Passing a exam is not easy in general. And the Salesforce Pardot certification exam is not one of the easiest exams around. There isn’t really a reason why because Pardot is meant to be simple to use. But I know quite a few consultants who have been studying for it all summer, and it’s proven to be a tat difficult.

I happen to pass the exam in one shot. Maybe I was just lucky. But just in case there was a bit more to it than sheer luck, let me share a few of my ‘study secrets’ on how to pass the Salesforce Pardot certification exam, so that you can be as ‘lucky’.

Simply because it will be a great advantage to be certified and I love to build a community of Pardot consultants so that we can all help eachother in the years to come.

Based on various market signals, trends and statistics, it is easy to deduct that consultants with Salesforce Pardot certification and expertise will increasingly be in demand over the next few years. More and more B2B and B2C companies are now ready for marketing automation adoption. They want to rely on someone they can trust when embarking onto the new territory of marketing automation, or when migrating to Pardot from other marketing automation platforms. Someone certified. By Salesforce.

How to Pass Salesforce Pardot Certification Exam–The Secrets

So here are my study tips, and some sample exam questions.

Pardot Certification Exam Secrets #1: Team up.

Everything is easier with a buddy, and studying for the Salesforce Pardot certification exam is no different. If you team up with a buddy, you can keep each other motivated to ensure you both study enough, and help each other work through the materials themselves. This may not sound like ‘a secret’, but really, it’s my best tip.  If you are in the least bit of competitive, you will want to ‘win’ as much as you want your buddy to ‘win’. When you don’t feel like studying, your friend will call you and tell you how much he/she did that day or that week, and that in turn, will help you to put in the hours. When you are tired and ‘not getting it’, buddies can clarify things simple, in your language. Etc. Get a buddy.

Pardot Certification Exam Secrets #2: Study.

Don’t just skim over the materials and hope for the best. You will have to go over the Salesforce Pardot training videos* at least twice. Some videos you may even want to watch three or four times. Don’t stop at the videos. After doing the videos for the second time, I reviewed the knowledge base on the topic of the videos. That cemented everything. Think NLP: neuro-linguistic programming: we need to hear and see things in several forms before we get the totality of the message. And then, we need to get our hands dirty and experience the message. That get’s me on my next tip on how to pass the Pardot exam….

*As well, be sure to use the Salesforce Pardot Certification Study Guide to ensure you place enough emphasis on aspects that the people at Pardot find important. (Link below).

Pardot Certification Exam Secrets #3: Practice.

It really helps if you get yourself access to a demo org at work so that you can see some of Pardot’s features in action.   Seeing things in action will help you make things click. This is particularly true for people without marketing nor marketing automation experience.

Pardot Certification Exam Secrets  #4: Build your Weakness.

Your weakest areas in your knowledge of the materials for the Pardot certification exam is likely a reflection of your overall professional weakness.

Having and MBA in marketing plus years of digital marketing experience (social media management, marketing automation, online sales management, etc.) sure helped. In fact, I had been looking for a comprehensive digital marketing platform such as Pardot!!

However, the Pardot terminology, how that marketing automation platform is organized and the steps I have to take to configure the platform for my specific marketing automations and digital marketing needs were not always so obvious. E.g. like every online marketer, I am familiar with bitly links but never heard of a custom redirect. So, for me, Pardot was like learning a new language. Plus, I had to spent some extra time on how to actually whitelist IP addresses and things like this. Last, this was also my first Salesforce certification exam, so I was new to the Web Assessor set-up and the typical pickiness of the Salesforce exam questions.

If you are already a certified Salesforce consultant then you are already familiar with the way it structures its exams. And, you’ll benefit from having Salesforce admin experience and from being detailed-oriented. Because you’ll need that too. But, if you are a Salesforce consultant with a pure IT background, you may not know anything about marketing yet. If your marketing knowledge is limited, you may wish to pick up a book or two on digital marketing to clue you in. This will be useful also after you passed the Salesforce Pardot exam, when you get to talk to marketing managers who wish for you to config their user requirements.

What is a bit surprising perhaps, is that you don’t need to know HTML to pass the exam. However, while working with Pardot, I am intensively grateful for my HTML knowledge. Ever worked with an HTML editor, such as the Pardot email template editor? Then you know that it will sure save you hours, if not days, of work fiddling around to get rid of garbage code and realise clean, professional pages.

Pardot Certification Exam Secrets #5: Study the Guide.

For easy reference, here’s the link directly to the wonderful Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant study guide: Guide  – Summer 2015. I say ‘Wonderful’, because it tells you everything: what to expect at the exam, how to study for the exam, the relative weighing of the various study topics, certification exam costs and sign-up details, and more.

Plus.

I know what you were looking for when you landed here on this page, and that is:

Free Salesforce Pardot Exam Questions

The study guide actually includes a few of these questions for you to practise with:

1. A client submits their Pardot form to test the form’s completion actions. After they submit the form, none of the completion actions are applied to their prospect record. What explanation do you give as to why the actions did not occur?

• A. The client has a visitor filter set up to filter activities from their IP address. Completion actions do not occur on filtered visitors.
• B. The ’email’ form field was set up to exclude free email addresses, so even though they submitted the form successfully, the Gmail address they used prevented the completion actions from running.
• C. The client did not un-pause the completion actions.
• D. Kiosk mode was enabled on the form, so completion actions did not run.

2. Your client is looking for a way to increase the quality of leads that are being passed from marketing to sales. What advice do you offer?

• A. Only pass on leads that are very active on your site no matter the company profile.
• B. Implement a blended lead scoring and grading system.
• C. Automatically assign all leads to sales reps in a round-robin system.
• D. Add more landing pages and forms to your site to increase the number of conversion opportunities.

3. Jim, a sales manager, just converted a lead to a contact in Salesforce, but none of the lead’s Pardot information (score/grade) transferred over. How do you address this issue?

• A. Pardot only shows this information on the lead record.
• B. Once converted, this information shows on the account record and not the contact.
• C. The administrator needs to create lookup fields on the contact to see this from the lead.
• D. The administrator needs to make sure he has mapped his lead fields to contact fields in Salesforce.

4. How can a prospect’s score be changed?

• A. Through automation rules.
• B. Through scoring model changes.
• C. Through completion actions.
• D. All of the above.

5. Which adheres most closely to email sending best practices?

• A. When possible, send emails on Monday mornings in order to stay top of mind throughout the week.
• B. Establish a consistent, predictable cadence for your email communications.
• C. Send plain text only emails in order to increase engagement rates.
• D. Make sure that all emails have a high image-to-text ratio.

These Pardot certification exam questions are provided by Salesforce itself. These exam practice question clearly show you that to pass the exam a blend of marketing automation, Pardot lingo and typical IT admin and config knowledge is required.

Now that you know my 5 secrets to pass the Salesforce Pardot Certification exam: be a trailblazer and go do it! Good luck!