Thoughts on Pardot Content at the ExactTarget Connections Conference

The ExactTarget Connections conference is wrapping up today, and kudos to the ET team for putting on a first-rate conference experience. No branding detail was missed from the orange ET messages on the stair risers in the convention center to the ET conference staff in their bright orange t-shirts to the orange soap and orange gerber daisies in the ladies restrooms at the JW Marriott. Did I mention there was a lot of orange at the conference?

But I didn’t attend the conference for an “orange” experience, I was looking for training on the Pardot product, networking, and a product roadmap. Although ExactTarget acquired Pardot last October, and then Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget in June of this year, the conference did not present a clear vision of how and where Pardot fits into the picture.

There were a handful of Pardashians at the conference, and as always they are super friendly and helpful. It was great to meet in person some of the Pardot folks I’ve worked with. I attended two pre-conference bootcamp sessions, and they were definitely geared to a beginner audience, which was perfect for the more than half of the audience who had been using Pardot for less than a year. More experienced users were left to wonder why they paid the extra cash for the sessions.

My wish would be that Pardot could pull together content for a power user audience. They now have customers who have been using the tool for 3+ years (myself included), and are looking for advanced ways to really make the product sing.

One answer may be to facilitate birds of a feather sessions for those experienced folks where they can share some cool things they’ve done with Pardot and their CRM, or use this expert group of peers to brainstorm ways to solve their most pressing problems. Whatever the solution, Pardot has got to figure out a way for these power users to continue their learning at the conference and be able to justify their continued attendance.

The word at the conference was to expect more Pardot content, more Pardashians, and more roadmap details at Dreamforce, which was encouraging. I guess that means I need to start looking for cheap airfares to San Francisco…