Introduction
Consumers evolved to become more resource/information centric, your organisation must deliver the best sales cycle experience possible or end up giving the worst. It all boils down to how you handle your sales cycle and add value to the sales experience, leaving a strong, lasting impression in their minds.
Today, technology creates an information expressway between you and your consumers. This expressway also bridges the "age-old gap" between your marketing and sales teams, giving a delightful sales experience to your customers.
As businesses rely more on data-centric tools to stream line their sales and marketing, HubSpot and Salesforce integration will help you achieve the next level of consumer experience as well.
The need to integrate the two systems.
HubSpot and Salesforce both offer a Pandora of features for managing the sales life cycle of your customers. But, it’s the integration between the two that opens a new portal for effective sales and marketing management through out the consumer life cycle. It allows your team to nurture and manage leads from the very first contact all the way through to the sale (and even after it closes), adding value to the overall sales experience.
Expectations from this integration.
For any organisation considering integrating HubSpot and Salesforce, there are a few questions to ask before diving in. It’s important to analyse fruit fullness of the integration for your business. In other words, you must answer this question: Is this integration really required for my business?
- Jot down your Marketing team’s main initiatives?
Your marketing teams may be focused on objectives other than simple demand generation. It’s important to understand the focus of your marketing team to best determine how to properly configure the integration. Though your marketing team will not be a deterrent, it is important that you understand and communicate your initiatives clearly to both your marketing and sales teams before deploying the integration. This will ensure that you configure it most effectively for both teams.
- What exactly are you trying to achieve with this integration?
Your top management will be counting them any benefits of connecting your HubSpot and Salesforce instances. However, you must also set clear expectations and a plan for achieving these benefits with the integration. Some basic expectations would be shortened sales cycles, reduced data gaps, and more sales closures.
- Is your data clean?
If you have been using either of the two systems already (especially Salesforce), you must check for obsolete fields, duplicate records, expired opportunities, and over grown pick lists. You must clean your data before integrating the two systems, as it will create more problems than solutions if you ignore this step.
- Do you have the required resources to implement and maintain this integration?
Integrating the two systems is not easy as it appears. It takes lot of effort to understand the requirements, plan an implementation strategy, build the syncing criteria, map all of the fields, construct notification or assignment work flows, and then test every thing before going live. Each step is required for a successful integration, and it’s advisable to partner with an expert for this process.
Some known issues encountered during integration.
Integrating HubSpot with Salesforce would seem a good idea, but it’s not that easy as some experts proclaim. Just to name a few of the issues you may encounter:
- Mismatch of Naming Convention
This is the most common issue encountered while integrating the two systems. In HubSpot, an individual person is usually referred to as "a contact" irrespective of where they are in the sales process. But Salesforce has both "leads" and "contacts," and they mean different things, depending upon your Salesforce setup.
- Data Inequality
Integration between HubSpot and Salesforce is not like combining two things into one. Speaking technically, it’s not possible to enter everything from HubSpot into Salesforce. You need to be clear about what data matters most to your organization for its sales process before you begin the integration. Next step is to verify whether or not it will be exchanged between the two systems and how. Don’t be surprised to find that what matters most to you isn’t part of the standard integration itself.
- Data Integrity
When you decide to integrate HubSpot and Salesforce, you introduce yourself to a collection of data nightmare possibilities. The most common is duplicate records. HubSpot looks for matching email addresses, so it will not create a duplicate contact if the email address already exists. Salesforce does not manage this that easily. You need to set rules or use add-ons to prevent duplicate records. So, while you strive to save time and streamline processes, one miss-calculation could end up creating loads of additional work for your organization.
Common issues after integration
- Incorrect sync-list criteria
This is a common problem where contacts will appear in your CRM’s leads queue unexpectedly. This means that a marketing-qualified lead you want to send to sales isn't syncing. This is caused by incorrect sync-list criteria that are either erroneously sending contacts to Salesforce, or preventing ones that should be sent from syncing properly.
- Primary contact from HubSpot is not associated with opportunity records
Any contact record must be assigned as the primary contact on that opportunity, which allows HubSpot to attribute and update a contact's life cycle stage and associated deal size to an opportunity in Salesforce. Read more to know how to avoid this association error.
- Custom Salesforce field not syncing to HubSpot
Any field on the Lead or Contact (or Account if Account Sync is enabled or Opportunity if Opportunity Sync is enabled) that is able to sync with HubSpot will appear on the Field Mappings screen. You can check this article on how to sync custom fields successfully.
Table Of Contents
- Protect and Maximize Your ROI with Salesforce
- How Effective Use of Salesforce CRM Helps
- Benefits of Salesforce CRM System for a Small Business
- Why Startups Need a CRM System
Conclusion
There are many benefits from integrating your marketing automation platform and CRM. The most important one being the total alignment between your sales and marketing teams. This directly results in better experience for your prospects and customers, ultimately driving consumer sales experience to the next level. However, given the multiple bottlenecks you may come across during the integration, it is better to seek expert advice to make it a success for your business.
