I talk about Pardot a lot because I like the product a lot. It provides a low barrier to enter into the world of digital marketing operations and automation for anyone who is interested in learning. The thing that makes it a great tool is how it’s presented to the user, in terms of its UI. I say this all the time, Pardot has a knack for boiling down the clutter to its most essential shape and form, and delivering a great user interface to its customers. However, Pardot’s decided simplicity, while making marketing operations a breeze, it comes with its drawbacks.

If you sit with Pardot long enough you’ll start to see there are other operational necessities that can’t be easily achieved on the platform. Like, simple field calculations, plugging fields as variables into automations. It’s not that Pardot engineers can’t make these nice things happen nor it’s because Pardot product development team hasn’t thought of adding to their product, and this is exactly where CRM comes to play.

Salesforce is somewhat the opposite of Pardot in terms of simplicity. It’s packed with features and customization options. Salesforce CRM, being a relational database essentially, allows you to manipulate and report on data in many different ways. With Pardot being acquired by Salesforce a while back, it’s getting more integrated into the platform each year. One of the most useful, and possibly the foundational, features of the integration is the ability to map Pardot and Salesforce fields to each other and define their syncing behavior. By doing so, it also allows you to start taking advantage of Salesforce’s more advanced data operations through formula fields, roll up helpers, flow builders, etc. for so you can leverage more dynamic data in your automations, making it possible to create smarter automations for your audience.

Out of the box, Pardot can connect to and work with 4 standard Salesforce objects (Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities). While these 4 objects will cover most of the marketing operation needs there will be times you will need to access additional custom objects you’ve built in your Salesforce org. The upper tier Pardot packages allow you to connect to 4 custom Salesforce objects of your choosing. While this really extends Pardot’s capabilities and wht you can do with your Salesforce data it’s worth mentioning that it comes with one missing feature. Salesforce allows Pardot to connect and read the data from custom objects but won’t allow Pardot to write or update. With that one caveat, the ability to connect to custom objects is still a very useful tool that allows you to make your marketing operations better than ever before.

If you have tips and tricks from your experiences with Pardot please share, I’m always curious to find out how others use these platforms to run their marketing operations.