Interview questions for Pardot

The demand for Pardot expertise continues to grow, helped by the Salesforce economy’s overall growth. With Pardot becoming ever more closely involved with Salesforce core activities, these professionals find themselves in a good position. Pardot is known (and admired) as a relatively simple marketing automation app; however, it’s deceptively simple. Organizations seeking to push Pardot further will need the knowledge around best practice configuration that only seasoned Pardot experts can offer. Pardot Admins and consultants need to understand how Sales Cloud functions in order to maximize their tech stack. This makes hiring a critical job.

1. What Causes a Prospect to Sync from Pardot to Salesforce?

For a prospect to sync from Pardot to Salesforce, the prospect record must meet the prerequisites and then an activity must trigger the sync.

2. What about Pardot (and marketing automation) interests you?

Why did you decide to specialize in Pardot/marketing automation? Could be another way this question is asked.Talk about your career path, the first time you encountered Pardot, and how it made you feel. Tell the interviewer about what “hooked” you; it could be the value you delivered when you “hit the ground running”, how Pardot functions, or that Pardot boosted your productivity compared to other tools you used – it’s your call!

3. How do you configure default and custom prospect field sync behavior?

1. Edit the prospect field.
2. From the Sync Behavior dropdown, select the desired behavior.
3. Save the field.
6. Have you run a discovery (requirements gathering) session to engage stakeholders? What was the outcome?
Talk about a session you ran with one or multiple of the personas (listed in the previous answer). How did you prepare for it? How long did it last? What was on the agenda?
And the outcome – was everyone engaged with what you were discussing, or did some people seem distracted? I have been in many workshops with unengaged stakeholders (and worse, people deliberately looking to derail the project) – you may think to avoid mentioning these types of experiences initially, however, put a positive spin on it (“what I did/learned was…”) and you will prove yourself to be more resilient.

4. Which elements are essential to have in place before starting an  implementation/feature roll-out?

What advice would you give to someone starting out or making an operational change? Remember, what may seem like a minor update technically could have significant change management considerations.
Here are a few things to flag:
• Subscriptions/consent management: Are subscriptions managed by lists currently, and are existing records organized into the correct format?
• Licensing: do you/the client have the correct licenses provisioned to go ahead with the implementation you want?
• Migration: if an organization is moving from another marketing automation tool, do you have access to it?
• Integration/connectors: same goes here – you need access to all platforms.
• Goals: where are the team/organization falling short? What exactly would they like to improve? Examples: lead acquisition, supplying higher quality lead for faster qualification, proving marketing influence customer retention.
• Timeline: the scheduled start and predicted end date for the work. Any tasks dependent on other teams will need the timelines communicated to also (so the project doesn’t get held up)
• Super users: who will be the one/two super users? They will be responsible for light admin tasks, and support the team day-to-day. They will go through additional training, so factor that into the project and their own schedules.

5. In Prospect Audits, what are Form Errors?

The prospect attempted to submit a form and received an error. The audit displays the field name and error.

6. What do you mean by Prospect Created — Form Submission?

Prospect Created — Form Submission means that the prospect was converted from a visitor via a form submission.

7. How Email Address Changes Sync to Pardot

When you change contact or lead email address in Salesforce, it can sync the new address to the corresponding prospect record in Pardot. This functionality is used if the sales team updates email addresses manually or via a data append service like Data.com, or if you merge lead records.

8. How would you explain Pardot to someone who has never heard of marketing automation before?

No doubt you would have been in this situation before. The key is to make sure you don’t just pitch Pardot as an email sending tool – it’s so much more than that! It’s all about the wider picture, tying other marketing touchpoints and Salesforce processes other teams are involved with. So, you could say that Pardot is a tool that taps into Salesforce data and listens for prospect engagement behavior, in order to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

9. What happens when you delete leads and contacts?

When a synced lead or contact is deleted in Salesforce, Pardot flags it as [[crm_deleted]] and sends it to the recycle bin. Pardot does not recreate the lead or contact in Salesforce.

10. How can you remove the [[crm_deleted]] flag and make the prospect eligible for syncing?

The following actions remove the [[crm_deleted]] flag and make the prospect eligible for syncing:
• Undeleting the record in Salesforce
• Creating a record with the same email address in Salesforce Automatically create prospects in Pardot if they are created as a Lead or Contact in Salesforce is enabled.
• Using one of these Salesforce functions: Send to Pardot, Send Pardot Email, Add to Pardot List, or Send Engage Email. In Pardot accounts that allow multiple prospects with the same email address, the Send to Pardot button doesn’t clear the [[crm_deleted]] flag. Instead, it creates a prospect record.
• Creating a Pardot automation rule with an action to Allow Deleted CRM Lead or Contact to Recreate from Pardot.

11. How can you Prevent a Prospect from Syncing with Salesforce?

If Salesforce doesn’t have a record with the same email address as the prospect record, don’t assign the prospect in Pardot. Unassigned prospects don’t sync when there isn’t a matching record in Salesforce.
However, if you have a prospect in Pardot, and a record with a matching email address exists in Salesforce, the records sync unless you disable CRM syncing. To disable CRM syncing for an individual prospect, navigate to the prospect’s record and click on the Disable CRM Syncing. To disable CRM syncing for multiple prospects, you need to set up an automation rule that targets the prospects and then select the Do not sync with CRM action.
Explain what Campaign Influence is.
Salesforce Campaign Influence is how Salesforce Opportunities are associated to the Campaigns that helped generate them. It’s all about joining the dots between sales revenue (stored in opportunities) and marketing data (stored in campaigns) – and therefore, the fundamental connection in measuring Marketing ROI (return on investment).