Integrations
DataScope & Pardot

New sales don't come out of thin air. They come from a lot of hard work gather leads, make sure they learn enough about your products, and push them to start using them. Part of that falls to sales and support, who will help customers figure out the best product for their needs and learn how to use it. But a big part is on marketing, who needs to bring in new leads and keep them interested.Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM apps thanks to its deeply customizable sales tools that can track almost anything you want about a customer. It's a database that is flexible enough to track the data your company needs. But how would you put that data to work to power your marketing activities?Read MorePardot. The marketing automation side of the Salesforce family of apps, Pardot helps you gather new leads, stay in touch with them via automated emails, and figure out who's the most promising so you can focus your sales and marketing efforts on them. And it works with Salesforce so your marketing and sales teams can work together.The app is built around marketing, prospects, and reports. You'll see the latter when you login to Pardot, with graphs of your team's leads over time and an event calendar to keep upcoming marketing opportunities in mind. You'll then get to work from the Marketing tab, which includes all the tools you need to get and keep leads. The first step is to make assets you'll use in campaigns. Make forms, and you can reuse them in landing pages when you're ready to use them. Add content blocks, and you can add them to your email templates—and then use those to build A/B testing variants and automatically send them to interested leads with automations. Everything's organized in PC-style folders for a traditional way to keep track of all your marketing assets.Pardot has long included tools to automatically update leads and send messages on a schedule, but the newest version, Engagement Studio, makes it even easier to target leads. You can have Pardot watch specific lists for activities—say, when they click a link, open an email, or fill out a form—and then do different activities if they did or didn't do that activity. You might send a different email next time if someone never opened your first message, say, while updating a lead's score if they did open the message since now they're a bit more likely to buy. Once you've built a workflow, you can test it to make sure it does what you expect before turning it on.With landing pages, forms, and social campaigns gathering leads, and automated emails keeping them engaged, you'll soon have a list of people most likely to buy your products. That's where the Prospects tab will come in, with its Salesforce-like lists of contacts and details about them. You can add deals, send direct emails to specific leads, link related leads, and see how their score has changed over time. And, you can link it with Salesforce to make sure your entire team has the same data about your leads.Pardot is a full-featured marketing automation tool that can be an effective tool to gather and maintain leads, especially if you're starting with a large lead list. Combined with Salesforce, though, it's an especially powerful way to drill down and focus your marketing based on all the data your company has gathered so you're the most likely to make the sale.