Plan Your Pardot and Salesforce Integration

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Determine which connector version type your Pardot instance has.
Determine considerations prior to setting up your Salesforce-Pardot Connector.
Determine the ideal sync method for your company.
Define a Pardot Integration user.
Explain how to find the connector version.

Introduction

Let’s start at the beginning. Marketing automation platforms are designed to increase sales and maximize efficiency for companies with complex sales cycles. How do they do that? By managing prospect interactions and online marketing campaigns in one central platform.

A marketing automation system typically offers:

Analytics that track all prospect touch points, including forms, page views, content downloads, emails, social interactions, and more.
Lead scoring and grading to qualify and prioritize leads.
Automated lead nurturing that sends emails to prospects based on predefined rules or time intervals.
Customizable real-time notifications when a prospect is active or showing buying signals.
Closed-loop reporting for easy ROI calculation.
Tools for nontechnical users to create dynamic, branded, personalized online marketing campaigns and emails.

While other marketing platforms may offer some or most of these features, Pardot has them all, making it a great marketing automation choice.

Why Pardot and Salesforce Are So Great Together

If a CRM is primarily a sales tool, marketing automation is its marketing counterpart. Integrating the two systems lets you sync information bidirectionally. When you update a record in your CRM, it automatically updates in your marketing automation system and vice versa to keep sales, marketing, and service on the same page.

Integration gives all teams valuable insight into prospect activities, increases the efficiency of the lead management process, and smooths out kinks in the buyer’s journey that can cause leads to drop out of the sales process entirely.

So now we know why integration is so important but how exactly does integration work? Integration happens through a secure connector that enables data to flow between Pardot and Salesforce. So where do you start?

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to see what each step of this module looks like? Great! As you work through this module, we have added video snippets throughout to help you learn more about the Salesforce-Pardot Connector.

Start with an Assessment

The Salesforce/Pardot data stream is important. Pardot and Salesforce have different authorization and sharing models. Data is shared through the Salesforce-Pardot connector via the connector user. If you already have this connector, you need to ensure that it’s set up correctly so it makes life easier, not harder, for sales and marketing.

Take time to thoroughly assess how the system syncs records, how it’s configured for your organization, and who is monitoring the connector sync queue and troubleshooting errors. Without someone watching this queue, some records may not sync and fields may not update.

When you are considering these questions and find you have a lot of questions of your own, it might be a good idea to find some resources to help you. Here are a few to get you started.

Salesforce Help Documentation
- Using Pardot with Salesforce
Implementation Guide
- Salesforce-Pardot Connector v1 Implementation Guide
- Salesforce-Pardot Connector v2 Implementation Guide
Webinars
- How to Align Marketing, Sales and Service with Account-Based Marketing (Sign-up Required)
Accelerators (Requires Premier Support)

If you don’t yet have a Salesforce connector for Pardot installed, we walk you through setup and configuration in the following units, and provide plenty of tips for where to get help for optimizing an existing installation. Let’s look at what version of the connector you have.

To be able to view the connector version, you will need a Pardot Administrator role user permission.

Open the Account Settings page.
In Pardot, click and select Settings.
In the Lightning app, select Pardot Settings.
Your version number will show in the Connector Version row.

Before you unpause your Salesforce-Pardot connector, there are several items that you should review. To make the installation easy, we outlined items to consider such as syncing fields and prospects, mapping users, and other setup tasks. Take a few minutes to review these items before you move on to setting up your Salesforce-Pardot connector.

If you are implementing Pardot Business Units we recommend using a partner. The connector is paused by default. Before you unpause the connector, specific steps need to be completed.

General Considerations Before Set Up

You can have only one Salesforce connector in Pardot.
Pardot can integrate with Salesforce Person Account record types.
Importing prospects into Pardot syncs them with Salesforce. Unassigned prospects sync to Salesforce, but records aren’t created when there is no matching email address.
Pardot checks for changes in Salesforce and Pardot often, about every 2 minutes.

Connector Version 2 Considerations

When your Pardot account is provisioned, the connector is created in a paused state.
Prospect records don’t automatically sync until the connector is unpaused. Users campaigns, and metadata will continue to sync and prospects records can be manually synced while the connector is paused.
Before unpausing, be sure to review the settings and configure Marketing Data Sharing if you want to use it. We strongly recommend using a partner for this portion of set up.
There are two ways a prospect can be synced manually: Sync with CRM on a prospect record, or Send to Pardot on a lead or contact record.
The integration user has access to all records that can sync between Salesforce and Pardot. If you plan to link multiple Pardot accounts to one Salesforce account, you can’t use the integration user unless you plan to also use Marketing Data Sharing.

Accounts That Allow Multiple Prospects with the Same Email Address

The most important aspect of the Salesforce sync is creating a one-to-one relationship between a Pardot prospect and a Salesforce lead, contact, or person account. The Salesforce-Pardot Connector uses CRM ID as the matching criteria for syncing in both directions in accounts that allow multiple prospects with the same email address.

This means that when Salesforce creates a lead, contact, or person account with a specific email address, a prospect is created in Pardot with a matching CRM ID. Data from each record syncs according to the sync behavior defined for each field. An excellent resource to learn more about accounts that allow multiple prospects with the same email address can be found in the help article.

Pardot Integration User

The Pardot integration user is an automatically provisioned user that connects to Salesforce to sync data. Pardot is the only app that can log in to Salesforce via the integration user, and only after a Salesforce admin has finished the Pardot setup.

The Pardot Connected App uses a secure authentication method that lets the Pardot application servers authenticate to Salesforce. The connected app contains the public half of a secure key pair provisioned to Pardot. If you have more questions or need help with this, refer to the link in the Resources section.

Choose a Sync Method

When the integration user is set as the connector user, the Salesforce-Pardot Connector syncs all records for objects that sync between Pardot and Salesforce. If you want to sync a subset of records, use Marketing Data Sharing to select the records to sync. Use the included integration user, or configure your own connector user.

When using Marketing Data Sharing, we recommend you use the integration user instead of configuring your own connector user. The integration user is preconfigured with the necessary permissions and doesn’t require a Sales Cloud license.