Pardot Improves the “Allow Multiple Prospects with the Same Email Address” Feature

In a recent blog post I detailed What Pardot Got Wrong with the “Allow Multiple Prospects with the Same Email Address” feature. Thankfully, Pardot has made a change to improve this feature. In this post I’ll provide an assessment of this recent change.

This week, Pardot restored the Automatically create Prospects in Pardot if they are created as a Lead or Contact in salesforce.com connector setting. You can now turn this setting off by unchecking the box. Previously, this setting was removed from the connector settings and it was on by default. I was not thrilled about this change because it was forced Pardot to create a Prospect for every Lead or Contact created in Salesforce despite how marketing-worthy they are. The result was the creation of a large number of unmarketable Prospects in Pardot, including duplicate Prospects that may have had same email address.

There are some nuances to this recent change. The way it interacts with Pardot orgs that have AMPSEA enabled is quite different than those without AMPSEA enabled.

AMPSEA Enabled; 'Automatically create Prospects in Pardot if they are created as a Lead or Contact in salesforce.com' Disabled

No new Prospects will be created in Pardot as a result of creating a Lead or Contact in Salesforce. You can use the 'Send to Pardot' button on a Lead or Contact in Salesforce to manually create a Prospect in Pardot. However, be aware if there is a Pardot record with the same email address a duplicate will still be created! It is still recommended to utilize duplication rules in Salesforce to prevent records with the same email address from being created in Salesforce.

Your other option is to keep the Salesforce to Pardot integration completely disabled (make sure the 'Send to Pardot' button is removed from page layouts and the connector setting is disabled). Then follow the below steps to create Prospects in Pardot from Salesforce:

1. Create a report in Salesforce where the 'Pardot Created Date' is blank and any other criteria you might want to use. Some companies have a checkbox field on the Lead/contacts that sales reps can check to have them created in Pardot. Include the CRM Record ID, Email Address, and any other fields you want to import to Pardot. Then export the report from Salesforce.

2. Then export your Prospects from Pardot.

3. Create a spreadsheet where you have your Contacts/Leads from Salesforce in one tab in the spreadsheet and your Prospects from Pardot in another tab.

   1. Create a column in your Contacts/Leads tab. Use the VLOOKUP function to dupe check the email address of the Leads/Contacts against themselves. Sort by that column and only keep one record if you receive any positives for duplicates.

   2. Create another column in the Contacts/Leads tab and use the VLOOKUP function to flag any Leads/Contacts that have email addresses that already exist for Prospects in Pardot. If you receive any matches check if the Pardot Prospect has a CRM ID.

      1. If the CRM IDs between the 2 records match you can leave that Lead/Contact in your import file if you want to update the record.

      2. If the CRM ID is blank on the Prospect, but exists in your import file then importing it will create a duplicate record (if you are importing using CRM ID). Another option if you want to update the Pardot Prospect record with data from your Salesforce source report is to do a separate import using the email address only. Alternatively, you can simply import the Prospect as a duplicate, and then merge the prospects. If you do this make sure to choose the record with the CRM ID as the master record so that the Prospect will sync with the CRM record moving forward.

      3. If both records have CRM IDs but not matching IDs this indicates that there is a duplicate record in Salesforce with the same email address. If you do not want to create a duplicate Prospect your option is to not import record in your spreadsheet. Delete the row. You might consider deleting the Salesforce Lead/Contact in your source report. Alternatively, you might also opt to import the Prospect. This will be a contextual decision, such as a Contact was in your Salesforce source report, but the existing Pardot Prospect in your database is linked to a Lead CRM record. Generally, it is preferred to treat the record furthest along in the sales process as the master, but you might also base this on criteria such as the oldest record. Import the duplicate Prospect,  which will enable you to retain as much marketing history as possible. When choosing which Prospect should be the 'Master Prospect' in the Prospect merge choose the Prospect that has the CRM ID of the record in Salesforce that you want to keep (in our case the Contact). Then you might consider deleting the losing CRM record (in our case the Lead record) from Salesforce. After merging the Prospect records in Pardot you might also choose to merge the two CRM records together it with an advanced merging tool such as Demandtools, choosing the Contact as the master record so you do not lose any CRM activity data.

Note: You will have some cleanup work to do in your Pardot org. You may want to delete the Prospects that were created the day you enabled AMPSEA that you never intend to send marketing emails to. Also, if you didn’t setup cross-object duplication rules in your Salesforce org before AMPSEA was enabled you will also need to de-duplicate your marketing database. The best option is to use the merging option inside of Pardot so that you can retain and aggregate all marketing activity, in case you accidentally sent an email to a duplicate instead of the master record by accident.

AMPSEA Enabled, 'Automatically create Prospects in Pardot if they are created as a Lead or Contact in salesforce.com' Enabled

 This was the option that was already enabled previously in Pardot. As a result you may have noticed new Prospect records from Salesforce that were created, including potentially duplicate Prospects that were a mirror of the duplicates you have in Salesforce. If you choose to keep this option on ensure that you have solid duplication rules setup in Salesforce, including cross-object duplication rules (learn how to do that here). Also, I strongly recommend going back and cleaning up your Pardot and Salesforce databases for any duplicates.

Note: If your use case requires you to have records with duplicate email addresses in Salesforce, but want Pardot to only have one record per email address and you have AMPSEA enabled you need to setup a custom integration with a dedicated integration user/license in Salesforce. If you are in this situation feel free to contact me. I built a custom solution that identifies when a record is created that has the same email address as another record in the Salesforce that has already been synced back to Pardot, and it hides that new record from the Pardot integration user so that a duplicate Prospect is not created.

I will continue to keep you posted as AMPSEA continues to evolve.