One of my favorite questions to ask is “why are you an entrepreneur?” I like to understand the motivation and drive for the person. Also, I’m interested in entrepreneurs that want to control their own destiny (an answer that resonates with me!). Of course, you can’t control much of anything in the world other than the most important things — your attitude, your actions, and your behaviors.

Entrepreneurs that I meet with like to tell me they want to build the “Pardot of X” where X is some industry or type of product. I’ve come to primarily understand this to mean they want to build a SaaS company that doesn’t involve raising money and does involve selling it for a meaningful amount of money. While that’s a worthwhile goal, I like to share the controllable factors in the Pardot story.

Here are the five most important controllable factors from the Pardot experience:

1. Employees-First –
   Our focus on culture was maniacal. Employees came before customers and all other constituents. Everything we did internally was focused on our core values of positive, self-starting, and supportive. The ultimate reason we succeeded was because of our people.
2. In the Path of Revenue –
   Our product unequivocally helped our customers make more money. We showed return on investment. We showed value. Our product helped turn marketing from a fuzzy role to a metrics-driven role.
3. Must-Have Product –
   Our product was the core of the majority of the B2B marketing functions. If you ripped it out, many of the marketing channels stopped working (email, lead forms, etc.). It was not a nice-to-have.
4. Complementary Co-Founders –
   Adam and I are very different yet complemented each other incredibly well. We knew our strengths and weaknesses and built an awesome organization.
5. Focused Solution –
   Our product delivered the most value with the best experience possible at the $1,000/month price point. We were focused on providing the most bang-for-your-buck in the SMB market, and we executed well. This was especially important as our market was so noisy.

Notice that timing is nowhere in these factors, even though it‘s easily one of the most important considerations. We didn’t know if we had good timing. We didn’t know when to start. We did know that by entering the arena, we gave ourselves a chance. And we got it right.

Control what you can control. Everything else is noise.

When we launched the initial marketing automation product for Pardot, the feature set was quite simple. We had a minimal analytics that would track the individual lead’s movement around the site, a basic form capture to collect contact information, rudimentary CRM integration to sync data, and that was about it. Over time we added core modules like landing pages, automation rules, complex CRM integrations, and dynamic customer journeys. Only, the initial plans didn’t call for email marketing.

In fact, we actively didn’t want to do email marketing. Who wants to be an email service provider (tools like Sendgrid didn’t exist then)? Who wants to deal with deliverability? Who wants to fight spammers? The initial strategy was to have integrations to Mailchimp and Constant Contact such that modules like the forms manager could trigger an autoresponder and an automation rule could trigger a 1-to-1 email.

Quickly, we realized something was wrong.

Our approach delivered a poor, incomplete experience to our customers. Email was too important to be siloed from the marketing automation system. Email was too powerful as a marketing channel to not be a first-class module.

After endless internal debates about email, we finally decided to become an email service provider. Now, we enabled email to be a core feature throughout the platform. Now, marketers didn’t have to switch between as many different systems to run their marketing programs.

Email was a major inflection point in our product/market fit journey. Prior, customers liked the software but our product/market fit was modest. After adding email marketing, and a few rounds of refinement, our product/market fit was excellent and customers raved about the solution.

Major strategy changes often seem daunting. By focusing on the customer, and going down a much more difficult path technically, we delivered a superior experience. And, in the end, that was one of the most important product decisions we ever made.

Three years into Pardot we were humming along and had just cracked the $1M annual recurring revenue milestone. Customers were loving the product and saying things like, “I don’t how I did my job before using Pardot” — a great sign we had a must-have product, not a nice-to-have. After listening to customers talk about the value they received, internally we started debating raising the price to match the value.

Then, of course, worries emerged:

• Would prospects pay the higher price?
• Would sales cycles lengthen?
• Would sales velocity slow down?

And, naturally, the sales reps didn’t like the idea because they feared they’d make less money.

After getting internal feedback and input we made the call and doubled prices. What happened next was unexpected: sales and revenue grew even faster than planned.

At that point, it dawned on me the opportunity was bigger than expected.

Marketing automation was a billion dollar market in the making.

We were at the right place, at the right time, with the right team.

But, honestly, at the start of Pardot we thought it was a decent idea but didn’t know if it was good or great.

We didn’t know if the timing was right.

We didn’t know if the Great Recession would slow us down.

Three years into the business we knew we were on to something big — even bigger than expected.