Pardot Business Units: Everything you need to know

What are Business Units?

Business Units allow Pardot customers to separate or partition their data by region, product or business area. This allows for your marketing teams to personalise their messaging to their relevant data lists.Sales will also benefit, as you will need to have all your ducks in a row to ensure the implementation of Business Units is a success. The end goal has always been to send the best leads to the right Sales people, which with the help of Business Units will lead to an efficient and productive sales process.

Can I use Pardot Business Units?

There are some requirements before you can start to use Business Units, these are:

• Pardot Lightning App needs to be enabled within Salesforce Lightning
• Business Units will only be available to Pardot customers using the Advanced edition from 11^th February 2019. Or those who upgraded to Advanced after 11^th February 2019.
• Business Units will only be accessible in the Pardot Lightning App in Salesforce Lightning.
• Your Salesforce edition will need to be Advanced +

Out with the old and in with the new!

Before….

Before the introduction of Business Units, Pardot customers who wanted to separate their data would have needed to purchase multiple instances of Pardot and sync them all to a single Salesforce instance.

The connector users would need to be limited on data they can see in Salesforce so your org-wide default settings would be set to private and sharing rules added only allowing the relevant data into each Pardot instance.

Now….

With Business Units you are now able to easily partition your Salesforce data into separate Business Units by using Marketing Data Sharing. We’ll tell you more about this in just moment…

• Each Business Unit will have its own lead management process, assets, prospects, users, set-up, limits and configuration.

The main benefit of Business Units compared to having multiple Pardot Instances is cost. Having a single instance of Pardot separated by Business Units will save your company a lot of money!

The Detail

Each Business Unit has its own partitioned connector, settings and configurations, segmentations and automations, assets and Prospects.

Things to be aware of when you want to implement Business Units:

• Once a Business Unit has been created and enabled, you can’t delete it!
• After the Business Unit has been named in Salesforce, you can’t change it!

When the Business Unit has been enabled, it will be created in a paused state, meaning the Connector between Pardot and Salesforce will need to be re-enabled. You should ensure you have your Marketing Data Sharing criteria set up and correct before re-enabling.

Marketing Data Sharing

How do I know the correct data is syncing to the correct Business Unit? The answer is with Marketing Data Sharing criteria; when you set up a Business Unit you will need to set up Marketing Data Sharing for Leads, Contacts and Accounts.

Marketing Data Sharing is based off a single Salesforce field value and depending on this value determines which Business Unit your data will flow to.

Example:

Marketing Data Sharing criteria – Region = EMEA

Only data from Salesforce whose Region field is EMEA will enter this Business Unit.

If there is data in your Pardot instance that does not match the Marketing Data Sharing criteria, the Prospect will be archived. It is therefore very important to have a process in place in Salesforce to populate the fields being used for Marketing Data Sharing.

I don’t have a process in Salesforce:

When the Prospect is sent to Salesforce, if the Marketing Data Sharing criteria doesn’t match the Business Unit they reside in the next time they sync, they will be archived in the Business Unit (and therefore deleted).

I do have a process in Salesforce:

When the Prospect is sent to Salesforce from your EMEA Business Unit, use your Process Builder that updates the ‘Region’ field with EMEA based on your Prospect Country Value. The next time the prospect syncs, their Region will be ‘EMEA’ and will therefore be free to sync to and from the Business Unit.

First Business Unit

The first Business Unit created is important – especially if you are already using Pardot and migrating to Business Units. It’s important because you can’t migrate activities, automations, settings, templates etc. The first Business Unit you create will take on the current state of the Pardot Instance. Any other additional Business Units set up will be like brand new Pardot instances.

Users

Each Business Unit can have its own set of users who can only access a single Business Unit.

If you need a user to access all Business Units; when creating new users, you can set them up to have access to all Business Units. These users within Pardot will see the Business Unit switcher, here they can easily switch between all Business Units.

Domain Management

Each Business Unit can have its own Email Sender Domain, or if this needs to be the same across all Business Units it can be.Tracker domains on the other hand, will need to be different across Business Units, and currently you can only create one per Business Unit. Examples (www1.domain.com, www2.domain.com or APAC.domain.com, EMEA.domain.com).

Campaign Management

If you are thinking about Business Units, you should also think about enabling Campaign alignment.

If you use Campaigns in Salesforce and you have this enabled Campaign alignment, you can restrict what Campaigns automatically get created in the Business Unit by using Campaign Record Types.