Why marketing implementations fail — Kristina Alexandra // Pareto Pi Consulting

Quotes

• “As a consultancy, we specialize in implementing two products, Salesforce and Pardot. When further talking about Pardot, it is a marketing platform that connects a lot of tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, a lot of landing page services and tools. So we help businesses to compile all their tools, all the data across spreadsheets and bring it to one marketing automation tool that becomes the one single truth.” - Kristina“I think about 5 years ago, it became a multi-cloud implementation and when we are talking about Salesforce we are always talking about what are these best marketing platforms that we can integrate and implement well. At that time, marketing cloud and Pardot were the single-core truth products that Salesforce was selling and that was me jumping on these products and getting certified. As the Salesforce roadmap kept Pardot in the marketing cloud, I stayed in that niche.” - Kristina“Pardot predominantly is for SMB and large enterprises. Obviously when we’re talking about large enterprises, the bigger the company, the more the complexity comes in but that’s when a lot of marketing cloud products I believe can start plugging into. In terms of Pardot itself, I would only recommend a company that had already established internal marketing best practices and they are ready to make an investment in this product in the first place.” - Kristina“Sometimes companies decide to purchase these complex (and expensive -Ben) and powerful solution but then they decide to go a little bit cheap and save and actually self-implement. Sometimes they have an internal sales administrator who owns it and starts working on it but without having the background in marketing, understanding the whole logic and the big picture, I see self-implementation as one of the key factors that can lead to failure.” - Kristina“The second point why implementations can go wrong is when it is with unprofessional hands.” - Kristina“Knowing how to connect and integrate these tools is one thing. Where the complexity actually comes in, is that the business itself doesn't understand how they can have the whole marketing knowledge and the automation that they potentially have or want to automate and put it on this platform. Like, they don’t know how to utilize the whole feature set that they got.” - Kristina“I think that at the leadership level, you get to a level of scale and there are times when your CEO and CMO says, great we need a sophisticated solution, a better CRM because we’re a larger company. The metaphor that comes to mind is like buying a car because you like the stereo. You need to be able to understand what all the feature set is, within the organization and maybe you’re not using all of it at once but you need to understand how it all functions together.” - Kristina“I like to use the analogy of karate and the belt that you have. You need to understand that you need to start from the basics. Then based on your actual internal knowledge and the level that you’re at, you need to understand what is the level you are actually ready to play at and the level of competition you need to prepare yourself for.” - Kristina“When you’re at the point talking about CRM, about having a lot of data and having a lot of complexity, invoices, product, etc. Then you can play marketing on a higher tier. Here it’s important you understand the appropriate marketing tool that can perform the automation and marketing communications that you want to do.” - Kristina“You need to understand the budget and how fast we actually want to grow and how much we want to reach people. Like me, I would start with the most basic, cheapest tools that are available for me to actually start and kick off the ground. But understanding your vision and your growth ceilings, you understand where you want to get and you understand what are the milestones and it will help you understand how to choose your tools.” - Kristina“Figuring out your Martech stack is a very complicated process, and it is not a decision that should be taken lightly. You need to consider not only the cost, the implementation, the talent, and the experience you have. You also need to factor in the trajectory that you’re having, your business model and how much room you’re gonna have to grow.” - Ben