This article is an overview of the functionality you can get from the Salesforce integration with Pendo Engage, and how it works. For information about how to set up the integration, including planning and choosing unique identifiers, see Set up the Salesforce integration for Pendo Engage.
This integration is different for Pendo Feedback. For information about the Feedback integration with Salesforce, see Salesforce with Pendo Feedback and Salesforce integration setup for Pendo Feedback.
Overview
The Salesforce integration with Pendo Engage is a two-way data sync. With this integration, you can set up the connection between Salesforce and Pendo Engage to do one or both of the following:
- Pull in Salesforce information to enrich visitor and account metadata in Pendo Engage.
- Push Pendo data back into Salesforce.
Broadly, “pull” refers to the process of collecting inbound data from Salesforce to Pendo (read), and “push” refers to the process of sending outbound data from Pendo to Salesforce (write). Pulling Salesforce information into Pendo enables more segmentation, allowing you to use Salesforce attributes to filter analytics and target guides. Pushing Pendo usage analytics into Salesforce provides additional data for your teams that are in Salesforce, but aren’t necessarily in Pendo.
Use cases
The Salesforce integration with Pendo Engage is a bidirectional data sync. This means that you can both pull data from, and push data to, Salesforce. This section covers why you might want to pull and push data between Pendo Engage and Salesforce.
Pulling data from Salesforce
You can use the integration to pull user and account information found in Salesforce into Pendo. This gives you more options for segmenting and filtering your data in Pendo, and for targeting guides to visitors based on Salesforce attributes.
For example, you could see how product usage is different across your users based on segments, such as company region, using information from Salesforce. If your company has an initiative to expand usage in a particular region, you can focus your reporting to just that segment of your users. You can also use guides to target those users to help increase feature adoption.
You could also use information from Salesforce to help Pendo differentiate between prospects, trial users, active customers, and churned customers when segmenting for guides. For example, you might want to deliver NPS surveys only to active customers, and you might want to target trial users with more onboarding guides to help drive a faster time-to-value.
Another use case is pulling in Account ownership information from Salesforce to make it easier for users to contact their Account Rep. You could do this by creating a Pendo guide that targets customers managed by a specific Account Rep. For inspiration and guidance, follow our Calendly use case.
Pushing Pendo usage analytics into Salesforce
When you push Pendo data to Salesforce, you’re syncing your visitor and account activity data in Pendo to objects that you specify in Salesforce, typically the Contact and Account objects, respectively. Any column that can be added to a visitor or account report in Pendo is eligible for syncing, with the exception of the Visitor ID and Account ID columns.
This Pendo usage data then becomes available for use in Salesforce workflows, generating tasks, reporting, sending notifications, and activities. It also becomes available to other applications that can connect with Salesforce. For example, you can:
- Create tasks for Customer Success when new users are struggling based on low usage for specific Pages and Features.
- Use Pendo data to calculate a customer health score in Salesforce using breadth, depth, and frequency indicators.
- Use a third-party marketing tool to invite specific users to a webinar or event based on product usage.
- Display NPS scores and comments in Salesforce so that your customer success team can better identify customers for outreach efforts.
How it works
The Salesforce integration creates a one-to-one match between objects in both systems that allows you to pull data from (read), and push data to (write), Salesforce. Pendo only pushes and pulls data into matching objects. It doesn't create new records in Salesforce or Pendo if no matching record is found.
Once you've created a connection, you can set up either or both a push and a pull between Pendo and Salesforce. The push and pull features of the Salesforce integration are the reverse of each other. The integration uses the same Salesforce objects that metadata fields are pulled from to push selected information from Pendo.
Once set up, push and pull syncs are automated to update every 24 hours. Nightly syncs occur between midnight and 6 AM based on your subscription time zone. You can’t change the frequency or timing of the automatic sync, but you can manually sync at any time from Settings > Data Mapping. Any sync, whether manual or automatic, runs both a data “pull” and “push”, if both are configured.
Creating a connection
You must create a connection between Pendo and Salesforce objects before you can set up a push or pull. You must first choose which Salesforce objects to connect to, and what you want to use as unique identifiers. For guidance on which objects to select for syncing and how to choose unique identifiers, see Set up the Salesforce integration for Pendo Engage.
Choosing Salesforce objects
Pendo data is grouped into two objects: a visitor object and an account object, which provide you with two possible bidirectional connections with Salesforce. For each connection, you can choose a single Salesforce object to sync with. By default, our Salesforce integration supports the following Salesforce objects: Account, Asset, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity.
We also support custom objects, which can be useful for more complicated configurations. For more information, see Connect more than one object in Salesforce to Pendo Engage.
Choosing unique identifiers
You must select a unique identifier (ID) for the visitors and accounts you want to use in the integration. To connect the two data sources, these IDs must match one-to-one between Pendo and Salesforce.
On the Pendo side, you can choose the Visitor ID, Account ID, or any other metadata (such as email address) to be the unique identifier. On the Salesforce side, you can choose any string, float, or integer field that doesn’t start with “Pendo_”, which is a prefix used only for pushing data.
At this point, you're only setting up the connection between unique identifiers, not a push or pull. The unique identifier chosen is used for setting up both the pull and push functionality, but the fields themselves aren't involved in a push or pull. Rather, the values of the fields that belong to these objects are pushed and pulled.
Configuring push and pull functionality
Setting up a “pull” and a “push” are separate configurations. This allows you to decide whether you want to configure either “pull” or “push” functionality, or both. For instructions, see the Set up the Salesforce integration for Pendo Engage article.
- A “pull” is set up from the Data Mappings page in Pendo.
- A “push” is set up by creating a Visitor Report or an Account Report in Pendo and configuring the push from within that report.
Below is an example of the flow of data for a pull and a push using the Pendo account object connected with a Salesforce object. The same flow applies to Pendo visitors, where the Pendo visitor object is connected with a Salesforce object, and Visitor Reports are used instead of Account Reports for a data push.