Speaker 0:
Oh, I got you.

Speaker 1:
Um, yeah.

Speaker 0:
Hello, everyone. We’re gonna give everybody a quick minute to hop in here for the session.

Speaker 1:
Check one two. Can everyone hear me okay?

Speaker 0:
Awesome. Thank you guys for being awesome and letting us know that you can hear us.

Speaker 1:
Perfect.

Speaker 0:
Alright. So we’ll go ahead and get started. Um, welcome everyone to MarDreamin. Good afternoon if you are afternoon if you are on Central or the East time or if you’re a little behind us and had a late start. Um, good morning still. Uh, my name is Amanda Rhodes. I’m from Sercante, and I will be moderating today’s session. So it’s a pinned message as well, but just a quick reminder, yes, these sessions are recorded and will be available on demand after MarDreamin is over. We will also be following up with them via email. And if you’d like a different track, you can click change track in the bottom left or click on agenda at the top to find a different session, but I’m sure you’re gonna wanna stick around to hear our lovely speaker here. Uh, I wanna introduce you guys to Ryan Khamisa, and he’s going to tell us everything we need to know about how we can fully maximize our Pardot investment. Ryan, take it away.

Speaker 1:
Thank you so much. And hello, everybody, all of our MarDreamin participants. Wonderful to be here and speak with you all today. Yes. My name is Ryan Khamisa. I’m a cofounder at Cloudtegic. Um, here to talk all things maximizing your investment. You’ve made the decision to purchase this technology. Now what’s the next step, right? Maybe we’re growing in our marketing journey as an individual professional, or our team is rolling these things out. So really here to provide the next step, uh, some tips and tricks along the way. So very excited to be with you all. And we got an action-packed twenty-five minutes, so stick with me. There’s a lot to cover. Um, but, yeah, any questions just throw them in the chat. Quick shout-out to the sponsors as you’ve probably already seen on a couple of slide decks from previous sessions, but it’s really wonderful for all these folks to step in and make things like this happen. I absolutely adore the Salesforce partner community and the community at large of people just bringing in their best practices. So it’s wonderful to see this.

Okay. What is Pardot Account Engagement? MK, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. I’m an old soul when it comes to marketing automation. I still call it Pardot. Old habits die hard. Uh, but what does it do? What is this supposed to do for me? Well, it’s a revenue tool. Pardot’s a revenue tool designed to really do four things. And the four steps to full utilization are capture, nurture, automate, report. Capture, nurture, automate, report. Where are my revenue-driving leads coming from? How are you finding me, and where are you converting? And then once you come over the line, how do I uniquely educate you, and are you the persona that fits that right model? Beyond that, leaning into the technology to automate the process — marketing automation, right? So I wanna make sure there’s anything with lead assignment, routing, scoring, grading. If this happens, then that happens. So it’s a chance to get kind of exciting and into the weeds a little bit. And then reporting. I have to bring everything full circle. I can’t justify my investment or the time I spent on activities if I can’t show that through revenue reporting and KPIs. So very important that we bring these all together at the end for that capture, nurture, automate, report. And we’re gonna talk about those four pillars today over the ten steps that we go through.

So just a glossary of topics that we’re gonna hit today in order. A little setup checklist we’re gonna dive into, and then as you see here, there’s some of the main topics, but you’ll have this as a takeaway post-show.

Okay. Great. So what we’re looking at here is our first starter setup checklist. It’s a great saying of, okay. Where am I and where do I wanna be? Well, if I don’t have any of these checked, I need to start here. This is a non-negotiable. We’ve gotta get this done. So making sure some of you old-school folks are up on the Pardot Lightning app, super important. As well as the V2 connector — wanna make sure we’re getting all the updates that Salesforce Pardot has to offer.

Sitting over to the right, our web tracking and our CNAMEs. Right? So who are the prospects coming to our website? And then beyond that, our tracker domains and making sure our marketed branded links actually look like they’re coming from our company. Deliverability settings — the proper include statement on SPF records anytime you’re getting into the spam folder or seeing some bounces, as well as DKIM or DMARC needs. Below that, the IP warming. So for brand new to Pardot, are we going through an IP warming exercise, sending good email right out of the gate to build our reputation?

And then the folder structure and asset nomenclature. We’ll get more into that in a little bit, but super important. If we don’t have a strategy around that or at least a V1 idea, we definitely wanna roll that out. And then the last piece there, just the HTTPS enablement. So anything I wanna create moving forward will certainly be secure.

So if you haven’t yet, if you’re missing one checkmark on this page here, definitely go back. It’s also just a good refresher to say, hey, do I have everything connected the right way?

Okay. Time to start. So phase one, step one of the ten-step program is data. The old saying of garbage in, garbage out. You’re only as good as your data — insert tagline there. It’s really true. We’re only as good as our data. So it’s good to understand what our data challenges are. Where are things coming from today? Are we allowing duplicates in from forms? Maybe it’s the sales folks inputting bad data in from an event or a trade show, something like that. Okay. Well, what do I need to put up as a stopgap to make sure that I have the data I need to be successful? And ultimately, prioritizing the data for moving forward. This is the way we’ve always done it? Great. Let’s change that. Let’s have a new strategy moving forward to make sure that new clean data is coming in. That’s the data that we need again to do our jobs better.

Outside of fixing the data, it’s really good to just do an assessment of where you’re at. Hey. We haven’t scrubbed our list in a year or two. Okay. Maybe we can create a dynamic list based off inactivity, something like that, that will allow me to say where I’m at with data. And then on the Salesforce side, field integrity and formatting inside Salesforce. Do I have a picklist? Is this a radio button? Understanding what I have in Salesforce and what I can work with from a data perspective. And the last bullet here is just for any enrichment tools. We work with a lot of clients who say, yeah, my data’s bad, or maybe we’re using things like ZoomInfo, InsideView, Clearbit, just to enrich or append the data that we already have. Maybe it’s an ABM model or a cross-sell/upsell functionality. We’re looking to go wide and deep in an account. It’s really great to have an enrichment tool like ZoomInfo.

Segmentation. I love segmentation. It is super important to me in understanding who am I talking to and why. Don’t think this is a tool that’s just made for batch and blast. That’s definitely one part of it, but separate relevant tracks are always fun. So how do I build my list? Well, we can do that through data that we just talked about in CRM. I can pull that in through fields and build my ideal list dynamically. Again, marketing automation, leaning into my investment.

Do we have written buyer personas? Who signs the dotted line for us? Or who’s part of this economic influence as part of this persona so I can put those into lists? Also the structure — I wanna make sure that, hey, if I’m going to message the CEO and maybe I also message the marketing manager, would they get the same message? I’m not sure. So it’s a good idea to segment appropriately based off the quality of the messaging and the content that we’re sending them.

Segmentation rules are always fun. Again, leaning into the automations. I wanna make sure that we always have those criteria-based segments. This is also a really great key feature to pull out when we’re talking about email preference centers and, again, being able to opt into more options for our different audiences.

I talked earlier about having to answer marketing’s most important question, which is: what’s working for me and what’s not working for me? When I go to create a Pardot asset, say it’s an email — in this case, well, it’s gonna ask me what’s the name of this asset, what folder does it live in, and then the third one is what campaign is this associated to? Pardot kind of slyly forces you into that first-touch reporting. Okay. Great. Well, I wanna know where my revenue-driving leads are actually coming from. How are people finding me? Maybe it’s on a LinkedIn ad. Maybe it’s through a contact us form on our website. So it’s really good to understand where they’re coming from among those different channels and sources. I wanna tag those to campaigns in Salesforce. Hey. We wanna do a PPC ad. Maybe we wanna do an event as well with a kiosk mode sign-up. Okay. Great. Let’s figure that out, and let’s definitely tie those to campaigns.

I always like to understand the why behind why people are converting. What’s the reason? Everything I wanna do is obviously revenue-focused — Pardot being that revenue tool. But identifying the why of where they’re coming in from and that lead source. And then beyond that, just tracking all those campaigns that are specific to that first-touch data.

Conversions, forms, form handlers, progressive profiling — all the kind of fun stuff. This capture, nurture, automate piece. We’re still on that capture side of it. So I wanna make sure that when you come to a landing page or I’m sending you an email, I want that page optimized for that capture. So what does that mean? Less is more certainly. I don’t wanna fill out maybe ten conversion fields. I think five or less is usually pretty optimal. But definitely wanna make sure that we have good forms in place and we’re capturing the right data.

And then optimizing the landing pages. If that email comes through, I want that look and feel to translate into the landing page, and it’s driving me clearly and easily into that conversion point through that form.

Progressive profiling — wonderful use. You don’t get it with handlers, but it’s wonderful to use with Pardot forms. Again, some people kinda get hung up on the styling of it, but really it’s great to eliminate as much as we can. Less is more in that conversion. Also hidden fields are super cool. Hey. If you fill this out, great. Now I want one more piece of information from you so I can qualify this lead even further.

And then auto actions and automations on the backend. Hey. You’ve come over. Now what? What’s the next step? Okay. I’ve got you. So conditional completion actions — do I wanna adjust score, grade, add to list? All kinds of fun stuff that we can do with Pardot forms.

Multiple nurture campaigns. We talked a little bit about segmentation in the beginning. I talked about separate relevant tracks. Pardot does more than just list emails. The wonderful Engagement Studio canvas that you all have access to today is begging to be used in a myriad of ways. I would say anyone managing a relationship can benefit from understanding Pardot or even using it. Maybe that’s our renewals team. Maybe that’s our customer success team. So it’s like, okay. Well, how can I continue to leverage multiple nurtures?

I like to set objectives. When I think of a nurture program, I think of a goal. I want you to convert. I want you to buy. I want something here to happen so I can make a report out of that or understand what’s working and what’s not working for me. By defining the audience, I can really say, okay. Great. This persona gets this message for this specific product, and it has this criteria. This is what you’re going to get. This is what I wanna push you toward.

But then you can get a little bit of a gray area. We don’t wanna be too salesy. We wanna provide value — uniquely educating. You’re different. How you sell and how you market is different. So understanding what the goal is — that’s super important — and how we speak to our audience.

Beyond that, the timeline of saying, okay. Great. How do I wanna track this? We like to date-stamp all of our things. Making sure that we have date stamps on our campaigns. But we say, okay. We’re gonna run this nurture for the next six weeks. It’s gonna have this many emails. We’re gonna create this different logic. Or maybe it’s an always-on campaign or an always-on drip campaign or six-month nurture campaign. But I love having multiple nurtures running so I can see more things like campaign influence and some other reporting, which we’ll talk about a little bit later.

Sales and marketing alignment. Not so much a step in leveraging the technology, but Pardot is great as an execution tool. It really needs to be strategic. If we don’t have strategy in how we approach this, we’re gonna get lost in the sauce or get complacent very fast. So it’s great to have sales and marketing alignment — team collaboration to meet revenue goals. Pardot being the revenue tool. Are we influencing revenue on the marketing side?

It’s always great to evaluate what your tech stack is. What’s sales using? How are they reaching out to their prospects one-on-one? When does marketing come into the fold? When do they exit the conversation? So always good to understand how the sales team and marketing team are leveraging their tech stack.

Having an SLA in place is crucial. What does each team need from me? Hey, sales team. I need this, this, and this in order for this person to come into a marketing drip. Hey, marketing team. I need XYZ in order to have this person completely qualified so I can reach out to them. Or I know how to drive this conversation now because you’ve given me the data I need. Hey. Thanks so much. Bridging the gap — sales and marketing are married. It’s good to set these parameters as soon as possible.

Content and messaging is always important to me. I meet with a lot of clients who say, yeah. We have a sales team using SalesLoft or Outreach, and we don’t really know what they’re saying. They’re kind of just out there putting their own cadences together. Yikes. So it’s always cool to say, hey. We’re driving content here targeted to this. We’re saying this. A particular vernacular or rhetoric. You should match that, but not in an HTML glowy marketing way — maybe a more direct, concise approach. But I always feel that it’s really important to understand content for your personas.

And again, just the revenue optimization side of it. RevOps is overarching. I know it’s a cheesy buzzword, but we certainly wanna make sure we’re understanding the lead-to-cash process as it’s aligned to revenue goals for reporting.

Qualifications, scoring, and grading. Things I have access to today in Pardot. Seems to be a feature that a lot of people kinda say, yeah, we have grading or we have out-of-the-box scoring, but we’re not customizing it. Okay. Well, we can do that. I wanna separately qualify my prospects using this technology. So understanding lead scores — their interest in us. Grading — our interest in them. Again, this is where a lot of our personas come into play. Who we’re going after, we can grade them on that ABC sort of level of scoring. Hey. They came to our page and they fill out a form. Great. They broke the threshold. So really wanna understand what those could be and what those mean to you.

Also understand what might be ROI-worthy to you. We’ll talk about that a little ways down the line when it comes to reporting and influence. But always great to know that we can customize all of these features. The quality of our leads is super important. Obviously, we talked about sales and marketing alignment. So we wanna make sure this is ironed in. Maybe sales wants to have more of a qualification. Maybe you only need a certain qualification to get to the next step, whether that’s in a lead cycle. So it’s good to identify that. And then we already talked about the threshold side, but what about the degradation process? If somebody goes inactive for three months, six months, well, maybe we start to peel back some of those scores so they’re not as high as they used to be. Or saying, okay. Great. Well, maybe we still need to continue to warm this individual because they’re not ready yet.

Okay. Cool.

Dynamic content. One of my favorite features. This is the fun stuff. Getting in that capture, nurture, automate section where we can really start to build a lot of cool things with dynamic content. Email and web content, multivariate testing, all kinds of cool things that you have at your fingertips.

What does this mean when we’re using dynamic content? I wanna drive more engagement. I wanna increase this engagement. I wanna talk to my prospect about their specific needs. I wanna answer the questions that they have. This allows my time-to-value to be a lot shorter. So I say, okay. Great. Now they’re getting the right messaging at the right time. It’s delivered to them — custom content. At least it feels that way. But it gives them less time doing their own due diligence. Let me provide you the content. I know you. I know your persona. I’ve spent months researching it. Great. Let me deliver the content to you that makes sense. Skipping the extra step for me means quality and quantity. What I can say in maybe two emails and a landing page versus six months of just dropping in an email every week or maybe it’s just a newsletter blast.

So really think about how you’re spending your time developing dynamic content. Don’t overdo it. Don’t overthink it. Less is always more. But certainly an interesting point to call out. And again, you wanna shorten that journey. I wanna get to yes or no as fast as possible when it comes to marketing. Either you want in or you want out. So what can I do to shorten that cycle?

Attribution. Oh, super buzzy these days. We always get people saying, yeah, we want an attribution model. Okay. Great. Well, there’s a lot that goes into attribution. Some steps you gotta take in the beginning in order for us to see this data over time, and then we can really start to play with it.

So what does that mean? A campaign hierarchy system. That’s super important. Understanding parent, child, grandparent, grandchild. This was news to me a couple years back, and I work with some really great people to help me flesh out what campaign hierarchy means. There’s tons of great information out there about campaign hierarchy in Salesforce, but I suggest you all take a look at it. Having a great hierarchy with a naming convention is extremely important.

As far as the follow-through, we wanna add the appropriate campaigns. One of our solution architects has sort of coined this term “everyday attribution.” Understanding what we want to track and how we wanna roll things up.

Beyond that, contact roles and opportunities — it’s a must-have. Talk to anyone in this space. They’ll say, yep. You gotta have that — contact roles and opportunities. A lot of the times it’s a sales adoption functionality. There are some places and people in place now that could say, okay. Great. We have to do it this way. This is a required field. We can have multiple contact roles and opportunities. But again, I wanna track all that back. I wanna see campaign influence or any attribution models over multiple campaigns.

And then the member statuses. The number one question for attribution for me is: which engagements are driving revenue, and which interactions are actually ROI-worthy to me? Email opens — do they matter? Maybe they do. Form conversions? Okay. Now I’m listening. So it’s understanding what’s important to us from an attribution model. This is not a one-size-fits-all. It’s certainly not a set-it-and-forget-it. But if we have a campaign hierarchy structure set up with an asset-to-campaign alignment, we can really see the value of not only Pardot but also Salesforce as well.

Okay. Last step, campaign alignment. I just talked about it. I had to choose the spaghetti and meatballs image there on the right because this is really where they get married — Salesforce and Pardot. Talked about asset naming conventions, folder structures, mirroring that in our campaign hierarchy naming conventions too. Flushing that out, taking time to really make sure it all makes sense so that if we hire new talent in the future, they can come in and roll this out. If we continue to expand or we bring in business units or do acquisitions — hey. Great. This is how we create campaigns. This is how we name campaigns. And this is how we name assets inside Pardot.

And then again, we’re allowed to blend all those together to get the KPIs that actually matter to us. So understanding an asset-to-campaign alignment — could it be one-to-one or one-to-many? Also wanna roll up and understand our different tiers. We can have up to five tiers inside our hierarchy. What does that look like? Again, it’s not one-size-fits-all. Something that’s more strategic for you. Maybe based on annual or years or timelines. Maybe it’s based on different campaigns, whether that’s events or webinars or email campaigns.

And then like I mentioned before, the naming convention — just to understand what gets included from a campaign. Is it a field? Is it an abbreviation? I know Sercante has done a really wonderful job of doing a naming convention calculator for campaigns, which is really cool. So I implore you all to check that out as well.

In conclusion, the setup checklist — like we talked about before. Making sure we have all those checkmarks in place today. Wanna make sure you’ve got everything that you possibly need. Again, the strategy for all this is the capture, nurture, automate, report. I’ve worked with clients of all different sizes, all different verticals. It really comes down to those four pillars of capture, nurture, automate, report. But you’re unique. You’re different. So what does capture, nurture, automate, report look like for your organization?

And most importantly, you can use this as an accountability checklist for yourself. Like, hey. Where am I today with data? Where am I today with segmentation? Where am I today with multiple nurture campaigns? Okay. Where do I want to go with sales and marketing alignment? Where do I wanna take dynamic content? And then what’s the next step? What do I need to do next from an attribution perspective or a campaign alignment perspective? How do I level up in the space?

If you can ask yourself those three questions as you’re going through this checklist, guaranteed to avoid complacency in the space. But again, you’ll have all this to check yourself on after the event.

So thank you all for listening to me. Hopefully it was informative, a little enthusiastic. Obviously, I have a passion for the space. I love talking about this stuff. You can always shoot me an email if you have any one-off questions. I’m happy to take twenty or thirty minutes individually. We can talk about your org, where you’re looking to go. I also would suggest you all connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m not a huge social poster, unfortunately. I’m mostly heads down in the work, but happy to connect with you all on LinkedIn.

Okay. Any — do we have time for any questions?

Speaker 0:
A little under— a little over two minutes. We had two great questions. One of them was already answered by a bunch of people in the chat. So thank you, Shannon, for providing your dedupe information. So one of the questions that we got was, you know, how do you handle duplicates in Pardot since that allows multiple prospects with the same email? And so Shannon provided one of their resources. Do you have any advice on what people should do to help reduce those duplicates?

Speaker 1:
So reducing duplicates — and sorry, repeat the question just one more time.

Speaker 0:
Sure.

Speaker 1:
Okay. Here it is. Perfect.

Speaker 0:
How do you handle duplicates?

Speaker 1:
Typically when they come in, right, what we’re doing is we say, okay. We’ve got these dupes. There’s numerous ways. I can say, hey. Let’s create a dynamic list. Let’s run that against criteria. The other piece is validation rules — fuzzy logic inside Salesforce. So when that gets passed over as a lead inside Salesforce, okay. Great. Does it meet the criteria? Does it fit here? I would also suggest this as a database cleanup. A lot of what we’ve been doing lately is saying, hey. I’m over my mailable contacts or prospects because maybe I have some of the same name. Okay. Well, let’s create a dynamic list at email address and send to recycle bin. So those are two ways I would take a look at that. Perfect.

Speaker 0:
And the last other question that we had was: can Pardot create one-to-one cadences for leads, or is something like SalesLoft needed?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. You can. So what you can do — let’s just say Ryan’s salesperson. I can create a user for them inside Pardot and say, okay. Well, Ryan’s going to be at said event, and we wanna let his people know in certain location. Let’s say it’s Marj Reeben in Atlanta. Okay. Great. Hey, folks — all of Ryan’s accounts in Atlanta — we want to send them a note and just say, great. I’m gonna send a three-email cadence. It can be just a text email format. Doesn’t have to be HTML or beautiful. We can just set a simple Engagement Studio program, maybe driving them to a landing page to meet you. Maybe there’s a link to your Calendly to book time with you one-to-one. So you can absolutely send those emails coming from that user, and we can also have real-time analytics as well as opens, clicks, all that kind of fun stuff. Good question.

Speaker 0:
Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Wonderful question. Alright, guys. This concludes today’s session. It’s about to transition us over to the next session on the track. There’s some great stuff coming up. If you have any additional questions for our speakers, always reach out to them. Ryan has provided his information, and of course all of these sessions will be available live on demand after the event. So feel free to check that out. Thank you, everybody, and have a wonderful day.

Speaker 1:
Thank you.