For many Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) customers, using Pardot provides them with the tools necessary to communicate with their distinctive audience(s) in a personalized way.
One common way to do this is to create dynamic customer-centric journeys that send emails on behalf of individual sales reps and help to promote new products or to educate audiences on a specific topic. After all, this is one of the main reasons organizations buy Pardot — to drive the sales pipeline.
But what happens when you need to send emails from different teams in your organization?
Follow along with this blog and learn a few tricks to create new experiences for your Prospects for sales, service, and other parts of your business by leveraging the CRM user lookup feature in Pardot.
Use CRM user lookups to send Pardot emails on behalf of other departments at your company or organization
One of the advantages of Pardot automation for email is the ability to leverage relationships in Salesforce between your sales reps, account owners, and other key service players with your Pardot leads and contacts.
Here are some examples below:
SDR (Lead Owner) to Prospect (Lead)
Account Executive (Account Owner) to Prospect (Contact)
In fact, here are the standard out-of-the-box relationships you can leverage from Salesforce in Pardot.
- Account Owner – Send the email from the prospect’s account owner in Salesforce.
- Assigned User – Send the email from the user who owns the prospect record. If the prospect is synced to Salesforce. this is the Lead or Contact Owner.
- Specific User – Select from a list of your Pardot users to use as the email’s sender.
- General User – Set a general address (like [email protected]) or a non-Pardot user to be the sender of the Email.
You can usually cover 97% of all your use cases using one of these options while drafting your Pardot list emails or engagement studio programs.
While most organizations don’t have a need for custom relationships, yours may be different. And that’s okay.
What if you need a different/custom user connection?
In your Pardot emails, you can always edit the Sender to say General User. This sends the email on behalf of that person as long as they have the same email domain you have validated in Pardot (@company.com).
However, that’s not always the best outcome. Sometimes we need more dynamic solutions.
In that case, we may want a relationship outside of Sales/Marketing for specific customer service-centric journeys like the one below:
Service Manager (Custom CRM Relationship) to Prospect (Lead or Contact)
In the scenario above, the User/record relationships were built in Salesforce and shared with Pardot in order to build out a service team to prospect customer journeys — think CSAT, follow-up surveys, etc.
Did you know you know you can create custom relationships AND send emails on their behalf?
Watch the demo below to set up your own custom CRM relationships between Users and your Prospects:
You can also follow along with these steps.
After you set this up, you can take advantage of this field right away with CRM user lookup.
This is what it looks like:
A quick note: Sometimes fields need a few minutes to sync. Be patient, go grab coffee and come back to this. In our experience, it is never more than a few minutes.
What are other examples of custom CRM user lookups?
Honestly, the possibilities are endless. Here are some options:
- Regional sales manager
- Customer service representative
- Technical support specialist
Don’t forget to check out our other cool ideas like A/B testing for you to leverage these different sender options within your organization in the most effective ways.
Where can I use these relationships?
These CRM user lookups are built into Salesforce, so you can use them in both Pardot and Salesforce. Within Pardot you can leverage them in the following ways:
- Email templates
- List emails
- Rules on automation rules, dynamic lists, and segmentation rules
- Potentially on the new conditional completion action criteria rules
This field cannot be used to send email notifications to the User linked to this Prospect.
Additionally, we did not see them in Engagement Studio Programs as rule options. But remember, you can build a list to act as your criteria instead of using the field directly.
Can I have more than one custom relationship?
Absolutely. This is out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce, which can now be repurposed for Pardot-specific processes.
Most organizations we have worked with have less than (3) custom User lookups. The only caveat is to make sure you name them correctly so there is no confusion while using them.
As you see above, you can pick from a picklist (CRM User lookup fields) under the Prospect CRM User Custom option, and choose which one you want to leverage on that particular email.
How do you test to make sure everything is working fine?
The best way to test this information is up to date in Pardot is to go through the following checklist:
- Review User mappings
- If the User is deactivated or not in Pardot, this will fail.
- Create a list of Prospects using the new field created and make sure the values are being reflected in Pardot.
- Watch the video earlier in the blog for a few troubleshooting steps.
- Run a preview test in your email test tab.
- Enter a few email addresses you know to have this field updated and see how it works out.
- You can create fake prospects to sync for this testing or build in Sandbox if you have access to one.
CRM user lookups make life easier for Pardot admins
Thank you for following along! Check out part two of this blog where we cover how to avoid email personalization missteps.
If you have any questions about this feature or how to use it in Pardot (MCAE) please give us a shout here.
