Pardot Lifecycle Reports

As a marketer, your goal is to generate and nurture high-quality leads to increase revenue. Utilizing the Pardot Lifecycle Report, you are able to see where your leads are in their buying journey. This report is a great tool to help you optimize your nurture process and identify any bottlenecks to closing more deals.

The Lifecycle report includes the Pipeline funnel, trends over time, and prospect velocity information.

Pipeline Metrics

The Pipeline metrics displays the number of visitors and prospects at each lifecycle stage during the selected time frame. The different metrics and stages defined by Pardot are:

• Visitors – Number of unique visitors in the selected date range as determined by the Pardot tracking code. If a visitor returns multiple times during the selected time frame, the visitor is counted once in this metric.
• Prospect – Number of newly created prospects in Pardot during the selected time frame. Prospects can be created through imports, CRM sync, and manually or organically through a Pardot form, form handler, or landing page submission.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – Number of prospects created in the specified time frame (in the Date Range selector for the report) that became assigned. Assignment means that the marketing team has qualified this lead for the sales team. Assignments can occur in Pardot manually, via the API, via a CRM sync, or during a Pardot import.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Number of prospects created during the selected time frame that are associated with opportunities. Associating a prospect with an opportunity means that the sales team has qualified this lead as a potential customer. Opportunities can be created in Pardot manually, via the API, via a CRM sync, or imported.
• Won Deals – Number of opportunities closed during the selected time frame.
• Total Revenue – Total revenue of all won opportunities in the selected time frame. Pardot pulls this value directly from the value for these opportunities in the CRM.
• Trending Percents – A historical comparison or percentage change between prospects created in the current selected time frame and prospects created in the previous time frame.

What Do Pipeline Metrics Mean?

By looking at how many visitors and prospects you have at each stage, you are able to utilize these insights to help you develop a marketing plan. For example, if you have more prospects that have not been converted into the MQL or SQL stage than the previous time frame, it could indicate that your demand generation efforts brought in more new leads and/or your prospects need to be nurtured more. It might also indicate that there are some bottlenecks in your communication strategy or your sales team not pulling your leads into the sales funnel properly. This would be something that would be worth looking into and maybe developing new tactics.

Velocity Chart

The Velocity chart displays the average time a visitor or prospect is in each stage. It is indicating the time from Visitor to Prospect, Prospect to MQL, MQL to SQL, SQL to won Opportunity, and the total days to get through the full prospect lifecylce. 

When you use the Velocity chart with the Pipeline Metrics, you get a deeper look into the time it is taking to move from stage to stage. Again, this is where you should be looking at the efficiency of the lead’s journey through your marketing funnel and completing the sales funnel. You should compare to previous time frames to ensure that there is nothing hindering this process. 

When analyzing this data, it is important to understand how long the typical sales process takes for non-marketing generated deals. Knowing this, you are able to compare the time it should take an MQL to get to a won opportunity as it would take a cold call lead to move through the sales funnel. Typically, prospects have already been educated on your company from your marketing content so the sales cycle, in theory, should be shorter. If it is taking longer, you should start asking yourself questions as to why this could be.

Questions to think about when looking at this report:

• Are your prospects converting to MQLs at the right time?
• Are leads receiving the right amount or too much content before talking to Sales?
• Are your Sales reps accepting your leads fast enough?
• Are opportunities closing slower or being closed lost right away?

Understanding the Visitor to Closed Deal prospect lifecycle can help you improve marketing processes and make better forecasts based on historical data.

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Happy Pardoting!

Brandon Walton

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Building things and Teaching stuff @ CypressLearning. Salesforce Marketing Champion 2020 - Current