Speaker 0: Hey, everyone. Welcome to MarDreamin. My name is Amanda Rhodes, uh, from Sercante, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. Before I introduce our amazing speaker, I wanna go over a couple quick things. Yes. These sessions are recorded and will you’ll be available on demand after the, uh, conference is over, so don’t worry. Um, and if you have any questions that you’d like to ask, Jacob, uh, there is a q and a tab in the chat section. Please post your questions there. Some of us may be able to answer a few of them as we go along. But at the end of the session, uh, if we have time for some q and a, we’ll go through those questions together. Without further ado, I wanna introduce the wonderful Jacob Catalano, and he’s gonna talk about how to foster a junk free Pardot org with some data maintenance tips that’ll be super helpful. Take it away, Jacob.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much. So just before we get started, can people just post and chat real quickly they can hear me okay just to make sure I’m not talking to myself? Awesome. I see a few in there. Love it. Good deal. Well, like Amanda said, my name is Jacob Catalano. I’m the product manager for Sercante Labs. Um, Sercante Labs is a group within Sercante where we’re creating custom apps and integrations to help bulkify Pardot and Salesforce. So with that, we’re gonna talk through some just best practice tips on how to keep your Pardot org clean as well as some solutions for long term maintenance. Before we get into everything, just wanna say thank you to all of our sponsors. Um, we very much appreciate y’all being here and being a part of this event. Um, we really can’t do all the stuff that we do without you, so very grateful to all the sponsors.

Speaker 1: Alright. So today, we’re gonna talk through uh, we have twenty five minutes, so I do apologize if we talk fast. As Amanda said, the session will be available and recorded after the fact, so let’s strap on in and dive in. So we’re gonna talk about how to clean your org for today in the short term, how to maintain it in the long term, and then the benefits of a junk free org in, uh, in general, why it’s beneficial. So talking through why it’s good for content reasons, why it’s good to make sure that our sync errors are reduced so that we have long term, uh, connection of data and how that relates to improved analytics and reporting.

Speaker 1: So with that being said, we’re gonna dive right into tips to cleaning. So there are four things and kind of a roadmap that we need to understand as we’re going through for for short term that will ultimately impact our long term maintenance for cleaning our org. We need to understand what is junk for us. We need to understand how we need to fix that and how we need to think about fixing the data, understanding what steps we need to do to clean and actually execute the the, uh, fixing of said junk data, and then finally go into how do we review to make sure what we did worked, as well as how that goes into long term maintenance.

Speaker 1: So understanding what’s junk. Um, junk is very subjective. There’s not there’s some high level kind of commonalities between it, but it’s not always the same for everyone. But understanding what this is is a very important exercise in in our long term maintenance. Um, whether it be that we have text fields that aren’t formatted properly with all caps, um, whether it be non standardized state or pick list values, junk form submissions where people are saying, hey. Your SEO could be better. Buy our buy our stuff, and you can, uh, be have a better SEO on your website. Um, and then finally, sync errors. And the most important, uh, issue of junk that we see is duplicates inside of our system. So, again, this is very subjective. We just need to understand in our situation what is causing a problem for the short term and what then could be pushed for long term solution.

Speaker 1: So, uh, understanding how we fix this. Um, text fields with all caps is one of the use case examples we talked through, but this is really just about formatting, uh, formatting data. When the data sent to Pardot, data will be put into the respective fields that we define from forms. Um, with that being said, if there are a few records to fix versus if there are a 100 records to fix, we may have to look at how we, um, are gonna fix it. So if we’re looking at text fields, there are some things where you can just go into the record and fix it. If we’re looking at a 100, a thousand records, we’ll wanna be able to use Excel. If we needed to, we could use automation rules to fix some of this stuff, but it really comes down to how much are we trying to fix. Are the use cases unique to the record you’re fixing, or are the use cases more general? If they’re more general, automation rules are the way to go. Um, if they’re not, then we won’t may wanna look at going into Excel, and we’ll talk through some of the formulas in the next, uh, few slides.

Speaker 1: Standardized state country pick list values is another big one. Really, that’s just pick list values in general. Um, so we need to understand, again, how big is this issue and how many fields is this affecting. If we’re trying to update a country field and we need to make updates from abbreviated to spelled out country values, you may not wanna use automation rules because you then have to create an automation rule for every single variation of your country, um, as opposed to being able to put that into Excel. Now, again, we’re talking about short term fixes, not necessarily long term fixes. So short term, Excel might be the way to go. Long term, this might be something where you have to, um, look at automation rules or maybe even integrating with a third party system.

Speaker 1: Um, the next two are ones that are gonna be a little more complicated to fix. So spam and then sync errors. So understanding what is spam. Uh, again, this is very subjective because you have people some organizations have clear cut rules as a as to what is junk when someone submits a form. Um, I worked with a company where we had a field on the form itself that said I am a, and there were five or six pick list values that said I am a current client, I’m a prospective client, I want to learn more about what you do in pricing, and then I’m a student, I want to get a job. Everyone who fell into the I am a student. I wanna get a job was immediately thrown out as junk, um, and so maybe that’s a field you can use. Um, other situations, you have to skim the Pardot comments field that come through from notes in a form submission. I’ve also worked with the orgs where they’re using the email address as the way to filter out junk, whether it’s just Gmail or Yahoo. There are some orgs who don’t want any freemium email addresses in their system, and so they’re not even going to push that to Salesforce. That is automatically going to trash. So in this situation, we need to understand what is that junk, and from there, we can determine whether or not we can utilize an automation rule on how to fix this or we need to throw this into Excel.

Speaker 1: And, again, the same thing can go be said about Pardot sync errors. So the different sync errors that exist inside of Pardot are going to be data formatting, access, process alignment, customization, and or dupes. Um, so data formatting and, um, process alignment are going to be solved similarly in that the data formatting is basically saying that the field in question does not meet the Salesforce criteria. If I submit a form inside of Pardot, Pardot is not gonna say, nope. We errored out. We can’t take this data, with the exception of numbers versus text fields. You try to put a text into a number field, it’s gonna mess up. But inside of Salesforce, if I create a text field, I get to define character limits. So I can say I only want 20 characters for this field, or maybe I want a thousand characters for this field. Maybe you want a novel in a field. With that being said, Pardot doesn’t care the amount of text you put into a field, whereas Salesforce dramatically does. And so you may get a sync error saying, hey. This field is way too many characters. We’re not gonna push change in the system. And the same thing for process alignment. That comes with validation rule errors or that comes with, um, pick list value issues where the system Pardot uh, if you define a pick list in Pardot of values of one, two, and three, um, but I import or fill out where the value is now four, Pardot’s gonna recognize and say, cool. I’m wrong. This is a new pick list value. Let’s put it in here for the value of four. When I try to sync to Salesforce, Salesforce is gonna say, hey. That’s not one of the values that we can allow in the system. We’re erroring this record. So we need to understand what the sync errors are, which on the previous slide, we were we highlighted an example. So if you go into your connector settings and look for sync errors, you will have the ability to pull a report of all of the sync errors you have in your org and what the errors actually are.

Speaker 1: And then the last thing we need to keep in mind for as we’re determining duplicate or determining how to fix errors is understanding the most important one of all, duplicates. How do we fix duplicates? Well, we have to understand and think through, um, and go through an exercise of what is your duplicate data, um, in the system. So are there a lot of duplicates or there’s only, like, 50 versus 50 or 5,000, I mean, to say? Um, how many exist and what is the information we need to deduplicate? Um, I’ve been in a few different orgs where we had intentional and non and, uh, unintentional duplicates where we said John Doe works for four different businesses, so they need to be in four different accounts and those are intentional duplicates we need to keep based on email address. However, there are unintentional duplicates created because since we have MCA turned on, things are not, uh, recognizing the intentional versus the unintentional duplicates. And so we have to understand what are we trying to what duplicate information do we need to keep capturing. So with that said, should they be deleted or merged? Um, when we look at duplicates in our system, some people may be perfectly fine with saying, hey. I only need the most recently created records, anything previous of two years ago or anything that’s just extra. I just wanna delete it. But, likely, you’re gonna wanna save as much information as possible and merge those fields. So depending on whether you wanna delete or merge, that’s gonna determine how we clean this up. And then lastly, if you’re gonna merge, understanding what the master record is. Whether you’re using Pardot’s or what sorry. Whether you’re manually merging or using, um, a third party integration, you have to understand what you need to merge, um, what the master record is, I mean, to say.

Speaker 1: So how we export data, um, or what we need to do to clean up the data. So as I said before, depending on if we wanna use automation rules or Excel, there are a plethora of formulas you can use. For the all caps example, we’re using the standardized formula, which basically allows us to make sure everything’s in standard text. You could also use the proper formula inside of Excel, and that allows, uh, the values to be put with the capital first letter, lowercase rest of the letters for your naming dimensions. It just depends on how you want to organize that. Um, additionally, you can use other fields. So for the pick list situation, again, I’m recommending Excel in this situation for short term cleanup. And so in the what we’re doing here is saying, I have a long laundry list of, uh, what the data should be based on Salesforce, and I have the values that I currently have. Well, you can create a table that says the abbreviated USA should relate to United States and then create a VLOOKUP formula that is able to update the values from Excel once you’ve exported the information to then create an Excel file that will clean up all of the things in bulk, and all you have to do from there is reimport the data into Pardot. And, again, this is for short term cleanup.

Speaker 1: Um, spam submissions, very similar situation. Depending on the, um, access or the error issue, we need to make sure that we’re updating accordingly. One thing I didn’t mention previously was around access errors. Those have to do if either the Salesforce integration user is not, uh, having the proper access or the Salesforce user sync with Pardot is not set up properly. So if I have the the v two connector for Pardot, I’m more than likely using the b to b m a integration user where I’ll need to make sure they have all the proper access for leads, contacts, and sales. So we need to also make sure that for the v one connector, that uses a, uh, separate connector that you, the marketer, get to define, and we just need to make sure that that integration user has all the proper connections. Again, for the process and formatting issues, we can either use automation rules to clean those up and say, if field is one, change value two two. Um, and then we also have data formatting errors, which, again, is similar to to pick list values, making sure that the wrong values or character limits are defined properly. So, again, this was all for the short term.

Speaker 1: Um, what we wanna take a look at now or sorry. Before I dive into that, duplicates. I mentioned before you have your, um, deletion versus merging. So if you’re gonna merge in bulk, you can do it manually. You’re more than welcome to. Depending on how many records you have, that could take a long, long time. So if you’re gonna delete, DataLoader is your best friend and best way to go. Um, all you’ll need to do is export the CRM ID, whether it be lead or contact ID, of the duplicate records you want to delete, bring them into DataLoader, and you can bulk delete them through that situation. And through third party solutions, you’ll have the ability to use fields that exist in Salesforce that’ll connect into the integration, whether it be a Demand Tools or a Cloudingo, um, and you’ll be able to specify in those, uh, builders and those automation builders on how to do the, um, dupes. So I’m looking in the chat real quickly. Intentional duplicates, can you clarify? Does the prospect have two prospect records and two contact records in Salesforce, each under a different email address? So there’s two situations in that. So the first situation is what you described. I have two prospect records, and they’re syncing to different records, and that would be what you want for intentional duplicates. There are other situations you’ll have in there where folks will have one person and that email address is syncing to two records. And depending on what the most recently updated record is inside of Salesforce, that will then populate that information to the right Salesforce record. It gets really complicated in that regard, but I’ve seen it done many a time. It just depends on if that record is syncing via AMSEA to this right CRM ID. Um, Um, so it just it really depends. There are still orgs I’ve worked with that don’t have AMSEA turned on. If you have that turned on, it will sync based on the CRM ID. So it’ll go one record to one lead or one record to one contact. Without it turned on, you have John Doe potentially going to two records.

Speaker 1: Okay. So then going into the testing side of it, my best friend for this is going to be reviewing our sync queue and reviewing dynamic lists. These are gonna be the best ways for us to review and make sure that whatever we have deemed as junk is actually getting cleaned up in the system. We wanna make sure that these lists are used for suppression as well for our engagement outreach, and we just wanna make sure that they stay as relatively low, if not empty, as possible. Um, and then for the sync queue, it’s just every week going in and monitoring that sync queue, monitoring the sync errors, and understanding that maybe there will be some situations where you have a relatively low number, but maybe you’ll have other ones where you’ll want to have it completely empty. It just depends on what the errors are that you’re getting into the system.

Speaker 1: So tips to maintain, we’re gonna go through this quick because we only have a few minutes left. Um, we’re looking at maintaining your org. Again, dynamic lists are gonna be your best friend. Using tags with those lists are gonna be helpful and then third party integrations, as I mentioned before, with the duplicates. That’s gonna be unless you, uh, wanna dive into some aggressive, uh, validation rules and or duplicate matching rules inside of Salesforce, I do recommend looking at third party integrations. It just depends on how often you’re getting duplicates into your system.

Speaker 1: So cleaning with dynamic lists, um, what we can do is basically create chunk finder dynamic lists. Again, you define the criteria similar to what we did before for the immediate cleanup and have these be regularly reviewed lists. So we just need to make sure that we’re not having automation rules to automatically throw them into the recycle bin. We’re manually reviewing them and putting them to the recycle bin. For the example of Leslie Knope. If we have Knope as a criteria inside of our, um, dynamic list, but we have someone with the last name, Knope, k n o a p k n o p e, then we potentially lose that person from our org, and we that might be someone that’s gonna close a million dollar deal for us. Um, we also wanna be able to understand how we can get creative with engagement studio programs. So instead of having to rely on one dynamic list to populate everything or five dynamic lists properly as we want to have campaigns to populate information, um, this is basically a way to help us to instead of having five automation rules and five dynamic lists, we have a couple dynamic lists and one engagement studio program to do our automations for us. So updating information of if the country is blank, we’re moving from a list. Um, if the account type is blank, we’re moving from list. Um, with that being said, also using tags. So instead of removing from a list in this situation, we’re adding a tag. So you can use an automation rule or you can use an engagement studio program to specify and say, if an email contains x y z, let’s do that to tag the prospect with either spam or even target account. What we do for spam can also be great for target account tracking, and the same thing can be done for highlighting if you’re a competitor.

Speaker 1: So I will talk about the benefits for the third party solutions in just a second. Um, going into this, so we have why is this important for us. The reason with, uh, making sure that the naming conventions and the, uh, all caps aren’t an issue is primarily for our content. So one of the benefits we mentioned at the beginning was making sure your content is clean. So making sure you don’t have fake email addresses in the system and and making sure your personalization tags are really, really clean, um, so you don’t have a situation like this where you have, hi, Ashley, male. Um, and the same thing goes for dynamic content, making sure that if I have dynamic content that is two paragraphs long, that dynamic content is speaking to the right individual. Um, and then more importantly also with fake email addresses and whatnot, keeping under your mailable limit. There’s so often where people are filling out forms, and we need to mark them as junk or do not contact so it doesn’t go against our mailable limit. And so making sure you have this thought through can especially if you have a smaller part at org with only about 10,000, uh, records for your mailable limit, you really have to be very particular about how that is used.

Speaker 1: Why this matters, though, for sync errors? Sync errors are related to the, um, analytics because it will prevent data from going to Salesforce, as I mentioned before. So we only wanna make we wanna make sure we’re passing good data over to sales without any issue. And if we have sync errors, the campaign information related won’t go into Salesforce. So if I have a thousand sync errors and all of those thousand people engage with an upcoming event like Marjorie, for example, they won’t have any of their campaign information pushed into Salesforce because the system isn’t even understanding that they are a valid record to exist in the system. So we need to make sure that benefits are reporting at the end of the day because that gets to inflated or deflated numbers depending on if we’re pulling in the wrong lead status values or form submission information. Country pick list can mess up filters for your reports if you’re trying to report based on region, and sync errors can also cause issues with your engagement studio programs for campaign member information as I detailed before.

Speaker 1: Finally, some third party integrations that can benefit in the long run. So Circante does have a solution called ProspectUpdater. It’s basically a solution that does all of the things minus duplication. So we are able to, uh, do data cleansing from form handlers, um, as well as pick list values and spam slash target account identification, similarly to what we showed you before. And in regards to duplicates, we have a solution that we’ve worked with many a time that we’ve partnered with called CloudDingo, and this is a solution that allows you to manual, mass, and automatically merge records. This is a solution that’s gonna be really beneficial for your long term maintenance as well as your short term cleanup because because it’s gonna be able to look at information that exists at the lead and contact level and go from there to merge those records.

Speaker 1: So in summary, we did a lot of information in a short period of time. We were able to talk through what can we do to clean up our org for today, what can we do to make sure this is cleaned up for the long term future and use that, uh, working, uh, training to make sure long term growth is good, And then understanding that while it’s tedious, it needs to get done because if not, we’re gonna have a lot of reporting issues in our work. So with that being said, thank you very much. Um, if there aren’t any we’ll have a we have a few questions, um, in the chat. We’ll be able to reference them later, and we’ll make sure that we are able to, uh, answer those questions to you, um, directly.

Speaker 0: Thank you, Jacob, for an amazing session. Um, looks like we’re out of time for doing too many questions. So if you do have a question, like Jacob said, please reach out to him in the event chat. We’re always happy here at Circante to answer questions, but we’ll try to hit some quick ones if you guys, uh, if you have a couple seconds. Uh, so, Jacob, if you’ll stop sharing your screen, we can show them on the on the presentation video.

Speaker 1: Yep. So looking at, um, so how do you treat sync errors on text fields, max length? In this situation, um, we are basically just needing to keep an eye on the sync error queue and over time of being able to have weekly updates. So the text length issue is one where we have the ability with, um, a third party solution like ProspectUpdater to make sure those text values stay short so you don’t have that, or it’s just keeping in mind and having time dedicated to every week going in and shortening those records, um, that’s gonna be the the quickest way to get that organized for long term usage.

Speaker 0: Perfect. And one other question we had that came in early was about syncing the entire Salesforce database over to Pardot.

Speaker 1: Um, I’d it depends on your available limit at the end of the day and depends on your personal preference. Um, if you have a Salesforce org that has over a million records and you only have a available limit of a 100,000, it ain’t gonna work. Um, but with that being said, that’s where it’s a matter of just making sure that you have the right data for what you need. So depending on your version of Pardot, you can use market our market data sharing rules to specify that only the right data goes into Pardot for your accurate dynamic list and engagement studio programs. Additionally, there are third party solutions like what we have with ProspectUpdater. We also have a session tomorrow on a solution we’ve created called flow action for Pardot that will kind of help you adjust that to where if you don’t have the right data syncing between Pardot and Salesforce, more is in Salesforce over Pardot. You can use automations to push that data into Pardot that you need for your ESPs and to make sure you have accurate dynamic lists.

Speaker 0: And with that, we are out of time. Thank you everyone so much, and have fun today.