Qualified experiences can be configured to create prospects in Pardot and leads in Salesforce. In fact, it's possible to change the default push destination from Salesforce to Pardot, Marketo or Eloqua. In this article, we present the pros and cons of creating prospects in Salesforce vs creating prospects in Pardot (or your other marketing automation system).
Creating Prospects in Pardot
Pros
- You can configure Pardot to determine which prospects will get synced to Salesforce. For example, if you want to only sync prospects who have reached a certain score in Pardot, you can set up Pardot automation that will push a prospect into Salesforce only when their score reaches that threshold.
- Pardot visitor cookies are stored in Pardot. If you sync a known visitor from Qualified to create a Pardot prospect, the saved cookie visitor behavior will then be related to that prospect.
Cons
- Syncing prospects from Pardot to Salesforce can take several minutes depending on the Pardot automation that you have set up and any other Pardot functionality that is running. If you have a robust Salesforce campaign attribution system for Pardot prospects synced to Salesforce leads, you may experience delays due to the time needed to sync.
- If you are only syncing Pardot prospects who meet certain criteria, you will not have the benefit of the campaign attribution in Salesforce until they are synced.
The scenarios for which you would push to prospects to Pardot first would be:
- If you want to qualify your Pardot prospects before you sync them to Salesforce.
- You do not want to assign them to owners or queues in Salesforce right away in order to alert those individuals to take action on them in Salesforce.
Creating Leads in Salesforce
Pros
- Creating Salesforce leads first ensures that each lead can be sent to Pardot using its CRM ID as an identifier. This prevents a Pardot prospect from being synced with the wrong Salesforce lead, which can happen if your Salesforce org has more than one person with the same email and/or a lot of duplicates.
- Your Salesforce campaign attribution model will be applied immediately, adding leads (or contacts) to your Salesforce campaigns.
- Syncing to Salesforce is instant. Leads are generated in your Salesforce instance right away.
- Leads are assigned based on the active Salesforce lead assignment rule. This can be helpful if you want the Salesforce team member (or queue) to become aware of the lead immediately.
Cons
- All visitors that are qualified will be added to Salesforce automatically. You will not be able to use Pardot to determine a threshold of demographics (grade), behavior (score), or other criteria, as a condition for syncing the prospect with Salesforce.
If you are deciding whether to sync to Pardot or Salesforce first, we recommend first syncing to Salesforce. This will ensure immediate syncing to Salesforce, allow you to assign Salesforce lead owners (or queues) via the active Salesforce lead assignment rule, and allow you to attribute the leads or contacts to campaigns, according to your Salesforce campaign attribution setup.
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