Person Account Sycing in Pardot can be a tricky thing if you aren’t careful.
Recently I learned just how tricky it can be if you aren’t fully looped into changes being made in Sales Cloud.
A client of mine was using Leads, Contacts and Accounts in their Salesforce org.
A decision was made to move away from Contacts and to instead migrate to Person Accounts. On the surface that’s not a bad decision. It meets the needs of the organization.
What had not been taken into consideration prior to the migration going live was the existing records in Pardot that were mapped to Contacts in Salesforce
Without any pre-work being done in Pardot, the switch from Contacts to Person Accounts severed the connection to Salesforce for those prospects synced to Contacts.
The Person Account integration was set up to create Leads in Salesforce when a new record is found and synced.
Because these Prospects were once synced with Contacts but now lacked a record to sync with.
Since the Prospect records were still assigned to to Salesforce-connected Pardot users, Pardot pushed several hundred records to Salesforce and they were created as Leads. This results in hundreds of duplicate leads for existing customers.
After a bit of digging, it became clear that this was not something that I could resolve on my own. I filed a support ticket with Salesforce and explained the situation.
The solution ended up being fairly straight forward, but could only be done by Pardot: Erase the CRM Lead IDs for the prospects that were created as Leads in Salesforce and re-point the records to the correct Person Accounts in Salesforce.
Once the re-pointing was complete, the records in Pardot began syncing with the correct Salesforce records and the duplicate Leads in Salesforce could be deleted.
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Thanks for posting this, I feel like theres a vacuum of info around this issue. Are there any other considerations you could offer to people who might have to activate person accounts after Pardot has already been integrated?
What kind of pre-work could have avoided the need to contact support to correct the problem?