by MarCloud 

The good news is, MarCloud is so used to handling these exact actions for clients that we’ve put together a framework covering every area of Account Engagement. B2BMA Nirvana by MarCloud can take you to the highest state of Salesforce marketing and a place of complete sales and marketing transparency.

We don’t need to attempt everything all at once, either. The first step is an audit of your account(s), which will uncover any sync issues, broken data, and so on. We’ll determine where you are on the path to marketing nirvana right now, then suggest the best areas to address as priorities.

Then, even as we make gradual improvements in your Pardot account, you’ll be in a better place to align with Sales Cloud users. You might not reach B2BMA Nirvana overnight but the sales team will notice the progress in how both of you liaise and report on sales and marketing activity.

So, if your business is one of the many struggling to get sales and marketing teams on the same page, get in touch for a Pardot account audit today.