What’s the key to maximizing revenue for most organizations? Aligning marketing and sales efforts, particularly when it comes to lead management.
The Power of Pardot
That’s why Salesforce has made sure that its marketing automation platform, Pardot, integrates closely with the Sales Cloud platform. Thanks to this seamless integration, sales teams who work primarily within Sales Cloud have clear visibility into the marketing activities and engagement surrounding individual prospects.
In fact, a salesperson can see whether a lead/contact has:
- Been sent a Pardot email
- Opened a Pardot email
- Clicked on a Pardot tracked link
- Submitted a form to Pardot
- Downloaded a file hosted by Pardot
- Viewed a specific page on your website
As you can see, this type of insight into someone’s engagement with your digital channels can be incredibly valuable to your sales team. It can fuel more relevant discussions – accelerating and increasing the likelihood of closing a deal.
Wait … What About Indirect Sales Channels?
Obviously, this is great for organizations that leverage a direct sales team. But what if your organization primarily sells through partners, such as independent dealers? In this scenario, Pardot can help nurture leads until they are ready to be passed along to a given partner. However, at that point, your partner won’t typically have access to the same rich insights that a direct sales team would.
Enter Salesforce Community Cloud
Increasingly, partners are using communities built upon the Salesforce Community Cloud to get access to leads and opportunities. This platform allows partners to be assigned leads electronically, enabling them to manage lead and opportunity records directly.
But out of the box, the same functionality that allows salespersons to access Pardot marketing activities for a given lead is not available to partners accessing these records through a partner community. Now what?
Bring It All Together with a Custom Component
Fortunately, Pardot has provided an API that enables activity records to be queried from an outside system. In fact, Sundog recently developed a custom component to do just that, using Visualforce and leveraging the Pardot API. It enables the Pardot activities to be viewed on a lead or contact record within the partner community.
Example of Lead/Contact View
With this custom component, partners can now gain the same rich insights into a given prospect’s engagement with different marketing campaigns and assets. So even if you have indirect sales channels, that means you can see direct results. Create relevant discussions. And continue a buying journey that begins with corporate marketing – and goes further than ever.
Want to know more about the tools and tech involved? Just ask. We’d love to help.
