Understanding Pardot and Salesforce Sync Behaviours
Understanding Pardot and Salesforce Sync Behaviours
CRM • Pardot
This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.
The ‘working as one team’ ethic between marketing and sales teams is known for being somewhat imperfect. For this reason, some might assume that Salesforce is for sales while Pardot is for marketers. However, with Pardot and Salesforce sync behaviours as a powerful benefit of using both platforms, collaboration and teamwork become much simpler.
For lead generation to deliver solid business results that keep everyone happy, it is key that both marketers and the sales team are on the same page in that they can view lead data seamlessly at any given time during a customer’s journey.
Pardot and Salesforce working together do just that; integrates sales and marketing efforts into one platform.
It lets us bring data, assets, and actions together so that we can have up to date information about a customer’s journey, their interactions with our brand and content, and ultimately the information the sales team can use to tailor their pitch and better win new business.
So what are Pardot to Salesforce sync behaviours?
Read on to find out, learn about typical scenarios and certain stumbling blocks that may occur.
What is Pardot and Salesforce sync behaviour?
Many systems have different types of sync behaviours. In Pardot, it simply means “how you want the sync to behave once processed”.
Let’s break it down so we can fully understand how the two systems really work together.
Triggering a sync
One of the questions I’m asked in my position at MarCloud is ‘how often does Pardot sync with Salesforce?’.
As a general rule, prospect records sync every two to four minutes. Most records sync immediately, but Pardot processes sync queues with over 400 records in batches. Standard batch processing syncs 12,000 records per hour.
Certain activities can trigger a sync, whether it be from a prospect, user or system:
Prospect triggers:
- Form submission.
- Form handler submission.
- Landing page submission.
- Email unsubscribe or resubscribe.
User triggers:
- Prospect import.
- Prospect field update.
- Pardot campaign update.
- Assigned user update.
- Manual sync from a prospect record.
System triggers:
- Update records.
- Add prospects to Salesforce campaigns.
- Update Salesforce campaign member status (this form of trigger is only applicable when applying rules or actions through lead management.)
How to trigger a sync for Accounts and Opportunities
Accounts
Salesforce will act as the master for triggering syncs for accounts. It will do this automatically once they are linked to a prospect record in Pardot that is syncing with a Salesforce contact.
In Pardot, the account fields act as read-only and are able to sync records that can be used for lead management purposes such as segmentation and automation ruling.
Opportunities
Once a connector has been established between Pardot and Salesforce, all Opportunities that are tied to contacts via a Contact Role trigger a sync to Pardot.
The contact record must also be syncing to a prospect in Pardot. However, for Opportunities that are tied to accounts only in Salesforce, they do not sync, they must be tied to contacts.
Once synced, Opportunities appear as a read-only field in Pardot and are unable to be deleted. In order to delete you must perform this action in Salesforce, the sync will then trigger and remove from Pardot.
If this is a feature that you wish to disable, this is possible by contacting Pardot support. But do bear in mind that this is a great feature for most users who wish to determine their revenue, whether it be processed or pending.
Can I control the sync?
Yes, you certainly can, using values you can control which platform is king. Read on to find out the different sync behaviours and how this can be controlled.
How sync behaviour actually works
Both Pardot and Salesforce, once connected, could have different fields of data for your prospects and therefore the questions you may have are;
- which data from which platform am I viewing?
- is it up to date?
- how can I change the data?
- why is data reappearing after deletion? This can be a real headache and not a good promotion of a helpful marketing automation system!
To avoid this confusion, admin users can set sync behaviour to manage most prospect fields to update in Pardot, Salesforce or even both, acting as the master to overwrite data from the alternative.
I will now delve into the different values that can be used to do this.
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