How to Update Pardot for Single Sign-On (SSO) Quickly and Easily

The countdown continues for Pardot-only users. (I imagine a New Year’s Eve style countdown.)

The eminent day is February 15, 2021.

By this date, all your Pardot users should be synced with Salesforce users with Single Sign-On (SSO) enabled. Pardot is saying sayonara (goodbye!) to its legacy, user authentication system.

SSO lets users access both Salesforce and Pardot with one set of credentials.

What happens after February 15?

Any Pardot users without SSO will lose their ability to log in to Pardot. The good news is that Salesforce will not delete users after February 15. An administrator needs to link all Pardot users to Salesforce users and enable SSO.

Tell me more

Salesforce has three types of Pardot logins, and two will be affected by the change.

Note: If you have Salesforce User Sync enabled, all of your users are either Pardot-only or Salesforce SSO-only. Salesforce does not require enabling Salesforce User Sync for the February 15 change.

How do I know which users to correct?

Go to the Pardot user administration section and review your users.

Look for any users that don’t have SSO. This includes:

Pardot-only users
Pardot users connected to Salesforce users but SSO is not enabled

Go to Pardot Settings >User Management>Users and use the view filter to examine your situation.

1. Synced Salesforce users

Any users that are user-sync enabled already have SSO enabled, You don’t need to worry about them. They have a blue Salesforce cloud icon next to their names.

2. Pardot-only users

Pardot-only users only exist in Pardot. You must create Salesforce users for these folks (you can use the free Identity license) and then map them to the Pardot User (choose their CRM username when editing their Pardot user), and finally enable SSO.

3. Everyone else (This got me!)

Now, check who’s left. Anyone? Do these users need to be deleted? Did they get missed in the user sync? Double-check for users that have a CRM username associated with their Pardot user, but SSO is not enabled. If the users are valid, you need to enable SSO with these instructions (Or, add their profiles/names to the user sync).

The important fact is that all users need SSO to access Pardot after Feb 15.

Identity licenses

Because additional Sales and Service Cloud licenses cost more money, Salesforce gave each account 100 Identity licenses at no cost. An identity license gives users the necessary access to Pardot.

You can see these by going to Salesforce on the Setup > Company Information page. The user licenses table will show a license named “Identity” and list the available and used licenses.

Identity licenses allow users to log into Pardot using their Salesforce credentials.

They don’t provide access to Sales or Service Cloud features, including the Leads and Contacts objects, the Pardot for Lightning App, and B2B Marketing Analytics.