Pardot Business Units – Leads and Contacts Syncing to Multiple BUs

Many organisations have Pardot Business Units, and need to allow a Prospect to exist in more than one BU. There are a few challenges with this.

Pardot has released a technical solution to ensure that data is not being overwritten, and to give customers more control over their data. Salesforce recommends you work with a Partner to implement this solution, so let us know if you need support setting this up.

The Spring’21 release notes include some information on syncing Prospects with cross-Business Unit Leads and Contacts:

A new setting on the Salesforce-Pardot connector stops Pardot package fields from syncing to lead and contact records in Salesforce. Using this setting as part of a custom setup allows prospects from different Pardot business units to sync to a single lead or contact in Salesforce. Eliminating the need to maintain duplicate lead or contact records. Read more

This technical solution aims to resolve the following:

Custom Objects to Store Pardot Proprietary Values

A Custom Object per Pardot BU in Salesforce can be used to store the proprietary Pardot field values. These values are related to Leads, Contacts, and Person Accounts. This allows for multiple values for the same field on records, e.g. Score from different Business Units.

Managing Email Opt-out

Currently, when a Prospect opts out they unsubscribe from all BUs (Global Opt-out setup). This is because the Opt-Out field is mapped to all Pardot Business Units. This technical solution unmaps the Opt-Out field so that Prospects can unsubscribe on an individual brand basis, using a ‘marketing profile’ per Business Unit.

Avoid Sync Looping

By setting field-level sync behaviour and assigning one BU to ‘win’ during data conflicts, sync loops can be reduced. There will need to be some other configuration to ensure data validity.

This is just a quick outline of how this new technical solution aims to improve your organisation’s experience using Pardot Business Units. Contact us for more information on how we can support implementing this for you.