Common Pardot Salesforce Connector Errors & How to Fix Them

It’s a sad fact in life that sometimes you can do everything right and still encounter issues. This is also true for the Pardot/Salesforce connector.

The three most common Pardot Salesforce Connector errors we see marketing automation admins continuously face are:

1. “Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects”
2. “Prospect and custom object sync has been paused since [a certain date/time]. If sync is paused for more than 30 days, you’ll need to do a full sync to get all updates.”
3. The connector is stuck on “Verification in Progress”

Here is how to solve these common Pardot Salesforce Connector Errors.

Common problem 1: Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects

You ran a successful email campaign last week and are eagerly waiting to hear from the sales team on last week’s MQL report. When you get the report you realize a large majority of your marketing leads are missing. You navigate to the Sync Errors report and notice this message “Your Salesforce Connector User does not have all of the permissions Pardot expects” next to the prospects from your campaign.

No fear, this error sounds more scary than it is.

Pardot is simply letting you know that it is expecting to have access to read and write certain fields, but the profile settings of the connector user currently prohibit that for some number of fields (those listed in the error).

This tends to happen more often in established Pardot orgs if profiles or field-level permissions change in Salesforce, but we’ve seen it come up in newly implemented Pardot orgs also. 

In the newly implemented org case, what typically happens is that you follow steps to set up the V2 connector with a Pardot Connector User and then go to the Connectors tab in Pardot, where you see this warning message:

Your first thought is: “What the heck! I followed every step in the implementation guide.”

The first step of setting up the Pardot Connector User (on either the V1 or V2 connector) is to assign the Pardot Connector User Permission Set but that doesn’t actually give Pardot access to everything it needs. Certain objects aren’t covered by that permission set because of Salesforce security restrictions. After you assign the permission set, you must manually configure your connector user’s permissions for Salesforce standard objects. Here’s a handy guide on how to Assign Object Permissions to the Connector User.

What you need to do:

Manually set field-level permissions to the Pardot Integration Profile.  Go into those fields, edit the field-level permissions and add to the connector profile and things should work well going forward.

Here are steps to edit the field-level permissions:

That’s it! It’s not a hard fix but it sure is confusing when you know you set up everything correctly following the Pardot implementation guide. I’m here to at least reassure you that it’s not you, it’s the implementation guide. 

PS: Setting up V2 with an integration user won’t trigger this error because the integration user authenticates directly to Salesforce so we don’t need to assign a permission set or object permissions.

Common problem 2: Prospect and custom object sync has been paused since [a certain date/time]. If sync is paused for more than 30 days, you’ll need to do a full sync to get all updates.

This is another scary-sounding warning message that isn’t hard to deal with. This is Pardot warning you that since the Pardot/Salesforce sync has been down for so long, it’s not going to catch up on data changes older than 30 days.

To fix it, when you’re ready, unpause the sync and click the “sync metadata” button 

Common problem 3: The connector is stuck on “Verification in Progress”

This problem seemed to happen more often in previous versions of the Pardot package and may be a non-issue moving forward. If, however, during implementation you connect and enable your v2 connector in Pardot Lightning and it stays on “Verification in Progress” for more than a couple of hours (Pardot support will probably suggest you wait for 24 hours, but typically if it doesn’t happen somewhat quickly, it’s not going to verify), check out this known issue along with the fix. 

Got any more for us?

What else threw you off during your Pardot implementation? Share in the comments.