Marketers

How to Run Complex Lead Distribution with Pardot Forms

By Jennifer Contino

Do you have a ‘contact us’ form that needs to route and assign leads to sales users and multiple groups? You’re not alone!

In this article we’ll show you how to handle complex lead distribution and assignment using Pardot forms. This can route form submissions to a variety of different user roles such as: Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Customer Support. Your departments may be different, so feel free revise them accordingly.

So far in the series, we have explored how to add Pardot forms to your website using iframe, form handlers, and pop-ups (!), as well as adding in some dynamic content for the prospect to receive personalized thank you content. So far we have covered the user experience up until the form is submitted – now we need to process their enquiry!

You should already be familiar with how to set up a Pardot Form. Here we’re just going to outline the components of the form that you will need in order to handle advanced prospect assignment and lead routing.

Step 1: Create Your Fields

Make sure you have the field you need. For this example, we’ll need to create the following fields in Pardot:

  • Inquiry Reason: Marketing, Sales, Finance, Customer Support, and other.
  • Product Interest: Pardot, Sales Cloud, and Community Cloud.
  • Number of Users: 1-10. 11-25, and 26+.

To create your fields navigate to the ‘Pardot Settings’ tab > click ‘Object and Field Configuration’ > Prospect Fields. Complete the information to create your new field.

Step 2: Add these fields to your Form

  1. First you’ll want to add the fields you require on the contact us form, such as first name, last name, company, and email.
  2. Then, add the ‘Inquiry Reason’ field, and make sure it is required and set to always display.

 

3. We’re going to want to create 2 dependent fields if someone selects the inquiry reason of Sales, then they’ll need to complete Product and Number of users. What we’re looking to do here is show the fields that will help us distribute the lead to the sales team, so if we distribute our leads based on geography, you’d ask for the location.

Step 3: Create a Pardot List and Add it to Your Form

Once a user completes the form you’ll want to add them to a Pardot list, you’ll do this by adding the lead/contact to a list through completion actions. So create your list, then add the user to the list, using the form completion actions. This is the list that will allow leads/contacts to enter the Engagement Studio program we are about to create.

Step 4: Create Your Engagement Studio Program

When you set up your engagement studio program be sure to use the following settings:

  • Recipient List: Use the list you just created and attached to the form.
  • Check: Allow prospects to enter the program more than once.
  • Check: No, allow unlimited entries.

Separate Inquiries

The first step is to sort out inquiries using the new field you just created, called ‘Inquiry Reason’. So you’ll want to use the logic if prospect custom field ‘Inquiry Reason’ is ‘Sales’ click save. Then on the no path, create the next piece of logic if prospect custom field ‘Inquiry Reason’ is ‘Customer Support’ and so on, so you should have a module for each inquiry reason, it should start out looking like the below:

Distributing Inquiries

Sales:
There are a few options to distribute inquiries, here’s an outline below:

  • Assign to a Group: This assigns a prospect to a user in a group using round-robin lead assignment.
  • Assign to a user: You can assign the user to a specific person.
  • Assign to a Queue: You can assign users to a Salesforce queue, just note, only Salesforce leads can be assigned, so if you have a contact, that completes the form, they won’t be assigned to the queue.
  • Assign via the Salesforce Active Assignment Rule: The active assignment rule will give you the most robust assignment capabilities. When there is no owner, the prospect is synced to Salesforce, and the rules for assignment that you create based on region, product, and etc., will be carried out and the lead will be assigned accordingly.

If I were to assign the lead using the active assignment rule, then I’d add a step to the engagement studio program under action, to assign via Salesforce Active Assignment Rule. So look for your node that says prospect custom field value equals sales, then on the Yes branch add the action of assign via the active assignment rule.

Support:
If you’re using service cloud, go ahead and create a user in Pardot with the Service
Cloud email address that automatically creates support tickets. Then, locate the node that says prospect custom field equals customers support, then select the action to notify the
user from the engagement studio program and select the service cloud user. This will
send the Pardot form notification to Service Cloud and create a support ticket.

Tip: If you want more information about the issue, create a dependent field on your
contact us form, so when the user selects “Customer Support” a field will show that asks for
information surrounding the issue. This will help your support agents get a better understanding of the issue.

Marketing, Finance, & Other
Consider creating a group of Pardot users and assign to the group within Pardot. Or if there is one person to receive all of these notifications, you can simply notify that user.

Additional Considerations For Engagement Studio Actions:

  • Scoring: This is a great way to assign scores to different groups, for instance, I’d likely give the sales inquiry a high point value and the support inquiry 0 points.
  • Create Autoresponders: You can create custom emails based on the users inquiry and deploy them right after you notify the groups using the actions.
  • Add to a Campaign: Add users to a campaign so you can track conversions on the website, consider adding sales inquiries but not general inquiries.

Add Closing Steps:
You’ll want to clear the prospect inquiry field once the program complete, as well as remove the prospect from the list. This way they can re-enter the program with 1 inquiry reason.

 

 

The Author

Jennifer Contino

Jennifer is a marketing automation consultant, who specializes in demand generation, at RoyCon Technologies.

Comments:

    Anand
    November 01, 2020 1:50 pm
    Hi Nice article, Once a prospect submitted a form, in pardot where i can find that inquiry message..?
    Lucy Mazalon
    November 03, 2020 9:46 pm
    Hi Anand, thank you for your message, glad you enjoyed the article. Are you using the standard comments field on your Pardot forms?

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