Sales and marketing misalignment is a costly issue in B2B, leading to missed revenue, internal friction, and slowed growth. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) addresses this by integrating seamlessly with Sales Cloud. This integration aligns teams by consolidating data, assets, and actions, providing real-time insights into the customer journey. Connected Campaigns enhance engagement tracking in Salesforce, ensuring quality leads are captured effectively.
In this guide, we’ll explore how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sync works to bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams. We’ll cover everything from bi-directional data sync and Connected Campaigns to leveraging engagement data for closing more deals faster. Additionally, we’ll show you how to demonstrate clear marketing ROI to your C-suite, making your investment in automation truly worthwhile.
Overview
Why Sales and Marketing Fall Out of Sync
Despite having the common goal of driving business revenue, a staggering 87% of organizations face alignment issues between marketing and sales teams. This misalignment creates a costly divide that directly impacts your bottom line and customer experience.
Lack of shared lead definitions
The handoff between marketing and sales often breaks down at the most fundamental level—defining what makes a qualified lead. Only 7% of salespeople consider leads from marketing as “very high quality”. This disconnect happens because marketing typically qualifies leads after just one or two interactions, while sales teams need prospects who are further along in their buying journey.
Without agreement on MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) criteria, both teams effectively work against each other rather than toward shared goals. Sales teams often claim leads are low quality or automatically disqualify them without proper consideration, while marketing feels their efforts go unappreciated.
Disconnected campaign tracking
- Track leads throughout their complete journey
- Identify which marketing efforts truly drive conversions
- Create consistent messaging across customer touchpoints
- Measure true campaign ROI
No visibility into engagement data
Without access to shared engagement data, sales teams miss crucial insights about prospect behavior and interest levels. Meanwhile, marketing operates blindly, unable to refine campaigns based on which leads actually convert.
This visibility gap creates what some experts call “the silent killer of effective lead generation”. Organizations with poor visibility often resort to reactive guessing games rather than strategic evaluation of their efforts. Furthermore, misalignment around engagement data leads to inconsistent customer experiences, with two-thirds of prospects reporting extreme frustration with these disconnects.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement addresses these challenges by creating a unified platform where both teams can track the complete lead journey and tailor actions accordingly.
How Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Sync Works
The backbone of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s effectiveness lies in its seamless integration with Salesforce. Understanding how this synchronization works helps maximize its potential for driving sales and marketing alignment.
Bi-directional data sync explained
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement creates a continuous flow of information between marketing automation and your CRM. This real-time, bi-directional sync ensures both systems maintain the latest customer information. In a typical organization, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sends lead information and engagement data to Salesforce, whereas Salesforce provides Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with sales activities—including qualification status, opportunity progress, and purchase history. This dynamic exchange creates a single source of truth for both teams, eliminating data silos and preventing misalignment.
Key sync triggers and timing
- System activities: field value changes from automation rules
- User activities: prospect imports, field updates, manual syncs
- Prospect activities: form submissions, opt-outs
- Email address updates
- Owner reassignments
- Field modifications on leads/contacts
Field mapping between Pardot and Salesforce
- Create the field in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement first
- Select the corresponding Salesforce field from the dropdown
- Choose sync behavior (Salesforce wins, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement wins, or most recent wins)
- Optionally enable “Keep field type and values in sync with CRM”
Handling sync errors and conflicts
Common sync issues include data formatting errors, access limitations, and process misalignments. When the sync queue gets backed up, it can cause delays and data discrepancies. Regular monitoring of the “Errors & Warnings” tab helps identify and resolve issues promptly. For efficient troubleshooting, export the error queue to CSV, sort by error type, and tackle the most frequent issues first.
Setting Up Connected Campaigns for Unified Tracking
Connected Campaigns represent a fundamental shift in how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement integrates with Salesforce, creating a true 1:1 relationship between marketing automation and CRM campaigns. Essentially, this feature eliminates the historical disconnect between separate campaign definitions, making Salesforce the central hub for all campaign management.
What are Connected Campaigns?
Connected Campaigns align Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) campaigns with Salesforce campaigns, creating a single source of truth for both platforms. Once enabled, campaigns display a blue cloud icon indicating successful connection. This integration pushes engagement metrics from marketing assets directly into Salesforce, giving sales teams unprecedented visibility into prospect interactions throughout their lifecycle.
Steps to enable and configure
- Review existing campaigns and clean up duplicates in both systems
- Create Salesforce campaigns for each Marketing Cloud Account Engagement campaign you want to connect
- Establish your campaign hierarchy before connecting
- Navigate to Pardot Settings > Connectors > Edit Salesforce connector > Campaigns tab
- Check “Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History”
- Select which campaign record types should sync
- Connect campaigns individually or use the mapping workbook for bulk alignment
- Finally, check “Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns”
Avoiding common setup mistakes
First thing to remember is that campaigns become read-only in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement after enabling this feature. Additionally, certain field values like Name, Archive Date, Cost, Created By, and Updated By will be overwritten by Salesforce. Before proceeding, associate all marketing assets with appropriate campaigns as you won’t be able to reassign them later.
Campaign hierarchy and record types
Campaign hierarchy defines how parent-child relationships are structured in Salesforce. This organization is crucial for reporting, primarily when incorporating Marketing Cloud Account Engagement metrics. Most organizations find 2-3 layers of hierarchy sufficient. Record types let you control which campaigns sync to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, preventing unnecessary data transfer.
Syncing Pardot default campaigns
Don’t overlook default Marketing Cloud Account Engagement campaigns like Website Tracking, Email Plug-in, and Salesforce Sync. Create matching Salesforce campaigns for these defaults before completing setup. Filter by “Unconnected Campaigns” to ensure none are missed during implementation.
Using Engagement Data to Drive More Deals
After connecting your campaigns, turning prospect engagement data into closed deals becomes the next critical step. With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, sales teams gain unprecedented visibility into prospect interactions, transforming cold outreach into timely, informed conversations.
Engagement History in Salesforce
Engagement History provides sales reps with real-time visibility into prospect activities directly within Salesforce. This collection of fields, related lists, and Lightning components shows valuable prospect engagement data across your most-used records. Sales can access metrics like email opens, form submissions, and website visits without switching platforms. The Engagement History Metrics related list on campaign records reveals relationships between campaigns, prospects, and marketing assets, enabling reps to prioritize outreach based on actual interest levels.
Campaign Influence and attribution
- Primary Campaign Source: Assigns 100% influence to the campaign noted in the Primary Campaign Source field
- First-Touch: Attributes all influence to the first campaign a prospect interacts with
- Last-Touch: Credits the final campaign before deal closure
- Even-Distribution: Divides influence equally across all campaigns a prospect engages with
Using B2B Marketing Analytics
- Engagement dashboard: Shows how marketing assets perform and contribute to pipeline
- Marketing Manager dashboard: Identifies accounts with largest opportunity values
- Multi-Touch Attribution dashboard: Displays top campaign drivers at each lifecycle stage
- Account-Based Marketing dashboard: Reveals how opportunities from specific accounts engage with your assets
Aligning sales follow-up with prospect activity
Real-time engagement signals are gold for sales prioritization. Automated alerts can notify your team when prospects exhibit buying signals like revisiting pricing pages or participating in Q&A sessions. Implementing lead scoring based on engagement metrics ensures your team focuses on the most promising opportunities. For instance, prospects showing high engagement through multiple questions or content downloads can be flagged as high-priority leads. This alignment between marketing data and sales outreach significantly improves conversion rates by enabling timely, relevant conversations exactly when prospects are most receptive.
Conclusion
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sync enhances sales and marketing alignment through bi-directional data sync, reducing information silos. Connected Campaigns offer visibility into prospect engagement in Salesforce, leading to better lead quality and higher conversion rates. While challenges like field mapping and sync errors can occur, VALiNTRY360 specializes in optimizing Salesforce to address these issues. A successful sync helps companies achieve shorter sales cycles, improved campaign ROI visibility, and revenue growth, providing teams with unified data for informed decision-making.
Ready to close deals faster? VALiNTRY360 offers customized Salesforce consulting services to optimize your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement implementation and transform engagement data into measurable sales results.
