On my journey to add more Salesforce Certifications, I never thought I would take the Pardot Specialist Certification Exam this early until I happened to work on Pardot at my work. I am going to be working on Pardot and wanted to make myself prepared. Further I found that the certification exam is easy and takes less time to prepare, hence took the exam and passed it on the first attempt.
Pardot, meaning ‘to market’ or ‘to sell’, is a B2B marketing automation by Salesforce offering a marketing automation solution that allows marketing and sales departments to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns from one central platform. It also offers a blended lead scoring and grading system to generate high quality leads, tracks engagement with campaigns, improves follow-up speed, and combines the powers of marketing and sales to turn leads into customers for life.
There are currently two levels of Certifications on Pardot to test knowledge and experience using Pardot in a variety of roles and contexts.: Pardot Specialist and Pardot Consultant. Pardot Specialist focuses on the ability to build strategic marketing processes while incorporating tools like lead scoring, email marketing and lead generation, and be able to use reports to make data-driven decisions.
About the Exam:
- Content: 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions*
- Time allotted to complete the exam: 90 minutes
- Passing score: 67%
- Registration fee: USD 200; Retake fee is USD 100
- Prerequisite: None
Study Material: All the training material is available online for free at http://www.pardot.com/user-certification/ with appropriate links to the knowledge base articles.
Make sure to review online Documentation, Tip Sheets, and User Guides by searching for the topics listed in the Exam Outline section of the exam guide and studying the information related to those topics
Preparation time: I hardly spent a week/20 hours for the preparation.
Key is to revise the concepts. Though the content is limited, it is very hard to remember all the concepts first time, especially for the ones who have had no prior hands-on. The questions I got in the exam are the ones which I have never seen before. Since Pardot certification is added relatively new, most of the questions on the exam are not shared by previous test takers yet. I noticed that it’s not the question that is hard, but the answers. Though on first look at the question, we might feel that we know the answer, when we look at the options, they really confuse us.
Blogs I followed:
- Must read and revise: Ben Edward’s comprehensive training guide based entirely on the Pardot study guide.
- Mayank’s : http://succeedwithsalesforce.com/preparing-for-the-pardot-specialist-certification-exam/
- Ben’s : http://www.salesforceben.com/pardot-specialist-certification-guide-tips/
Tips:
- Focus more on these concepts :
- Administration
- Lead Management
- Salesforce Integration
- Besides the training videos go thru all the related knowledge articles and FAQs
- Go thru all the video series on Automation tools: http://help.pardot.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2128111-which-automation-tool-should-i-use-
Good Luck !
jbitra.com 