The Pardot / Salesforce Sync
By: Chris Stegall
Tags: Connector User, Pardot, Salesforce Pardot, Salesforce, Integration

Pardot is a game-changer for marketers and, whether you’re nurturing prospects via email, web assets, or events, being able to track the effectiveness and impact of campaigns from “first touch” in Pardot to “closed won” in Salesforce revolutionizes the relationship between sales and marketing and helps organizations improve their efforts across the board.

With Salesforce’s acquisition of Pardot in 2013, syncing data across the platforms became even easier and really opened up the benefits to organizations who previously might have gotten hung up on the tech side of the equation. That said, sometimes the relationship between the two can still be a bit tricky for new users, so today we’ll run through the most common issues and questions we see from implementations of both platforms (and link you to a more comprehensive breakdown of exactly how to make your Pardot / Salesforce sync a success). Let’s dive in!

How the Sync Works

A typical data flow for Pardot -> Salesforce and (and back again) looks something like this:

A visitor comes to your company’s website and fills out a form (that you capture with Pardot).

Pardot creates a prospect record.

After Pardot qualifies the prospect, marketers (or automation/rules) assign it to a sales user or queue. This creates a new lead in Salesforce and kicks off the sales cycle. Depending on your needs, Pardot can be configured to create contacts or person accounts instead.

Updates to the lead, like campaign membership, contact conversion, and account or opportunity association, all sync back to the prospect record in Pardot. This gives your marketer a complete view of the prospect’s status with your organization.

When a deal closes, revenue from the opportunity is attributed back to the very first visitor touchpoint so you can calculate closed-loop campaign ROI.

And that way you have full visibility into the effectiveness of your campaigns and touchpoints, from start to finish of the process!

Setup — “What’s a Connector User?”

Setting up the connection is a fairly simple process in terms of integrations, but it does take about an hour of focused effort and, for most beginners, the aspect of creating a “connector user” can seem a bit confusing. We won’t break down the whole process here, but will take a chance to clarify the “connector user” connundrum.

Essentially, a “connector user” is is a Salesforce user whose permissions control Pardot’s access to your Salesforce org. Salesforce made this simpler for clients who kickoff Pardot today by automatically provisioning one, called the “Pardot Integration User”. And, while technically any Salesforce user can be your “connector user” there are some benefits to having it be a standalone set of credentials. First, it helps keep track of who actually edited the record (because if your connector user is sharing credentials with Dan, and a sync occurs, it’ll appear as though the record was last modified by “Dan”), having a separate user make sit clear what was an automated record change, and what was a manual effort. And secondly, because the connector user only has “access” to information its permissions allow, having a standalone user allows you to give the connection more broad permissions than you might want to give your individual users for their roles. So, for that reason, we always recommend provisioning a standalone Integration User.

What syncs?

Once you’re all set up, what data actually syncs between the two?

Leads, Contacts, & Person Accounts

Accounts

Opportunities

Campaigns

Custom Objects

Users

When does it sync?

And this is probably the second most common area of confusion for new setups. The integration between the two systems, while dynamic, isn’t constantly updated in real-time, but instead waits for modifications that “trigger” a sync and generally “reads” those triggers every 2–4 minutes. This image is a nice breakdown of the triggers themselves.

And, while most records sync immediately on a trigger (but remember, those triggers check every 2–4 minutes), if you’ve made a bunch of modifications to a bunch of records, say mass imported attribution to a new campaign, Pardot processed the synced records in batches of 400. Still, standard batch processing syncs about 12,000 records per hour, so unless you’re really making a lot of changes across the database, you shouldn’t have to wait too long for everything to be up to date.

Those are the most common connection questions we hear but, if you’d like to read more in depth you can download Salesforce’s guide right here or, as always, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help!

In the meantime, keep working hard, smart, and happy. And we’ll see you in the cloud.