It started out like any other day. I was sitting at my desk reading reports of a series of forms that had gone amok when she stepped into my P.I. (that’s Pardot Investigator) office a tall and skilled marketer.  You could tell her confidence glowed with her holding a thin silver MacBook in her arm and in the her hand clung an iced coffee which left her fingers with an effect of dampness.  Her eyes were red and not all the tears had not cleared totally away. I knew she was in trouble and before she could speak I said:

“Let me guess, landing page troubles?”

She said “Yes, I need to create a new landing page quickly or my job will be in jeopardy…but I don’t know any HTML”…

Here is what I told her.

Build Landing Pages inside Pardot…

Pardot currently offers two different ways to create landing pages.  The original method is for you to create a custom HTML layout and add Pardot Region tags to determine what sections are editable or not. Unfortunately, this method take quite a bit of time and requires the user to understand the complexity of how to make CSS, JavaScript and html work with the Pardot WYSIWYG editor. Second, this method does not allow much flexibility on your layout. If you want to move a section of the layout or what to insert additional sections, you would have to create a new landing page layout. In other words, this method required having a web developer on call to make changes.

A new editor was released when Pardot for Lightning was rolled out. This new editor was a total revamp of the prior landing page editor.  No longer did you need to have any HTML skills or build out landing page layouts. You can know drag images, html blocks, rich text and buttons onto a landing page and edit it with a new WYSIWYG editor. On the surface, this seems to have solved out all the problems from the prior editor. However, the new editor lack the following features:

• You were unable to add any brand standard. That means if you have specific css styles you used on your website, you can’t just setup the editor to use them. The result is the landing pages tend to look very generic and boring.
• There are no prebuilt templates to pick from. So if you have never built a landing page before, you are expected to build everything from scratch.
• The editor does not integrate with any landing page created with the old editor.  Thus, you would have to rebuild by hand every landing page you had in the past in Pardot.
• You can’t use external libraries like Bootstrap, JQuery to override the standard page setup.
• The mobile responsive design is also locked down so you have no control how the page will render on mobile/tablets.

These limitations make it a poor choice.  Either you use the old overly complicated old editor or go with the too generic styled new editor in Pardot. Its like Pardot gives you the only choice of “It’s Drag and Drop Dead”…

Build Landing Pages outside of Pardot…

It is rare for me to suggest using external tools, but there are quite a few editors that make building landing pages easy. If you don’t know HTML, these three platforms might be the better route to take.

Unbounce

Unbounce is one of the easiest platforms to create landing pages. Designed to work with PPC, you can create your own landing pages from scratch or pick from over 100 prebuilt templates to get you started. This system uses a drag and drop editor and allows you to add/drop/modify your landing page layout with ease. Features like integration with Google Fonts makes it fast and easy to customize the pages to fit your branding guidelines. Unbounce also works with tray.io and zapier so you can push your captured leads into Pardot or Salesforce.

Bizzabo

When you think about landing pages, you might consider what the purpose of the landing page is for. If your pages are tied to online or in-person events, then you should consider Bizzabo.  Bizzabo is an event marketing platform that features one of the best landing page editors out there. You can quickly create high quality designs using their drag and drop editor. Bizzabo also has connectors to tray.io and zapier so you can get your event registrations over to Pardot or Salesforce.

Leadpages

Lead pages is one of the few landing page platforms that offers a huge library of templates. They also provide free hosting, WordPress integration or publish landing pages on third-party domain/website.  I found this platform not as easy as Bizzabo or Unbounce, but it did offer more flexibility when you need to have landing pages hosted on your own website. Leadpages also has connectors to tray.io and zapier making data transfer easy to Pardot or Salesforce.

The story concludes…

When I finished talking, she looked up and she had a small glint in her eye. She had been taking notes while I wasn’t looking. Her tears quickly disappeared and she gave me the stare cold like the ice coffee she finished.

She said “Thanks a bunch P.I., this is exactly what I needed to finish this campaign. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help, but I got to the airport and take a flight out to Tahiti.”

Before I could utter a sound, she had turned and left my office. I missed my chance to get my fee and ask her what her name. The only thing I had left was her ice coffee. It was the smell that dreams are made of…

There is a secret world of marketing intrigue and delayed data. On the surface you see Pardot and Salesforce passing data back and forth, but it takes a keen eye to know that something is right. Some activities in Pardot doesn’t trigger a sync to Salesforce. Looking through help guides stashed in the Salesforce secret safe (and on the disorganized help website), you find the following information:

These activities don’t trigger a sync from Pardot to Salesforce

• Receiving or opening an email, unless the action is set to adjust prospect score
• Page views, unless the action is set to adjust prospect score
• Visitor sessions
• Prospect account changes
• Creating or mapping new custom fields
• Changes to formula fields in Salesforce
• Undeleting a prospect

You quickly inform your boss “M” that something isn’t right. You ask for a ticket to the Bahamas to investigate this further. M says she will fly you coach to Detroit, but you quickly decline. Instead you do some fast finger research on your tablet and discover another detail:

Only these activities cause a prospect to sync from Salesforce to Pardot

• Updating the assigned user (owner) for the lead or contact record
• Making field changes to a lead or contact record
• Updating a related account record in Salesforce for a lead or contact who is associated to a Pardot prospect.
• Activities that update the Last Modified timestamp triggers a sync to Pardot for existing prospects
• Updating a lead or contact email address

You are now certain there must be someone at Salesforce trying to stop Pardot from working. You check to see if Marc Benioff hasn’t been kidnapped and now is in Baja. You ask your friend Langley at Marketing Cloud, but he doesn’t know anything about it. He is too busy figuring out Connector v2.0. You even call IT support line, but they don’t know anything about it and create a support ticket for you. You conclude without any doubt there must be a double-agent at Salesforce. There must be a “Doctor Know” who can get Pardot and Salesforce to sync.

To save time, we are going to skip forward a few days after you have some boring brawls with henchmen, an escape from a dungeon using cheerwine and a roll of certs, and car chase in a Pontiac 6000 station wagon on Mount Rushmore. A few days later you finally reach Doctor Know. Without using any witty one-liners, you get him to tell you how to make Pardot and Salesforce sync on demand…

Step 1: Create a custom field in Salesforce

Your solution will add a custom checkbox to the lead object (you can also create a custom field on the contact object later). You hidden camera took a screenshot of the custom field below:

Step 2: Create a custom field in Pardot

To make the sync work, we create a custom field in Pardot that is connected to this Salesforce field. Again, that hidden camera was able to capture what you did in Pardot below:

Step 3: You can create workflows in Salesforce. Your boss “M” reminds you that workflows are outdated (and comments on your wardrobe as being not cool). She suggests you switch to Flows instead. However, you decide to go with workflows for now (and you think your skinny jeans look great).

We start by creating a workflow rule. Because you want to save time, you decide to use the Pardot holiday special suppression solution to determine when Salesforce and Pardot will be forced to sync. So you set the criteria field IsHoliday equals one (which means today is a holiday).

Then you set the immediate workflow action to update your custom checkbox to be checked.

Now this works great, but what happens if it is not a holiday? You need one more workflow to check to see if it’s not a holiday and uncheck the checkbox.

So you create another workflow as shown below:

..and then set immediate workflow action to update your custom checkbox to be unchecked.

With the workflows in place, you now have a system that will modify the lead record when it is a holiday (and syncs again the day which isn’t a holiday)….

So why would this force Pardot and Salesforce to sync?

Remember, Salesforce will sync to Pardot when the Last Modified timestamp is changed. So by changing the checkbox, you are modifying the lead record and updating the Last Modified timestamp.

Could we do something like this from Pardot?

Yes. You could create repeat automation rules that could update the checkbox once a day which would force a sync between Pardot and Salesforce.

Is there anything that would stop a sync?

Yes. If there is no email address on the lead or contact in Salesforce, those records would not sync to Pardot. If there is no one assigned to the prospect in Pardot, those prospects would not sync to Salesforce. Additionally, any records not visible to the Pardot/Salesforce connector would not sync.

Epilogue

So after getting the details from Doctor Know, you empowered the rest of M’s team of how to make Pardot and Salesforce work together. M was so pleased she gives you more assignments to solve out how to make Pardot use Hubspot forms. Doctor Know would later leave his position to manage a Baskin Robbins in Omaha, Nebraska.