There is a secret world of marketing intrigue and delayed data. On the surface you see Pardot and Salesforce passing data back and forth, but it takes a keen eye to know that something is right. Some activities in Pardot doesn’t trigger a sync to Salesforce. Looking through help guides stashed in the Salesforce secret safe (and on the disorganized help website), you find the following information:

These activities don’t trigger a sync from Pardot to Salesforce

• Receiving or opening an email, unless the action is set to adjust prospect score
• Page views, unless the action is set to adjust prospect score
• Visitor sessions
• Prospect account changes
• Creating or mapping new custom fields
• Changes to formula fields in Salesforce
• Undeleting a prospect

You quickly inform your boss “M” that something isn’t right. You ask for a ticket to the Bahamas to investigate this further. M says she will fly you coach to Detroit, but you quickly decline. Instead you do some fast finger research on your tablet and discover another detail:

Only these activities cause a prospect to sync from Salesforce to Pardot

• Updating the assigned user (owner) for the lead or contact record
• Making field changes to a lead or contact record
• Updating a related account record in Salesforce for a lead or contact who is associated to a Pardot prospect.
• Activities that update the Last Modified timestamp triggers a sync to Pardot for existing prospects
• Updating a lead or contact email address

You are now certain there must be someone at Salesforce trying to stop Pardot from working. You check to see if Marc Benioff hasn’t been kidnapped and now is in Baja. You ask your friend Langley at Marketing Cloud, but he doesn’t know anything about it. He is too busy figuring out Connector v2.0. You even call IT support line, but they don’t know anything about it and create a support ticket for you. You conclude without any doubt there must be a double-agent at Salesforce. There must be a “Doctor Know” who can get Pardot and Salesforce to sync.

To save time, we are going to skip forward a few days after you have some boring brawls with henchmen, an escape from a dungeon using cheerwine and a roll of certs, and car chase in a Pontiac 6000 station wagon on Mount Rushmore. A few days later you finally reach Doctor Know. Without using any witty one-liners, you get him to tell you how to make Pardot and Salesforce sync on demand…

Step 1: Create a custom field in Salesforce

Your solution will add a custom checkbox to the lead object (you can also create a custom field on the contact object later). You hidden camera took a screenshot of the custom field below:

Step 2: Create a custom field in Pardot

To make the sync work, we create a custom field in Pardot that is connected to this Salesforce field. Again, that hidden camera was able to capture what you did in Pardot below:

Step 3: You can create workflows in Salesforce. Your boss “M” reminds you that workflows are outdated (and comments on your wardrobe as being not cool). She suggests you switch to Flows instead. However, you decide to go with workflows for now (and you think your skinny jeans look great).

We start by creating a workflow rule. Because you want to save time, you decide to use the Pardot holiday special suppression solution to determine when Salesforce and Pardot will be forced to sync. So you set the criteria field IsHoliday equals one (which means today is a holiday).

Then you set the immediate workflow action to update your custom checkbox to be checked.

Now this works great, but what happens if it is not a holiday? You need one more workflow to check to see if it’s not a holiday and uncheck the checkbox.

So you create another workflow as shown below:

..and then set immediate workflow action to update your custom checkbox to be unchecked.

With the workflows in place, you now have a system that will modify the lead record when it is a holiday (and syncs again the day which isn’t a holiday)….

So why would this force Pardot and Salesforce to sync?

Remember, Salesforce will sync to Pardot when the Last Modified timestamp is changed. So by changing the checkbox, you are modifying the lead record and updating the Last Modified timestamp.

Could we do something like this from Pardot?

Yes. You could create repeat automation rules that could update the checkbox once a day which would force a sync between Pardot and Salesforce.

Is there anything that would stop a sync?

Yes. If there is no email address on the lead or contact in Salesforce, those records would not sync to Pardot. If there is no one assigned to the prospect in Pardot, those prospects would not sync to Salesforce. Additionally, any records not visible to the Pardot/Salesforce connector would not sync.

Epilogue

So after getting the details from Doctor Know, you empowered the rest of M’s team of how to make Pardot and Salesforce work together. M was so pleased she gives you more assignments to solve out how to make Pardot use Hubspot forms. Doctor Know would later leave his position to manage a Baskin Robbins in Omaha, Nebraska.

When you think of the holidays you think of time with family and friends or watching a classic movie (Scut Farkus always shows up in December), but you don’t think about spending time turning off and on your Pardot Engagement Programs. Unfortunately, you may be the person this year having to make sure your emails don’t go out this holiday season. Luckily for you, I can show you how you can automate this process which will give you more time to facetime with your parents chonky cat (don’t be jealous of all his followers on Instagram).

Step 1: We need a formula in Salesforce

There are multiple ways to determine which day is a holiday and which day is a standard business day, but I found building a formula is the quickest (and easiest) method. In my example here, I am creating a field called IsHoliday.  This field is a number formula on the Lead object (you can also repeat this step and build a formula field on the Contact object if you need it). The formula simply looks at today and compares it to a specific holiday date. If the date matches as a holiday, then we display a 1. If the current date is not a holiday, then display zero. If you are not familiar with Salesforce formulas, you may want to review some Salesforce help guides before starting.  In this example, I used the IF statements to check for specific holiday dates. You can modify this formula to fit your needs (add and drop the number of holidays to fit your organization).  To make things easier, I have a screenshot of a sample formula below:

Step 2: We need the field in Pardot

Now I won’t explain here how to add a prospect field to Pardot nor my mother-in-law’s obsession with Mark Harmon in NCIS, but you just need to know that you’ll need the Salesforce field to be in Pardot so we can use it.  To make it easy for you (like hiding then finding the Roku remote after Thanksgiving), I made a quick screenshot below:

Step 3: Just make a dynamic list

You now need to create a dynamic list in Pardot with one criteria based on your new field. Just set the criteria IsHoliday field equal to one.  If today is a holiday, then the list will add all your prospects to the list.  If not a holiday, the list should have no one in it.

Step 4: Add suppression list to your Engagement Programs

You’ve reach this point so far unscathed and I am happy to say you are going to reach the finish line.  Now you have a suppression list that works only on holidays you just need to add it to your engagement programs.  This will stop anyone on the list from receiving emails on a holiday.

Variant: You don’t want any emails to be skipped in your Pardot multiverse program

Yes, there is a way to make the holiday suppression to work where you can make your prospects blink in and out of existence in your engagement programs.  However, there are a rules to make this happen:

• Your Engagement Program must use a Dynamic List for its Recipient List
• You do not talk about Pardot with Loki (don’t ask me why he is eating with his hands at your family dinner, that is something you’ll need to figure out)

Next, you just need to update your recipient dynamic list with some additional criteria below:

With this new criteria on your dynamic list, your engagement program will add and drop prospects on holidays.  Remember when you remove and add back a prospect later, the prospect starts where they left off in the engagement program. For your purposes, this means they can skip getting an email on a holiday while you discover if your dog will eat your aunt’s fruitcake. In the multiverse almost anything is possible. You can enjoy the holidays without your laptop and your pets might forgive you offering leftovers to them.