Couple weeks ago, I saw a quick post on NetSuite's fan page on Facebook on Pardot. For those of you who are not familiar with Pardot, they are marketing automation provider. It's pretty awesome tool for Marketing department.
Pardot offers OOB, easy setup to connect with either NetSuite. It offers connectors for other CRM tools as well. Here is a catch; you can only connect to ONE CRM tool. It makes sense. First of all, you wouldn't want to have multiple CRM ran within your company. That's serious waste of money.
Anyway, one issue that I found with NetSuite connector; while it works well with minimum setup effort, it is highly limited in customization. Pardot set the ground rules how leads/customers/prospects will get synced between the two system and you really don't have much say in it.
I have submitted an enhancement request for this with Pardot but it's not really going anywhere.
What is an alternate solution? You can take advantage both NetSuite and Pardot API to sync between the two system. It takes some work Pardot API is available
When you look at NetSuite documentation, you will see nlapiRequestURL() method call. You can use this to connect out to Pardot API. You can use nlapiStringToXML() to get response body back and convert it to XML and from there you can get any values you want out of it.
YOU DO NEED TO KNOW XPath. You can get a quick tutorial from W3Cschool.
Pardot API documentation has good amount of information on getting up to speed on using API usage.
I think this method is far less intrusive compared to OOB Pardot to NetSuite connector and you have full control over what information comes back and go out.
One Note: You will need to use this as Scheduled Script in NetSuite and from time to time, you will get following errors from Pardot:
- Invalid API Key
- Request Time out.
- Exceeded Time out.
It happens from time to time. Nothing serious to worry about. Just make sure you code accordingly.
Happy coding!
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