What are best practices for configuring the Salesforce connector on a new Account Engagement implementation?

Use a dedicated integration user rather than a person's account, so the connection does not break when someone leaves and so audit trails are clear. Give that user the access it genuinely needs — the relevant objects and fields — and no more.

Plan field mappings before turning sync on. For each mapped field, decide deliberately which system is the master and set the sync behaviour accordingly, rather than accepting defaults. Marketing-owned fields usually favour Account Engagement; sales-owned fields such as lifecycle stage usually favour Salesforce.

Sync a small, controlled subset first and inspect the results before opening the gates. Check that picklist values match on both sides, since mismatches are the most common source of errors. Agree with the Salesforce admin what happens to prospects with no CRM record and how deletions should behave in each direction.

Finally, put monitoring in place: someone needs to own the sync error queue, or errors accumulate silently for months.