How to Prevent Data From Being Overwritten in Pardot and Salesforce

Preventing field updates to a field allows you to write to the field once and then retain the original value for the lifetime of the field. This can be useful for fields like lead source, UTM values, or if you want to be able to report on first-touch. In this post, I’ll cover the setting you need to enable in Pardot to prevent field updates and how to create a validation rule in Salesforce to prevent users from updating these fields.

Prevent data from being overwritten in Pardot

To prevent data from being overwritten in Pardot, update the field sync settings to use Salesforce’s value. Navigate to Admin > Configure Fields > Prospect Fields, select your field and select “use Salesforce’s value” from the dropdown.

Note: For this to work, you will need to sync all prospects from Pardot to Salesforce. Any prospects that ONLY exist in Pardot will have their fields overwritten.

To ensure that this is working correctly, update a prospect in Pardot. When you save the prospect you should see the data value change, but after the sync to Salesforce happens you should see the value change back to the old value.

Prevent data from being overwritten in Salesforce

Now that you have set up Salesforce as the master value, you might want to prevent the field from being overwritten in Salesforce as well. This can be done using a validation rule.

Create a validation rule in Salesforce

Here are some examples of what a validation rule would look like for preventing updates to the Lead Source field.

Navigate to the lead object > validation rules > new and enter the required information.

To run the validation rule if the lead source is changed and if the current value is not empty use this as your error condition formula.

You might want to allow some users to update the lead source field. For example, a marketing manager might need to update the field to correct data. To set up the validation rule to run if the lead source is changed, if the current value is not empty AND allow a particular user alias to bypass the validation rules, use this as your error condition formula.

You can also bypass the validation rules by using the user role ID, like this:

Activate and test

Activate your validation rule and test it by updating the lead source for a lead that already has a value. You should see an error message when saving the record.

Do another test by creating a new lead. Fill out the lead source field to ensure that you have the ability to update the field.

With a validation rule activated in Salesforce, Pardot will be able to write to the field if it is empty. If it has a value Pardot will not be able to update the field in Salesforce.

Questions?

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