Assess a Customer’s Current Salesforce and Pardot Landscape [Pardot Consultant Study Guide #2]

As a Pardot consultant, I have worked on countless Pardot projects in different capacities – short-term, long-term, at the implementation stage, audits, general administration, and the ‘help-get-more-out-of-the-investment’ type. I know it’s cliche to say this, but I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

When studying for the Pardot Consultant certification, the ‘evaluation’ section is the hardest section to revise for – it’s likely you’re tired of seeing ‘Given a scenario’ and not knowing where to start.

I recently presented this section at the Pardot Consultant Bootcamp, hosted by the Trailblazer Community – here is the recording to follow along as you read:

This post will help you to pick apart a scenario when you are ‘Given a scenario’ in the exam question. The knowledge you need can only truly be gained through real-life experience – as an experienced Consultant, spotting risks and opportunities in projects will be second nature.

You won’t need to know all of these for the certification exam – however, you will need these if you want to become a successful Pardot Consultant. Here is my list.

The Most Important Question

First things first, you should find out if this is a new implementation of Pardot, or an existing one. This will lead you to ask different questions accordingly.

• Is this a new implementation, or an existing implementation of Pardot?

NB: you will see (existing) in front of any question that is aimed at organisations that are already using Pardot).

Section 1: General Licensing Questions

• Which edition of Pardot do they have/will have?
• (existing) How many Pardot accounts do they have? Do they use Pardot Business Units?
• Will they be purchasing Pardot Business Units?
• Do they have B2B Marketing Analytics, and has it been set up?
• Which edition of Salesforce do they have? (Note: this definitely won’t come up in the exam, but useful to ask in a project kick-off!)
• Have they purchased Salesforce Engage?
• (existing) Have they updated to the Pardot Lightning App? Is everyone using it?

Section 2: Attitudes Towards Pardot

• (existing) Why did they buy Pardot in the first place? How satisfied are they with it?

Section 3: Inbound Data

• What sources of data do they have? (web-to-lead, list import, another marketing automation tool integrated to Salesforce?)
• Is there a governance/approval process around inbound data?

Section 4: Leads

• Are they using the lead object?
• Do they follow a lead lifecycle (eg. from status ‘Open’ to ‘Closed – qualified’)
• Are they using the lead conversion process properly?
• Are they using lead assignment rules? Lead queues?

Section 5: Accounts & Contacts

• What different account types do they have? How are these distinct from each other? (Record types, picklist field?)
• Are they using person accounts?

Section 6: Campaigns

• Are they using Salesforce campaigns with best practice?
• Are they using Salesforce campaign members with best practice?
• (existing) Have they enabled Engagement History? Connected campaigns?

Section 7: Custom Objects

• Are the marketing team using any custom objects that are important to their processes?

Section 8: Users

• Which users need access to Pardot? Do all these users have a Salesforce license?
• Which Salesforce profiles do these users have?
• (existing) Have they enabled Salesforce user sync?

Section 9: Reports

• Which reports are the marketing team using? Which do they use to communicate their performance to other teams/send to their superiors?
• (existing) If they have B2B Marketing Analytics, has it been set up? Are they using it? Are they using the out-of-the-box dashboards, or have they created their own?

Section 10: Connectors & Integrations

• (existing) Which Salesforce connector version are they using (v1 or v2)? (NB: as a new customer, they will be using v2 by default).
• Do they need to restrict the Lead/Contact data syncing with Pardot to a specific sub-set (either for security/data visibility purposes, or to avoid exceeding Pardot Prospect database limits)?
• Which Pardot Connectors are they using? (eg. to their webinar tool)
• Are they using the Pardot API? If so, why and which Pardot objects is the API accessing?

What’s next?

I will be continuing to add to this article over time with more questions. If you haven’t done so already, check out the overview of the ‘evaluation’ section that brings everything together so that you can feel more prepared for the certification exam: