The Client
As the state’s leading economic development agency, the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) has a streamlined mission to grow and strengthen Arizona’s economy. The ACA uses a three-pronged approach to advance the overall economy: recruit, grow, create – recruit out-of-state companies to expand their operations in Arizona; work with existing companies to grow their business in Arizona and beyond; and partner with entrepreneurs and companies large and small to create new jobs and businesses in targeted industries.
Prior to implementing Pardot, the agency was struggling to find value in their existing marketing tool. The user experience was less than satisfactory, and the marketing team was struggling to keep up with a large volume of manual tasks without help from external marketing agencies. And, while the organization was already using the CRM functionality of Salesforce, the two systems didn’t share the same data. In order to streamline their marketing operations and better align their sales and marketing teams, ACA needed a user friendly tool that would integrate with Salesforce. By using Pardot for email list management, drip campaigns, and lead scoring, ACA’s marketing team can increase efficiency while simultaneously providing their sales team with important details about each potential customer.
The Challenge
ACA was bogged down with a marketing platform that was complex and frustrating to use. They were already using Salesforce to drive their sales process, but the marketing team needed an automated solution that would remove unnecessary human intervention and dynamically update and route leads to sales right away. With limited insights into marketing campaign effectiveness, ACA also focused on improving its reporting capabilities by simplifying the process of creating and running custom reports. In order to improve efficiency and align their sales and marketing teams, ACA needed to find a trustworthy partner to customize, integrate and implement Pardot.
The Solution
ACA chose to work with MST Solutions after successfully using its services to implement Sales Cloud and due to the company’s previous experience implementing Pardot for other organizations. MST Solutions conducted discovery sessions with the sales and marketing teams to fully understand their pain points and requirements for the new system. MST Solutions automated marketing segments for email campaigns, added form handler code to existing website forms and integrated Salesforce and Pardot. A significant amount of data and marketing assets were then migrated from the legacy system to Pardot, creating a single source of truth for the organization. With the two systems integrated, MST structured the email campaigns in a way that allows for sophisticated analysis of email performance.
The Outcome
Sales and Marketing alignment is critical for marketing success. Having a defined process in place to qualify leads helps to align ACA’s sales and marketing teams, leading to more unique opportunities for collaboration.
With a deep integration between Sales Cloud and Pardot, ACA can now use a single engagement funnel to focus on the right leads, at the right time. ACA now uses Pardot for all their email marketing and leverages Engagement Studio to help with lead routing and nurture campaigns. The new system provides advanced email nurturing features and more flexibility when setting up campaign structures. The marketing team has been able to increase efficiency with user friendly editing and list management tools, email templates, and improved reporting capabilities. After the successful implementation of Pardot, ACA is seeing increased email engagement and a steady flow of high-quality leads.