Pardot sync errors wreak havoc on your Pardot instance. These errors prevent Prospects from syncing up with Salesforce, which prevents Leads from being assigned to salespeople. Your team’s hard work is devalued when Leads do not make it to the sales team. Here are 3 tips for preventing sync errors between Pardot and Salesforce:
1. Edit your Salesforce State & Country picklist values to exactly match your Pardot State and Country Dropdowns.
This common Pardot sync error occurs when the State or Country values do not match between Pardot and Salesforce. This can be an issue for international companies who have prospects who use different terms for countries. For example, someone who may enter the country they live in as “Iran”, but the official default country name in Salesforce is, “Iran, the Islamic Republic of”. Obviously, no one is going to enter “Iran, the Islamic Republic of” on a form, they would enter a different value so it is important to go through these Salesforce values and change them to the value that your prospects are most likely to enter (such as “The Islamic Republic of Iran” or simply “Iran”). Unfortunately, Salesforce does not have any plans to standardize the state and country values between Salesforce and Pardot, so you will need to manually go through all states and countries and make them match.
2. Check for Contact/Lead Email addresses
Have you gotten a Pardot sync error about a duplicate Contact/Lead? This occurs when a Contact or Lead already exists in Salesforce, but no email address is associated with that record. The prospect’s email address is the unique identifier in Pardot and enables it to sync with the Lead/Contact in Salesforce. Email needs to be a required field on Leads/Contacts. For clean up, you can set up a weekly report on all Leads/Contacts without email addresses and follow up with salespeople to get them.
3. Set a reminder in your calendar to check sync errors 2x weekly
Ideally, you have time to check your Pardot sync errors daily. But what you do ideally isn’t always the same as what you do realistically. Set aside 15 minutes in your calendar twice a week to check and resolve sync errors. This will prevent hundreds of sync errors from piling up. Treat this time as a meeting that you cannot skip. You’ll be thanking yourself when you’re dealing with 10 sync errors at a time instead of hundreds.
Keeping data flowing seamlessly between Pardot and Salesforce is a huge undertaking when Pardot sync errors pile up. If you have tried these 3 steps and you still experience significant sync errors, contact our Pardot consultants today for help getting started.
