What are the best practices for integrating Pardot and Salesforce to improve your marketing automation?

Although bi-directional sync is important to keep systems aligned, I would also caution against syncing every single piece of data. There are some elements of early, top of funnel, that may be valuable (and usable) in your marketing automation (i.e. Pardot, in this case), but not relevant for down funnel (i.e. Salesforce Revenue Cloud, for example). Too often we dilute the data in the CRM with data that is irrelevant from a prospecting or sales perspective.

End-to-end process mapping from marketing to sales (and then to post-sales, renewals, expansions) is critical to ensure that there are no broken hand-off's, misaligned definitions, or conflicting views of the customer. This mapping should include terminology and definitions as well so that the team is speaking the same language and looking at the data within the system the same way.

We map marketing and sales processes end-to-end. Integrated systems and aligned definitions ensure seamless hand-offs. This clarity of workflow, metrics, and language enables efficient collaboration. Our teams have full visibility into the prospect journey. Smooth transitions between phases drive better results.

Lead scoring is one area where I see companies either not leverage fully - or not leverage at all. Lead scoring helps to prioritize the best leads and get them into to the right people on your team - as quickly as possible. It also prevents your sales team from wasting time on leads that are least likely to convert, enabling a more viable and predictable pipeline, but also better conversion rates.

we use lead scoring and assignment rules to optimize lead management between marketing and sales. By scoring leads on engagement and grading on firmographics, we can prioritize and assign properly. Clear definitions and automation enable quick, aligned follow-up. This has improved coordination and conversions.

Customizing analytics enables continuous improvement. At my company, we integrate marketing and sales data into custom dashboards. This provides visibility into the customer journey and marketing ROI. We review the dashboards regularly to identify optimization opportunities. For example, we improved lead scoring based on analysis of conversions by stage. Optimizing the data and processes between marketing and sales drives growth.

Integrations between all of the systems in your tech stack enables automation which leads to efficiency. Having the data aligned within all of your systems in real time allows the business to have that "single view of the business" that we all strive for. Integrations and automation can also minimize errors from manual inputs, but also save time (and frustration) from your sales team (and others) from having to do manual, repetitive data entry.

Be careful. Just because an integration only takes a few clicks to set up initially, doesn't mean it will be easy to maintain in the long run. Integrations gone bad can wreak havoc on your data, systems, processes, and team.

Another important thing to consider is integrating two robust platforms like Pardot and Salesforce necessitates a new set of skills and understandings for your marketing and sales teams. Staff members need to be trained not just on how each individual tool works, but also how they interact with each other.