Is this your story? You’re not getting enough value from your marketing automation & CRM platforms.

by | Last Updated: Mar 7, 2024 | Blog, Business issues, HubSpot, Pardot | MC Account Engagement

Does this sound familiar? Is this your story?

You use Salesforce and probably bought Pardot (or maybe HubSpot) only to find that you’re not getting enough value.

You’re heavily invested in Salesforce, and thought that your marketing department should use Pardot for marketing automation since it is owned and developed by Salesforce and must integrate and work great with Salesforce. Salesforce and Pardot are world-class, right? So it should be a safe bet to invest in Pardot.

Well, maybe, but these platforms don’t work out-of-the-box to do what you expect or what you need. And frankly Pardot can be very complicated and quirky. You really need to know the ins-and-outs of how to make Pardot work well, and to play nice with syncing data to Salesforce. Otherwise you might as well be using MailChimp.

Are you making the most of MQLs/SQLs? Probably not, and here’s why…

With Pardot and any marketing automation platform you need to layer in systems and processes on top of their built-in features to really get properly qualified leads sent to sales at the right time. Many organizations heavily rely on just ‘form fills’, but aren’t capturing all of the prospect touch points throughout the Buyer’s Journey. This involves a strategic plan for fields, forms, lists, automations, journeys, and more to all work together.

Most organizations fail to plan out and implement the type of well designed system that is required to make marketing automation really fulfill its mission of acquiring, nurturing, and qualifying leads and sending them to sales at just the right time.

How much money and lost opportunity are you losing from inconsistent data collection?

Most organizations don’t have a well planned strategy for data capture and properly syncing data between Pardot and Salesforce, or they just haven’t executed it completely. Most instances of Pardot get initially set up as some type of ‘Quick Start’ package that only includes the ‘bare bones’, but soon you find that you aren’t capturing the kind of data you need, and it isn’t syncing properly with Salesforce, or the data just isn’t useful enough.

So you find you need to hire a consultant to fix things, and it takes months to organize and implement what you thought you bought Pardot marketing automation for in the first place. Many months later you still aren’t getting the data or reports and dashboards that you need. And you’ve lost countless dollars in opportunity cost.

Is hiring a marketing automation ‘Power User’ who’s ‘done this before’ enough to get where you need to be, and fast enough? Probably not, and here’s why…

You end up hiring internal people, but they don’t have the knowledge or experience to set up the necessary systems for you to do effective marketing at scale. Yes they can probably send out email newsletters, and configure a few things, but they haven’t done this multiple dozens of times so they don’t know best practices of how to set up proper scoring, grading, profiling, email templates, preference centers, lifecycle management, MQL triggers, campaign hierarchy, revenue attribution, and so forth.

Maybe you’ve even tried hiring a contractor or independent consultant to fix things, but they are only one person, and even if they had enough experience and could focus enough on your project, they can only do so much in a timely manner so it takes many months to get anything done. And they don’t have the combined breadth and depth of knowledge and experience that an agency has.

Bottom line is you’re not getting enough benefit of what the platform is capable of and that you are paying for, month after month.

Let us help you generate platform ROI. Let us help your story to have a happy ending.

Every lost lead and missed sales opportunity is costing you $$$ by not optimizing.

What is the cost of not addressing and fixing some of your problems? Somewhere at least in the thousands of dollars per month, maybe more.

Not fixing the related problems or optimizing your marketing automation platform, CRM, and marketing and sales processes can result in severe and long term costs.

Costs can be in the form of lost revenue, wasted time, and wasted and burned out human resources.

The cost and risk of engaging with the wrong agency, consultant, or contractor can mean:

  • Lost revenue
  • Spending too much (i.e., paying too much for a consultant)
  • Needing to hire one or more internal full time staff (when otherwise you might not need to)
  • Locking into an unnecessarily long term engagement via annual contract
  • Not using the latest best practices
  • Not meeting your goals
  • Bad or missing data & inaccurate reports
  • Lack of accurate reporting
  • Risk a lot of time wasted
  • Dragging out your goal timeline
  • Overworking and burning out staff
  • Hiring several entities when one could do the job
HubSpot lead generation dashboard

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Certified Consultant/Owner | Jeff Kemp

Marketing Automation & CRM Consultant

hire Jeff Kemp | Marketing Automation & CRM Consultant

I help select and optimize your processes & tech stack for improved marketing & sales effectiveness, operations, and ROI.

My superpowers are Knowledge, Experience, and Business acumen. I enjoy the intersection of working with people, processes, and technology where I can provide leadership and add value.

With over 30 years of marketing and sales experience I've been laser targeted on Marketing Automation for 10 years, seven of those as a Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) Consultant, and also as a Certified Salesforce Administrator and HubSpot Expert. Prior to that I have over 15 years of WordPress development experience and additional roles in sales and marketing management.

Since I've worked with a lot of clients in various industries I've seen several of the same struggles that are common to almost all organizations (as outlined in this article). With each organization and project that I'm involved with I work hard to solve many of those typical problems, plus identifying and solving sometimes unique and complex issues which often involve cleaning up technical debt from legacy systems, and architecting processes and solutions to help organizations set up effective lead management systems and operational efficiencies using best practices and proven methodologies.

I also love dogs :0)

Optimal Business Consulting (OBC) is proud to be a Salesforce Partner. -->More about Jeff & OBC

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