Training 43 countries on marketing automation

Context

A company present in more than a hundred countries looks as if it has a marketing team in each of them. In many country offices, marketing was one responsibility among several, carried by an executive assistant or a sales coordinator, and campaign requests traveled to the global team to be built. When the division adopted Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot), a brand-new platform for 43 countries, the natural assumption was that the job was teaching people a new tool.

The objective

The goal was for every country to run its own campaigns: taking concepts and content from the global team and adapting them locally, building their own for local needs, and letting every prospect’s activity flow straight back to sales in the CRM. That meant learning two jobs at once. One was the platform, with all its capabilities and limits. The other was the campaign itself: starting from its goal and working back through the audience, the landing page and the conversion, well before anyone asks for an email.

What I did

I owned the global rollout as administrator and super user, feeding requirements to IT and taking on everything else. Training started live: sessions, homework, tests, and then each country’s first real campaign, built together and reviewed in detail. Office hours stayed open after that, along with hands-on support for the technically harder builds.

Around the training, I put together a kit countries could run their campaigns from on their own. Templates, code snippets, recommended asset dimensions and campaign logic all came from real global campaigns and from what the early champion countries learned. Custom code extended the builders with shadows, gradients and the brand’s own fonts, which the platform’s documentation at the time didn’t provide for; the workaround went into every template. With a colleague who owned training on other parts of the platform, I set up a community channel where all of it lived.

The last layer was a reference library: 42 short videos, each covering a single task, with a written version for anyone who would rather read. They were made for the occasional user, trained and capable but not in the platform every day, who needed one answer without searching through hours of recorded sessions. Most users were new to digital marketing as well as to the tool, so the templates also carried the brand: fonts, spacing and layout were already decided, which took most design choices off people’s plates.

The first campaigns needed close rework, down to the last detail, and a good deal of hand-holding: each one was also a lesson in audience, copy and conversion. Everything was taught and recorded in the live system, on real campaigns, which took time. In return, nothing anyone learned was hypothetical.

The outcome

• 43countries trained
• 100+campaigns within six months
• 42individual skill videos

Within six months of training, more than a hundred campaigns had gone out, built on a library of dozens of templates I designed and coded. The video library is still in use today, long after the live sessions ended.

Skills and tools

Platform

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) administration
• CRM integration with sales

Training

• Training design and delivery
• Video tutorials and written guides
• Change management across 43 countries

Builds

• Email and landing page templates
• HTML and CSS in no-code builders