This is a common question, especially considering the price of Salesforce licenses. It can certainly be difficult to justify the extra expenditure of a user license for a marketing user, who will not be creating or updating opportunities. The important thing to consider here is that Sales Cloud is positioned as not only a Sales tool, but also as a key driver of your Marketing and Customer Service functions.
We see several benefits of at least one Pardot Administrator being able to access Salesforce:
Understanding of the Sales process - In order to drive Sales and Marketing alignment, Marketing needs to have a better view of the organisation’s Sales process. This includes having visibility of typical Opportunities which are created and having the insights into fields which are captured and used in Opportunities, plus the stages, typical values and close rates.
Visibility of leads handed over to Sales - One of the most important aspects of Marketing Automation is the lead generation functionality provided by tools such as scoring, grading and automated lead qualification. It’s vital to monitor the performance and conversion ratio of these leads passed to sales, both in terms of whether they are followed up, and also in terms of the conversion rates, allowing the marketer to refine their lead qualification logic.
Access to debug sync errors - A common cause of sync errors between Pardot and Salesforce is validation rules. Pardot must obey the field-level validation which has been set in Salesforce. For example, if you have an industry field with the values of “Finance”, “Manufacturing” and “IT”, but Pardot attempts to save a value of “Information Technology”, this will cause an error when the record attempts to sync. However, this is only one example of many potential sync errors. To avoid this, it’s important to either have a responsive Salesforce Admin or Developer, or for the Pardot Admin to be able to troubleshoot themselves.
Visibility of synced prospects - Pardot and Salesforce hold records in separate databases, but look to synchronize every 3 or 4 minutes by using the Salesforce Connector. However, being able to check records directly in Salesforce is useful for the Pardot Admin. This is useful to troubleshoot issues such as a blank Assigned User for records which exist in Salesforce (usually means the Assigned User does not exist in Pardot). Alternatively, it’s also useful to understand which fields from Salesforce should be synced to Pardot for the purposes of segmentation or data capture with forms.
Usage of Salesforce Campaigns - Pardot Campaigns are a very important method of understanding how you first acquired your prospects, however if you want to understand how marketing influences the whole buying cycle, you can use Pardot to automatically record Salesforce Campaign Responses for Leads and Contacts at key marketing touchpoints. This enables you to use marketing ROI models such as first touch, even touch or last touch attribution, providing valuable insights into the impact of marketing on the bottom line of your business. The Pardot admin needs access to Salesforce to create and set up campaigns to record the performance of marketing initiatives.
Drive adoption of Pardot’s Sales tools - (1-to-1 emails, SF Engage, visibility of Pardot information, add to Pardot lists) One of the star features of Pardot (and an area rarely used to full potential) is its Sales Enablement tools. Pardot includes several ways in which you can deliver insights to your Sales team directly in Salesforce without them needing to log into Pardot. A Salesforce login will be extremely useful for you to set up, test and train Sales in how to use these areas of functionality. They include:
Visibility of Pardot Information directly in Salesforce - this enables your Sales team to check the last time a prospect visited your website, how they converted, the first marketing touchpoint, any comments left on a contact form and more.
Add to Pardot Lists - This gives your Sales team the ability to add prospects to segmentation lists from within a Salesforce lead or contact record. These lists could be used as part of your email marketing initiatives, or could feed into a nurture program - for example, after a telephone call or meeting with a prospect who isn’t ready to purchase, your team could add the prospect to a nurture which keeps them warm for 3 or 6 months until they’re ready to re-engage with Sales. You will need to define with the Sales team which lists should be created, and test in Salesforce that they’re showing correctly.
Tracked Salesperson emails - Pardot includes options for your Sales team to send tracked emails to leads and contacts. These functionalities are called Send Pardot Email and Salesforce Engage. Whilst Engage is a paid extra, it will enable your team to send an email to more than one lead or contact at once. As a Pardot Admin, you will select which templates are available for your team to use, including which parts of the template can be edited. The sales team can then select one of the templates, send to prospects, and get visibility of the opens and clicks.