Certified Pardot Consultant

(Please don’t ask for specifics on the exam questions, as this would breach the test taker agreement and devalue the exam for everyone)

Towards the end of 2014, the Salesforce certification portal gained a new track - Pardot Consultant. As anyone who knows Bob Buzzard knows, certifications are my Everest - I have to take them on because they are there, and this was no different.

In fact, it was pretty different - at BrightGen we have customers that use Pardot, so I have experience of implementations, but its not my primary focus so I needed to do some serious studying to make sure that I’d covered all the bases. As a Salesforce Platinum Partner (and as an MVP) I get access to the Premier Training Catalog, which has around 16 hours of interactive Pardot training, so that was my run up to Christmas taken care of.  There’s also a huge amount of information that is publicly available in the Pardot Knowledgebase.

The exam format will be familiar to anyone that has taken a Salesforce certification before, accessed via webassessor with 60 multiple choice questions.  The exam is 90 minutes and the pass mark is 70%, which is a little tougher than the sales/service cloud exams which are 105 minutes with a 68% passing mark.

One area where the exam felt different to the others that I’ve taken (apart from Technical Architect) was the detailed reference information that I had to know - its not just a matter of knowing the concepts or features of Pardot, My thinking is that this is because Pardot is an application rather than a platform (unlike Salesforce) which reduces the breadth of the exam and this is countered with increased depth.  I know this isn’t the greatest explanation, but if I go into details I’ll be giving away information about the specifics of the exam, which would breach the test takers agreement.

The study guide is spot on in terms of the areas that you need to cover, and here’s a few more tips from my experience:

• Pardot has a large number of connectors available, and you should know how to setup and use each of these in detail
• It also has a large number of completion/page actions - you’ll need to understand the purpose of each of these, when they execute, and identify the appropriate setup for specific scenarios
• Knowing Pardot is not enough - much like the Sales and Service cloud exams you need industry knowledge around the certification, in this case marketing automation strategies, targets and metrics.

The other key piece of advice I’d give is to make sure that you read the question thoroughly - when I reviewed my exam prior to submission I found that I’d completely misunderstood two or three questions and picked the opposite answer to the one that was (I believe) correct.  

I put more time into studying for this exam than any others apart from Advanced Developer and Technical Architect, but it was worth it as on 30th December I gained the Pardot Consultant certification and am once again Salesforce Certified Everything.