What are Pardot Business Units?

usiness Units allow Pardot customers to separate or partition their data by region, product or business area. This allows for your marketing teams to personalise their messaging to their relevant data lists.The end goal has always been to send the best leads to the right Sales people, which with the help of Business Units will lead to an efficient and productive sales process.

Pardot Business Units are separate databases within a Pardot account that allow Pardot customers to partition their prospects, campaigns and assets by regions, products or services. The BUs will remove the necessity to connect multiple instances of Pardot to Salesforce in order to restrict data syncing to each Pardot account. They are available for Pardot Advanced & Premium edition customers only

Table of Contents

Can I use Pardot Business Units?

There are some requirements before you can start to use Business Units, these are:

Pardot Lightning App needs to be enabled within Salesforce Lightning
Business Units will only be available to Pardot customers using the Advanced edition from 11^th February 2019. Or those who upgraded to Advanced after 11^th February 2019.
Business Units will only be accessible in the Pardot Lightning App in Salesforce Lightning.
Your Salesforce edition will need to be Advanced +

The Detail

Each Business Unit has its own partitioned connector, settings and configurations, segmentations and automations, assets and Prospects.

Things to be aware of when you want to implement Business Units:

Once a Business Unit has been created and enabled, you can’t delete it!
After the Business Unit has been named in Salesforce, you can’t change it!

Some of the Key Concepts:

Restricts Access to Prospect Data

Before Pardot BUs, access to prospects could not be restricted. Anyone who has access to Pardot (and has a user role greater than Sales), has access to all the prospect records.

Now, Pardot admins can restrict access based on products, services and regions by partitioning data in BUs and assigning users to each BU.

Eliminates Selective Sharing Rules

The new feature also eliminates the need for complex selective sharing rules by introducing the Marketing Data Sharing criteria. A single Salesforce field can now determine which Pardot Business Unit your prospect data will sync with, and any prospect that no longer matches the criteria will automatically be suppressed; for example, when country equals Germany, sync the Lead with the EMEA BU.

Before Marketing Data Sharing, Consultants and Pardot Admins had to set the Salesforce Organisation-wide Sharing settings (Org-wide Default) to private, just so they could then include Sharing Rules that would open up particular records to the Connector User. In a lot of instances, companies do not want to have an org-wide default of private, but thankfully Marketing Data Sharing and the Pardot Connector v2 are well on their way to simplifying record access for Pardot Admins.

Business Unit Account Switcher

If the Pardot account was purchased after 25^th April 2019, users will also have the ability to switch between BUs using the new Account Switcher feature. No longer will users need login and out of individual Pardot accounts. This feature can be accessed from Salesforce and will only impact Pardot product elements.

Multiple Email Sending Domains

Finally, Pardot BUs will allow customers to use multiple Email Sending domains and Tracker domains across their BUs. Whilst it will still be required to set a Primary CNAME additional CNAMEs will be available as an option when creating new assets, allowing for sub-divisions and regions to have their own unique branding.

Limitations

A lot of the new features released as part of the Pardot BU functionality are irreversible, for example:

A BU cannot be deleted once enabled
The BU name in Salesforce cannot be changed
You cannot switch the Salesforce account used for the connector after installing

The irreversible nature of the Pardot BUs means it is important to plan their structure carefully with careful consideration of all their nuances.

Ref material: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/pardot-business-units/get-started-with-pardot-business-units