Pardot for Healthcare & Life Sciences – Healthcare Marketing for Salesforce Health Cloud

Salesforce went head-first into a vertical-specific approach a few years ago, on a mission to build CRM frameworks that covered the needs that are common to organizations in those industries. The ‘Industries’ Cloud products were born, to provide a solid foundation for businesses to get up and running faster with Salesforce, minus a whole structural rebuild.

It did cross my mind about a year or so ago, that Pardot had not yet aligned with the differentiated industry positioning that Salesforce had successfully carved out. Having worked with businesses across a broad range of industries, I have seen how differently Sales Cloud can be structured from one industry to the next, and more importantly, how Pardot needs to adapt to slot into this.

Pardot has released two industry-focused offerings to fit with Salesforce Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud. This post will talk about Pardot for Healthcare & Life Sciences and which Healthcare Marketing use cases are popular for marketers in this vertical. But first, let’s talk about how Salesforce Health Cloud differs from standard Sales Cloud.

Salesforce Health Cloud: Key Points

Salesforce Health Cloud is a product that’s more than just marketing hype. It also verges from standard Sales Cloud more than cosmetically, with important differences below the surface.

It’s important to be aware of how objects are structured on the Salesforce side, because (as I mentioned in the opening), Pardot needs to slot into this data model and complement the Salesforce records and processes, rather than compete with them.

• Types of People: Leads, Contacts, Candidate Patients, and Patients (special Person Accounts).
• Special Objects: Care Plan (case), Care Team – all with special behavior from their original form.
• Unique Objects: Problems, Goals, Clinical Data, Care Requests, Care Diagnosis, Member Plans, Preauthorizations.

Source: ‘The Health Cloud Data Model’, developer.salesforce.com. Note that not all objects listed are included in this diagram.

3 Healthcare Marketing Use Cases for Pardot

As we’ve seen, Health Cloud can handle a complex web of relationships between the different people your business interacts with. Pardot is primarily B2B, so the use cases mainly target one persona: healthcare professionals.

Here are 3 use cases for different sub-verticals:

• Healthcare Professional Engagement in Life Sciences: build loyalty by staying top of mind with these valuable repeat buyers, who purchase drug and medical devices products.
• Physician Referral Management: encourage physicians to make more referrals, more often by getting your educational content in front of them – at the right time.
• Healthcare Payers: do business development on your corporate customer base, which includes marketing for acquiring new customers, or upsell to existing ones. Keep any brokers engaged and loyal by running campaigns from Pardot into broker communities*. *Community Cloud, ie. the Salesforce portal product.

Summary

It’s great to see that Pardot has joined Salesforce on their mission, by beginning to differentiate their offerings for different industries, especially the verticals that have distinct CRM requirements that separate them from standard Sales Cloud.

We can expect Prospects and other Pardot-specific objects to be more ‘friendly’ with Health Cloud objects, hopefully improving record sync, segmentation, and overall marketing operation efficiency.

Check out the official product page.
For more on Pardot for Financial Services, read this post.