What Was Built
A global power systems engineering firm had owned Pardot for years without implementing it. This engagement covered the full arc — from initial audit through strategic roadmap, Pardot buildout, and 6–8 months of ongoing instance management.
Current-State Audit & MarTech Ecosystem Assessment
The client had owned Pardot for years without meaningfully implementing it. Marketing initiatives were fragmented across three platforms — Mailchimp for newsletters and nurture, Salesforce CRM for forms and 1:1 follow-ups, and Google Ads for paid search — with no unified lead flow, no automation, and no consolidated reporting. Every lead handoff was manual.
The Week 1 assessment involved structured stakeholder interviews with the marketing team to map the current lead flow end-to-end: from website form submission and event capture through to business development, sales process, and paid search. The output was a clear picture of the as-is state, a ranked list of friction points, and the foundation for the recommended MarTech strategy.
MarTech Consolidation Strategy & Pardot Roadmap
Based on the audit findings, a consolidation strategy was developed: retire Mailchimp and migrate all email and nurture workflows into Pardot; connect Pardot natively to Salesforce CRM; activate lead scoring and assignment rules; and deprecate the manual CRM form capture process in favor of Pardot form handlers and automation rules.
The roadmap was structured across three phases — Foundation (CRM sync, form migration, list management), Automation (lead nurture, scoring, assignment), and Optimization (reporting, campaign performance, Google Ads integration) — with clear milestones, dependencies, and owners for each phase.
Pardot Implementation & CRM Integration
The implementation spanned the full platform setup: account configuration, user roles and permissions, Salesforce CRM connector activation and field mapping, custom redirect and tracking code deployment on the website, and Pardot form handler migration from the existing Salesforce web-to-lead forms.
Automation rules were built for lead assignment based on service line and geography, lead scoring thresholds were configured for sales-ready handoff, and email templates were migrated from Mailchimp and rebuilt in Pardot with responsive design. List segmentation was established for the primary business development and event capture workflows.
Ongoing Pardot Instance Management & Campaign Operations
Following implementation, the engagement shifted to ongoing management: building and deploying email campaigns for events, thought leadership, and business development outreach; monitoring lead flow and CRM sync health; and iterating on lead scoring thresholds based on conversion data.
A training program was developed and delivered to the internal marketing team, covering day-to-day platform operations, campaign creation, list management, and reporting. By the end of the engagement, the team was operating the platform independently with documented SOPs for each core workflow.