Hubspot and Salesforce Integration Admin’s Guide

hubspot and salesforce integration admin guide

Introduction:

While HubSpot orchestrates the integration with Salesforce, both platforms play key roles in the setup process. Here’s a breakdown of how it unfolds:

Installation Journey:

  • Initiation and Conclusion in HubSpot: The journey to connect HubSpot and Salesforce begins and ends within HubSpot’s interface, guiding you through the necessary steps.
  • Salesforce Collaboration: During the process, you’ll be prompted to complete specific actions within your Salesforce account to establish the link.

HubSpot Takes the Wheel:

  • Configuration and Monitoring: Once the installation is complete, HubSpot becomes the central hub for managing and customizing the integration.
  • Settings and Insights: Field mappings, synchronization settings, and any sync errors encountered are all accessible within HubSpot’s integration settings.

Key Elements:

  • The identifier for a contact in Hubspot and Salesforce is his Email Address. This is like our ID: using this value the machine understands how to match between records or create new records.
  • The identifier for a company in Hubspot or Account in Salesforce is the Website URL. e.g you may create duplicates between Salesforce and Hubspot unless there is a match between  website URL
  • The primary difference between how HubSpot and Salesforce structure data is that Salesforce uses two objects to represent ‘people’ data, Leads and Contacts, while HubSpot only uses one object.
  • In HubSpot, all new leads are created using the Contact object. To track progression from Lead to Opportunity to Customer, a property in HubSpot is used called Lifecycle Stage, with the integration in place in progress in Salesforce will update the contact lifecycle stage in Hubspot.
  • Hubspot Deal = Salesforce Opportunity
  • Hubspot Company – Salesforce Account
  • Once the integration is completed leverage Hubspot Insights values and map those to dedicated custom fields in Salesforce.

Some Basic preparations you should do:

  1. Clean Your Data: Before integrating with HubSpot, ensure your Salesforce data is accurate. Duplicate reports and health assessments can reveal issues like technical debt, duplicates, and inaccuracies. Clean things up before integrating; dirty data will only double the trouble. This concise version retains the key message while dropping unnecessary repetition and emphasizing the critical action: data cleanup before integration. You can use Salesforce reports duplications reports on leads, contact and accounts before the sync.
  2. Spread the Word: Alert team members managing other systems connected to Salesforce about the HubSpot integration. This ensures everyone understands data flow and facilitates internal collaboration. In addition, communicate the upcoming changes to impacted Salesforce users. Focus on the value proposition for each team – Sales, Marketing, and BI – highlighting how HubSpot will improve their work and the customer experience. 
  3. Create an Integration User: The integration user is the user profile that HubSpot uses to log into Salesforce. This user profile will be the user that has access that HubSpot needs in Salesforce. Anything you want HubSpot to be able to do, see, or change in Salesforce, this user profile will have access to do that.A best practice for creating the Salesforce profile for the integration user is to create a clone of the system administrator profile and parse it down to the HubSpot user. Some people choose to use an existing system administrator as the integration user, but it’s a best practice to use a dedicated integration user.All changes made by HubSpot will show as edits made by the integration user. If this is an existing Salesforce user, it will be impossible to distinguish what that user changed and what HubSpot changed in Salesforce. Whereas a dedicated integration user that is mapped as the HubSpot integration user will show edits made by HubSpot as the dedicated integration user, meaning you’ll be able to easily identify changes made by HubSpot in Salesforce.
  4. Create a data mapping file: Hubspot contact has a lot of values to offer. The best practice is to extract a list of contacts with all properties and then go one by one and decide if you like to map it to salesforce and if you do, what is the sync rule?
    1. Prefer Salesforce unless blank: This sync setting will only update the field in Salesforce from HubSpot if there is no value for the field in Salesforce. But, once the field has been set the first time, HubSpot can not edit it anymore. It’s really important that you look at the fields that are preferring Salesforce. If you are using a lead status field or the lifecycle stage properties and this setting is enabled, HubSpot will not be able to update the value for this property.
    2. Always use Salesforce: This sync setting means that, regardless of if the property is blank or not, you don’t want HubSpot to update this field. That means that only Salesforce can put new data in this field and HubSpot can not change it.
    3. Two way sync: This is the best sync setting for most fields because HubSpot and Salesforce can update it. It will always have the most recent value.
    4. Don’t sync: Use this if you do not want the data on this field to be shared between HubSpot and Salesforce. If it is a default field where you can’t delete the mapping, you can click edit mapping and select don’t sync. Then, this field will not sync. You will not be able to delete the mapping, because it is a standard mapping, but you can choose not to sync it.
    5. Create the corresponding fields in Salesforce in case they do not exist. You will have to ask your admin to do it for you so maybe it’s a good timing to release the internal communication.. After the installation steps 4 + 5 will look like that:

 

Package Installation

Navigate to this Hubspot page and follow the instructions and download the app.  Once the integration is installed don’t forget to put the integration user we created in the previous step. Once the installation is done you can also add the Hubspot visual page within Salesforce. We will elaborate on this matter down below.

 

If you want to stay here without jumping to other website here is a detailed explanation on how to download the app and steps to do until the installation is completed:

  • In your HubSpot account, click the marketplace Marketplace icon in the main navigation bar, then select App Marketplace.
  • Use the search bar to locate and select the Salesforce integration. If you didn’t find it you can just navigate to this link 
  • In the upper right, click Install app.
  • If you’re connecting HubSpot to a Salesforce sandbox, select the Yes, this will connect to a sandbox checkbox.
  • Click Log in to Salesforce.
  • In the pop-up window, enter your Salesforce credentials and click Log In. After logging in, you’ll be redirected back to the installation process in HubSpot.
  • Next, install HubSpot in Salesforce. Click Start the Salesforce package installation to begin.
  • You’ll be redirected to Salesforce to install the HubSpot integration package. Select Install for All Users, then click Install.
  • In the dialog box, select the Yes, grant access to these third-party web sites checkbox, then click Continue.
  • Salesforce will then install the HubSpot integration package. This installation may take up to ten minutes.
  • You may see a message: This app is taking a long time to install. You will receive an email after the installation has completed.
  • Click Done and wait for an email from Salesforce with the subject Package HubSpot Integration Install Successful.
  • After the package has been installed in Salesforce, navigate back to the HubSpot connector wizard and click Next.
  • Next, add the HubSpot Visualforce module to Salesforce. This module shows the contact’s likelihood to close, and allows you to view and filter contact activity and enroll contacts in HubSpot workflows. Click Skip this step and install the Visualforce window at a later time. This is not urgent for now, you can accomplish that at any time
  • Choose how your data will sync between HubSpot and Salesforce. HubSpot will create mappings between HubSpot properties and Salesforce fields regardless of which setup you choose. If the Salesforce field does not have a matching HubSpot property, a new property will be created in HubSpot by an Unknown user.
  • For now Select Recommended setup, click Review settings

 

This is where the cool stuff start:

Way to go, you made it so far and you are very close to the finish line. You can take a coffee break and come back to the interesting part of the integration. You have to be focused and relaxed.

COFFEE BREAK ☕️

To get to the integration page, navigate to Settings -> Connected Apps -> Salesforce  -> Edit Settings

The main integration page should look like the image below. it has dedicated tabs for each object including the option to sync custom objects:

  • Sync Health – you should revisit this tab every week in the first 3 months to monitor the integration sync errors. Every error has a root cause, one record that fails may lead to more records that will fail..
  • Contacts – the first thing that you should do is to make sure that the contact sync is turned off. we will turn it on in a few steps soon we will be ready to see records kick in to Salesforce.  

  • Creating and Updating Contacts –  this section is totally up to your business marketing and sales processes. In the Salesforce mini section we choose what we would like to do when a lead / contact is created or updated. In the example above we chose not to do anything in Hubspot from the simple fact that in this particular business case, the sales teams wanted to privately work on their leads, without any marketing engagement. 
  • Deleting Contacts –  This is also dependent on a business decision. The best practice in general is not to delete any leads or contacts in Salesforce but when it happens you should feel comfortable to delete them also in Hubspot.

  • Adjusting lifecycle stage – This is such an important component in the sync! lifecycle stage is actually where the prospect is in the buyer’s journey. usually when new contacts sync in to Salesforce they are still Leads or MQLs, while turning this sync on means that when a lead converts to a contact with opportunity in Salesforce it will update the contact lifecycle stage in Hubspot to ‘Opportunity’ AND when the opportunity changes to ‘closed won’ it will update the contact lifecycle stage to Customer! – Have I said data integrity yet? woo hoo!

  • Limiting what syncs – The idea here is that you have control over data that flows to Salesforce, you can choose a contact list (dynamic) and only those will sync into Salesforce. Create a contact list called ‘Salesforce Integration List’ and set the conditions to include leads that were created in the last 48 hours and that that their lifecycle stage is MQL hoping to get a small subset of records (1-10 should be ok)

Last step before we turn on the sync, go through the contact mapping scheme and make sure you add all the required fields from the data mapping file that you covered during the preparation. 

For fields that you see in the list you just need to set the sync rule and double check the corresponding Salesforce fields. For fields that you created in Salesforce for this integration you will have to add to the mapping through the ‘Add New Field Mapping’. Our best practice is to add to the scheme fields in Hubspot that can contribute to pipeline analytics in Salesforce like Original Source, Original Drill Down 1, Original Drill Down 2 those should be created in Salesforce and then added to the mapping scheme. Kapish? 

Wrapping things up:

So far we did everything that is needed for the contact object, you should do the same for Companies and Deals, it is not complicated as Contacts and it should be simple after we went through the contacts sync. 

When you are done go back to each tab and activate the sync. The sync between Hubspot and Salesforce triggers every 3 minutes so don’t expect the contacts in the  ‘Salesforce Integration List’ to show up right away. 

Tip – the pro way to identify if a contact is synced with Salesforce is to go to the contact page, on the right side there is a Salesforce sync card with all the information you need to know:

You can click on actions and then ‘View in Salesforce’ . It is super awesome!

When you feel comfortable with the sync, open the ‘Salesforce Integration List’ and sync MQLs that were created in the last 90 days..

Next step is to work with your Salesforce admin to make sure that the new leads are assigned to the right AE or SDR, this is also a good time to add the Hubspot visual force page on the Salesforce contact page and educate sales how they can get value from the information from Hubspot. 

For any questions you may have please use the comments section below. Feel free to download the e-book it includes a step by step guide and more insights and tips. 

Check out our lead scoring blog post, remember that when the lead scoring goes up this is an amazing opportunity to sync into Salesforce as well. 

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