HubSpot Salesforce Integration Done Right

In general, different software solutions use different naming conventions. This means that some of the terms used in HubSpot will differ from those used in Salesforce. For example, in HubSpot, each person that you have collected information on is known as a “contact.” Every contact you have has their own “contact record.” These terms are used no matter where the person is in the sales process and whether or not they are still a prospect or an actual customer. As soon as someone fills out a form for the first time, HubSpot will automatically refer to that person as a contact and create a new contact record for them.

This differs from Salesforce. While they also keep and maintain records in the same way, they use different terminology. “Contacts” in Salesforce are persons who are already customers. People who are not yet customers are recorded as “Leads.” As you can imagine, this could cause a few issues when it comes to integration. You will need to evaluate both platforms and identify potential terminology mismatches and how to address them. The term “campaigns” is another naming convention issue. Campaigns on either platform cannot be synced because they are different entities. A campaign in HubSpot is a collection of assets and tactics, whereas a campaign in Salesforce is a grouping of contacts.

Unfortunately, 100 percent integration between platforms isn’t possible. This means not all of the data in HubSpot can be entered into Salesforce, and not all of the data in Salesforce can be entered into HubSpot. For example, only part of the “task” information in the Salesforce platform can be entered into HubSpot, while the “activity-level” data in HubSpot can’t be fully integrated into Salesforce.

Both data environments need to be cleaned before you can integrate them. Not only can outdated or inaccurate data from one platform to another result following integration, but you’re likely to experience duplicate records as well. While HubSpot only creates new contacts if the email for that contact doesn’t exist in its CRM, Salesforce won’t recognize duplicate records. So if you don’t set specific rules or add-ons to prevent Salesforce from adding duplicate records, you’ll have a lot of work to do cleaning up your data following integration.

Additionally, you need to set your update rules correctly to ensure that information doesn’t pass between the two platforms incorrectly following integration. For example, do you want the most recent data from either platform to always populate the appropriate field? Or do you only want the data from HubSpot to be updated in Salesforce if the field in Salesforce is blank? There are several settings you will want to look at.

Creating segmented lists allows you to personalize engagement with your leads much more effectively. You can use HubSpot to segment your leads into lists using a variety of criteria. You can also make lists using reports in Salesforce. However, when you integrate the contact records in both, you won’t be able to take the lists from one platform and automatically create them in the other via integration. If you want both your HubSpot users and your Salesforce users to have access to the same lists, you will need to create them independently following integration.

As much as a successful HubSpot Salesforce integration can help strengthen sales and marketing alignment, it will be ineffective unless you actually align your marketing and sales strategies and get both departments on board. Otherwise, there’s no way that your marketing and sales teams will be able to take advantage of the benefits that the integration of HubSpot and Salesforce can provide. In the end, you can’t rely on integration to align your marketing and sales -- this can only be done via your marketing and sales processes and strategies. Integration will only be impactful if alignment between sales and marketing is already in place.

Constantly importing data from HubSpot to Salesforce and vice versa is a time-consuming and inefficient process. Integration will automatically import and export the majority of the data from both platforms so that your marketing and sales teams have access to all of your customer and prospect information no matter what platform they’re on. This will close the marketing and sales loop, which can help to strengthen your personalization and segmentation capabilities as well as improve the accuracy of your data analytics since all of your metrics and KPIs will be based on more complete and accurate data.

When syncing new records from HubSpot to Salesforce, you will be able to set up important lead intelligence to be sent automatically to your sales team, such as web activity, email opens, form submissions, and more. This lead data can be invaluable in helping your sales team close deals. Lead scores can also be automatically sent from HubSpot to Salesforce, allowing sales to identify qualified prospects that are ready to be engaged instead of wasting time on leads who aren’t as far along the sales funnel. Then sales can prioritize your leads based on how ready they are to buy. This, in turn, can help to dramatically shorten sales cycles.

More complete customer profiles will result from integrating the customer data collected on both platforms. You will be able to automatically assign contacts from HubSpot to specific Salesforce campaigns based on specific activity and engagement. Assigning tasks in Salesforce based on specific actions will be a breeze using the workflow tool available in HubSpot. For example, if a lead has visited a product page four times within a single week, a follow-up task can be automatically assigned for that lead.

Through integration, you can also sync your pipeline in HubSpot with your pipeline in Salesforce. Then your sales team will be able to monitor how marketing is nurturing your leads, while marketing will be able to see what happens to the leads that they qualify once they are handed off to sales. This allows your marketing team to make data-driven improvements based on how successful sales is able to convert leads to customers.