If you're trying to scale a professional services business, at some point you need to consider implementing a Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution. As a term, PSA is as slippery as any in the technology space, such as CRM or ERP. You can understand what it means generally, but it inevitably prompts many questions such as: Is a PSA solution a single tool or is it a suite of tools? Is a PSA solution the same thing as Project Management solution? Should my PSA platform integrate with other tools in my business? If I buy a PSA solution, should it consume systems such asQuickbooks? And as you've likely already guessed, the answer to all of these questions is a resounding, "It depends!"

Wouldn’t it be odd/off-putting if you hired a personal trainer, showed up at the gym, and were immediately thrusted into a workout regime that didn’t support your goal of training for a half-marathon, losing 20 lbs, or simply strengthening your knee after recovering from an injury? It certainly would be. Then why are we as Salesforce consultants doing this with complex, sophisticated technology that spans multiple business functions and supports a large majority of employees? 

Salesforce and Pardot have a symbiotic relationship that can’t be beat when it comes to B2B marketing automation. At Kicksaw, I often find myself talking to a potential client about their sales operations and find that the conversation will naturally venture into the marketing operations territory. After all, the Marketing department's goal is to send the Sales team as many highly qualified leads as possible. And while Salesforce has put together documentation on how to implement Pardot with Salesforce, Kicksaw has a highly skilled Marketing Ops team that has executed more than a hundred implementations, and along the way, we've picked up some valuable tips and made note of some important “gotchas” that are often overlooked during the implementation process.