“Overall, 2011 was a fantastic year for us in terms of new customer signings,” Cummings said. “The marketing automation market is still very small, and we expect the overall market to continue to have strong growth with the big three vendors (Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot) continuing to separate themselves from the other vendors.”
During 2011, Pardot added more than 130 features and product improvements, including social posting and social profiling, new tags for organization, improved custom scoring and nurturing, a user interface refresh and connectors to technology providers, including GoToWebinar, Webex, ReadyTalk, Data.com/Jigsaw and Olark.
The company also added new reporting and analysis tools, designed to help small business marketers improve campaign outcomes and lead generation. The new analytics suite, which was developed by the company in partnership with GoodData, includes customizable dashboards and chart and graph building capabilities.
Enhancements also were made to Pardot’s integrations with leading CRM systems from Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and SugarCRM.
Cummings said the decisions regarding product enhancements were driven by insights and requests from the customer base. Approximately two-dozen features added during 2011 were selected based on insight from users via the Pardot Idea Exchange, an online customer portal, according to the company.
“Customers that communicate through our idea exchange at Ideas.Pardot.com are critical to the on-going enhancement of the product,” Cummings said. “Each quarter, we add hundreds of new features and tweaks to the product; a substantial number of those improvements coming directly from our customers. We believe that staying as close to our customers as possible gives us a competitive advantage in addition to our strong corporate culture.”
