Connecting Marketing Cloud Child and Parent business unit to different salesforce instances

Question

My user in marketing cloud has access to 2 business units - parent BU and child BU. The parent BU is connected to the production org of Sales Cloud via MC Connect. Consequently, the child BU automatically inherits the connection to the production org as the parent BU.

However, I want to connect the child BU to the SFDC sandbox unit of the same Sales Cloud production org. And I do not have the priviledge to edit the connections in the child BU.

Current: Marketing Parent BU >> SFDC Prod Org Marketing Child BU >> SFDC Prod Org (Inherited)

Expected: Marketing Parent BU >> SFDC Prod Org Marketing Child BU >> SFDC Sandbox Unit How to connect the marketing cloud child BU to Sales Cloud sandbox ?

Are there any restrictions for connecting different SFDC orgs to different BU in the same marketing cloud org?

Answer 1

Out of the box, you can only connect one SF instance to your marketing cloud instance. To connect to more than one SF instance you would need to have multi- org provisioned in your account. Proceed with caution as it comes with a myriad of challenges and is irreversible.

Copied in some answers i found in the success community:

some of the considerations for Multi-Org (MO) that you need to account for:

1. Each BU will need to be separately configured, even if they are connected to the same org. There is no "inheritance" of the connection concept at all in this scenario. This includes configuration of every user within BU's.

2. MO once enabled can't be disabled (just stating here for completeness)

3. All Contacts as well as All Subscribers will contain contacts from all BU's. While you can restrict access to All Subs (by the way this can be achieved via permissions as well as business rule) currently if you need to prevent access to All Contacts (via contact builder) you'll need to restrict users from accessing contact builder all together.

4. With MO each BU has it's own synchronized DE setup. If you utilize same integration user across more than 1 BU synchronized DE's will be the same for all BU's that are connected with that user (and the same org, sandbox and prod will be considered separate orgs).

5. With MO Journey Builder functions within respective BU's context, therefore tracking and contact data actually works more intuitively comparing to one org setup

6. You'll definitely need a custom preference center and would need to carefully consider all the unsubscribe/resubscribe flows, where these might be triggered from and what systems should be updated and when (e.g. maintaining CRM status vs MC subscriber status). And how to distinguish test from prod contact.

7. Your contact utilization will account for all contacts/leads/users that reside in sandbox and prod orgs. Just be mindful of that as this is one common oversight.