HubSpot – Salesforce Integration

1. Introduction

   The ubiquitous role of technology in modern life has forged a consumer that requires meaningful and relevant information delivered at resource-tasking speeds. To meet this demand, your organization must maximize each stage of the sales cycle or risk falling short of rising customer expectations. How you handle your sales cycle and how you add value to the entirety of the sales experience, will leave strong and lasting impressions 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 streamline their sales and marketing processes, HubSpot and Salesforce integrations are the perfect implementations for custom strategies deployed in such a way as to bring the consumer a truly next level experience.

   The need to Integrate the two Systems.

   HubSpot and Salesforce both offer a plethora of features for managing the customer’s sale cycle, but,  it’s the integration between the two that opens a new pathway to effective sales and marketing management throughout the entire consumer life cycle. It enables 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 organization considering integrating HubSpot and Salesforce into their processes, there is the question of need; 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 can configure it most effectively for both teams.
   • What exactly are you trying to achieve with this integration?
     Your top management will be impressed by the many benefits of connecting your HubSpot and Salesforce instances.  However, you must also set clear expectations and an actionable plan for achieving these benefits within the integration.  Some basic deliverables would be shortened sales cycles, reduced data gaps,  and an increase in sales closures.
   • Is your data clean?
     If you have already been using either of the two systems (especially Salesforce), you must check for obsolete fields, duplicate records, expired opportunities, and overgrown 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 as effortless as it may appear. It takes lot of determination 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 everything 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 can have enormous returns for your business, but keep present in your mind the following possibilities:

   • 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 organizations sales process before you begin the integration. Next, verify whether or not the data 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 which you choose to send to sales isn't syncing.  This is caused by incorrect sync-list criteria that are either erroneously sending contacts to Salesforce or are 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.
   

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 a better experience for your prospects and customers, ultimately driving the 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 run-away success for your business

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