How to Set up Salesforce Identity Licenses for Pardot – Trick to Save Admin Headaches

Pardot’s user authentication (Pardot-only logins) will be discontinued as part of the Spring ’21 release. All users logging into Pardot will be required to use Salesforce single sign-on (SSO).

To make the transition smoother, Salesforce provisioned 100 identity user licenses for customers to patch up the gaps where any Pardot users don’t have Salesforce licenses.

We’ve been helping our clients get prepared for the changes and found there’s a trick to how you can structure your Salesforce Identity Licenses to save confusion down the line.

• Every user that needs to access Pardot must have a Salesforce license.
• If a user does not have a Salesforce license, you will need to create a Salesforce user record with an ‘Identity’ user license type (selecting a profile is mandatory, which we will revisit later):

• With Salesforce user sync, every Salesforce profile is mapped to a Pardot user role (eg. Administrator, Marketing Sales Manager, Sales). The Pardot user record inherits the user role defined for their Salesforce profile (eg. all ‘Standard users’ could be assigned the ‘Sales’ user role for Pardot).

By default, there is only one Salesforce profile for ‘Identity User’. As Salesforce profiles and Pardot user roles are mapped one-to-one, you can find yourself facing limitations. What if you had 10 users requiring identity user licenses, however, 4 need the user role ‘Marketing’ and the rest ‘Sales’. How can you tell Pardot user sync to treat these users differently?

This can be solved by cloning the ‘Identity User’ profile in Salesforce 4 times, naming them ‘Identity – Admin’, ‘Identity – Marketing’, ‘Identity – Sales Manager’, ‘Identity – Sales’.

When mapping profiles during Pardot user sync setup, with 4 separate Salesforce profiles, you can define which level of Pardot access each should have without risking any cross-over.

Overall, this is a great way to make your account permissions set up clearer so both your team, consultants, and your future self, will thank you.