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I read that Pardot syncs Prospects with Salesforce in this way:

  1. if it finds a Lead with the Prospect email address in SF, it will sync with that lead.
  2. If it cannot find a lead, but it can find a Contact with the Prospect email address, it will sync with that contact.
  3. If no lead or contact is found, then create a new Lead.

That's fine, but when I go to Pardot and I check the Prospect field mappings under the Admin section, then for any field I can only select one field, where I would expect I could select a field for Lead and a field for Contact.

How does that work?

The problem occurs in this scenario:

enter image description here

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  • I don't have documentation to back it up (I believe it's in their knowledge base)... It uses the field API Name. If you have a field on the Lead table and a field on the Contact table with the same API name, it assumes those two fields should sync. If you have two fields you wish to pass converted information to, they must have the same API name. lead.email_2__c would not sync to contact.secondary_email__c unless you update the API name on one of them.
    – zainogj
    Feb 8, 2016 at 13:40

2 Answers 2

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Found it - at least the closest I could find:

If you're using a custom field in Salesforce on both leads and contacts, we pull the name of the Salesforce field from the contact field ID.

...

We recommend that each Salesforce custom field you map has its own unique API name as Pardot will not respect case sensitivity when syncing. For example if you have two separate fields called "hair_color" and "HAIR_COLOR," Pardot will not recognize the difference in capitalization and will only sync with one of the two fields.

From my comment above: It uses the field API Name. If you have a field on the Lead table and a field on the Contact table with the same API name, it assumes those two fields should sync. If you have two fields you wish to pass converted information to, they must have the same API name. lead.email_2__c would not sync to contact.secondary_email__c unless you update the API name on one of them.

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  • So in short: I have to use the same field API name on both Lead and Contact and then when in Pardot I select that field to sync with a Pardot Prospect field, then Pardot will sync fine to the field on both Lead and Contact..? To put it the other way around: a Salesforce fieldname in the dropdown in Pardot is not tied to either a Lead or a Contact, but Pardot will try to find that field on Lead or Contact whenever it can find it.
    – Willem Mulder
    Feb 8, 2016 at 16:03
  • You've got it. As mentioned, it is case sensitive as well. Glad to have a sync out of the box, but it's missing a critical feature of being able to map those fields. I'm not going back and changing all of my API names so they sync... we ended up creating multiple pardot fields for it (i.e. Contact Email 2 & Lead Email 2). The downside is Marketing needs to be aware of those in their logic and emails.
    – zainogj
    Feb 8, 2016 at 17:34
  • I just tried this, and that works! Excellent :-)
    – Willem Mulder
    Feb 10, 2016 at 8:27
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Pardot default fields are both present in Leads and Contacts. Pardot chooses to sync prospect default fields depending on the availability of a lead or contact based on the prospect's email address (Contact wins when they are both present). Basically, you can't influence that through field mapping in the Salesforce connector.

enter image description here

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  • So the answer is: the default field mapping works fine, and Pardot manages to find the proper field on either contact or lead. But for a custom field we can only specify either a contact field or a lead field, which is totally weird, but apparently how it works? Is there any solution to the problem I'm having? Or does nobody use custom fields like that?
    – Willem Mulder
    Feb 8, 2016 at 10:23
  • Hi Willem, the common configuration for custom fields is to choose prospect fields or account fields, not contact or lead. I edited my answer with a diagram. Can you direct me to the document or place wherever you get into trouble?
    – user28311
    Feb 8, 2016 at 13:37
  • You have to be in Admin > Configure Fields > Prospect Fields..
    – user28311
    Feb 8, 2016 at 13:45
  • thanks foor looking into this. I added my scenario to the question: the problem occurs when a Lead is converted to a Contact. How does the mapping stay intact?
    – Willem Mulder
    Feb 8, 2016 at 15:59
  • Mapping stays intact provided that you have mapped your custom Lead fields and Pardot fields in Salesforce to similar fields in Contact (In SF: Customize> Leads > Fields)
    – user28311
    Feb 8, 2016 at 16:06

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