If you have multiple brands, products, or serve multiple regions, you may have heard of Pardot Business Units. However, what are Pardot Business Units, are they right for your organization and how do they behave?
Before teams say yes to Business Units (BUs) it is important for them to understand what it will mean for the organization, how their marketing automation processes will interact with the CRM, and the benefits that come with their implementation.
What are Pardot Business Units?
Picture a house, the foundation is the CRM, everything being built up from it, and then each room within that house is a Pardot BU separated by walls and locked doors. This is not an open concept layout. You still have just one house, meaning one Pardot account, but you have multiple units all flowing into the CRM.
This one account concept keeps businesses with multiple brands, products, and/or locations from having to use and manage multiple Pardot accounts to keep everything separate. With BUs, they can have multiple separate Pardot databases all flowing into their one Salesforce account and only have one Pardot account to manage.
Each BU has its own individual campaigns, assets, and prospects, just as a room in a house has its own separate furniture. Companies with multiple brands, products, or regions that need a clear divide between campaigns and assets can benefit from this as everything is kept separate and organized, ensuring that the right message is being sent to the right audience.
How do Pardot Business Units Function?
From a user standpoint, think of the administrator as the owner of the house with the master key. The administrator can choose which users can enter the rooms based on who is given access, or to whom they want to give a key to that specific room.
For organizations with Pardot Advanced Edition purchased after April 25, 2019 and using the Pardot Lightning App, this is done via the Business Unit Switcher. The administrator can grant users access to more than one Pardot business unit from the Salesforce org and then the users can switch between each BU in the Pardot Settings tab using the dropdown menu to select the BU.
In terms of CRM sync, as of the Pardot Spring ‘21 release, the Salesforce-Pardot connector has a new setting that stops Pardot package fields from syncing to leads and contacts in Salesforce. This setting can be used as a custom setup to sync prospects from different Pardot business units to a single lead or contact in Salesforce. Then on the lead or contact record in Salesforce, teams can see which BUs the individual belongs to if they converted on forms from multiple units. In the past, a prospect from BU1 that converted on a form from BU2 would have been created as a duplicate, or second record in Salesforce, but not anymore with this new feature. For this setup, Marketing Data Sharing Rules need to be reconfigured, so lead and contact records sync to more than one business unit.
To see how each Business Unit is performing, apps can be created in B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) that shows datasets of Pardot, Sales, and Service Cloud. To use B2BMA with multiple business units, organizations need a Tableau CRM Growth or Plus license. Each BU can only be associated with one app. If your team has B2BMA Plus, the Campaign Engagement card includes filters for BUs, so that marketers can easily choose which one they would like to analyze.
Are BUs Right for My Organization?
Do you have multiple Pardot accounts? If you are already using multiple Pardot accounts, definitely consider BUs. It will simplify your marketing automation into one account, but will still provide the separate database functionality.
Do you have multiple brands, products, locations, or divisions? If you have these multiple segments within your business, the next question to ask is how much do they overlap? Are you constantly trying to cross-sell or is it of the utmost importance that these brands function separately? Does your marketing for one region look completely different from your marketing to another? Do you want one house with a closed concept, or do you need more of a large studio layout with an open loft where all of the data is living in one unit?
For more information on Pardot Business Units, including the preparation for setup, download our guide and get with your team to discuss the type of functionality you want to see from your marketing automation platform.
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