Monitoring and optimising the candidate pathway thanks to Salesforce and Pardot

For the past two years, Talan has been our flagship partner in our Digital Transformation projects. Our collaboration began in a critical and demanding context: the health crisis. I appreciated the intelligence, agility and pragmatism of the team, which played a pivotal role in the challenges we met together to support the Group's Schools. To quote one: "Luckily we got Pardot! 

In short...

• Sector: Education
• Technology: Salesforce Pardot and Sales Cloud
• Offer: Salesforce/Pardot support and training, marketing automation

The mission in detail

Our client is a private higher education group that owns around twenty schools and entities in France and abroad.  In a largely competitive sector, the group has major challenges in raising awareness among young people and their parents in order to:

• Position its schools as benchmarks of higher education
• Publicising your career paths and programmes
• Acquire new “prospects” (young people looking for training)
• Follow the path of a candidate
• Convert “prospects” to registered and therefore “customers” (students of the group)

To meet these ambitions, a key success factor is sharing the right information, standardising and digitising processes. Also, the group had already implemented Salesforce a few years before. Users were now waiting forthe tool to be updated to the Lightning version and new high-performance tools to innovate in tracking and optimising candidate pathways.

The challenge: equip sales and marketing teams to monitor and automate their actions and optimise their performance

In order to establish simple, unified and automated customer relationship monitoring processes, the group therefore wanted to review the customer pathway, from the prospect to the candidate, then to the registered person. To do this, Group Management wanted to implement an automation marketing tool to:

• Managing marketing interactions in an omni-channel context
• Give sales teams a unified view of their sales processes.
• Harmonizemarketing and sales efforts

The client called on Talan to support it on the two building blocks for updating the Salesforce instance to Lightning and for implementing Pardot Advanced. Indeed, this version makes it possible to have separate commercial entities (or business units), which enabled the group to capitalise on a single common solution and the schools’ marketing teams to orchestrate a marketing strategy specific to their school (and therefore, its challenges, its target, etc.).

The mission: redesign the group's CRM and implement Pardot

The Talan team was responsible for the overall deployment of the project :

• Audit and impact studies
• Definition and design of the technical solution
• Technical implementation
• Data integration
• Performance analysis via reports and dashboards
• Training and change management

To carry out this mission, we worked hand in hand with the client’s technical and business teams to:

• Answer technical questions on Sales Cloud and Pardot
• Redefine a school’s business processes and translate them into tools
• Support the upskilling of teams on new tools and functionalities

Pardot Advanced: successful implementation and upskilling across four entities in a few months 

Pardot was implemented in iterative phases, which made it possible to adapt the approach to each new school.  In May 2020, one branch of the group was the first commercial entity to implement Pardot, followed by another in September 2020. In April 2021, Pardot was implemented in four commercial entities and all the teams concerned were trained.

The results:

• A better integration approach for the tool, more suited to the daily lives of schools
• Development of synergies between marketing and sales teams
• Better consistency and efficiency to roll out marketing campaigns
• Some figures in the covid period:
  • 14.30 hours of training delivered for one of their schools
  • A 164% increase in campaign mailing per month during the health crisis
  • Support for the implementation of a monthly newsletter, representing an increase in emails sent by +196% (targeting of around 20K prospects).
  • Introduction of new lead acquisition / data collection channels

A significant increase in the average click rate of +638%

It is a great challenge that we have met in a difficult health context.   As a Pardot and Marketing Automation expert, I am delighted to have achieved the objectives set and to have implemented business processes and tools fully used by users. Thanks to this success, the scope of this group’s mission has expanded and the partnership has set out to be long-term.

Aurore Dercourt, Talan project manager and Pardot expert

Knowledge of Pardot and the marketing professions: the key success factor of the mission

One of the key known success factors for a successful implementation of Pardot is the maturity of the marketing teams. With this in mind, we have provided Marketing Automation expertise based on Inbound Marketing and, as a result, improved editorial strategy (for example, implementation of a profiling strategy and dynamic audiences).

A fifth Pardot implementation will be operational in the first quarter of 2022 for one of their business schools.