Thanks to Laura Folio and Adam Blitzer for their blog post on Pardot earlier this week. We want to continue to discuss what Pardot is offering by taking a look at one of their great whitepapers.

Marketing Automation is an integral part to any marketing organization, but there are a lot of choices out there. With so many top vendors to choose from, how do you make the best decision for you and your organization? Pardot has written a great whitepaper to help you through the process, Web Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide.

Their whitepaper is set up in a very easy to read with a number of charts that help walk through the decision-making process.

I also found their list of ten questions to ask when evaluating a marketing automation tool particularly useful:

1. What marketing solutions do you currently employ (email marketing, paid search, etc.)?
2. Does your sales team use a CRM system?
3. How does marketing pass leads into the CRM system (if applicable)?
4. Which areas of your marketing and sales process could be more efficient?
5. Who in your organization will use the marketing automation system?
6. What is the projected timeline for deciding on a solution?
7. What are some of the short-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
8. What are some of the long-term goals to be achieved with marketing automation?
9. What type of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) do your employees typically use?
10. Do you have web programmers in-house, or do you use an outside agency?

One of the most important things to remember when selecting a Marketing Automation tool is that it needs to work for you and your team, which means you want something that works with the flow of your data, your CRM and your processes. Pardot has set up some easy to follow check-lists of things that will help you make the best choice between the systems you are evaluating. They aren’t exactly tear-sheets but could easily be utilized as such to help you along the way.

Their whitepaper is extremely informative and a must-read for anyone in the market for a Marketing Automation system.