HubSpot Salesforce Integration: Avoid These 5 Pitfalls

Integrating HubSpot and Salesforce is a no-brainer for sales and marketing alignment. Combine HubSpot’s deep marketing metrics with Salesforce’s insightful sales data and you can have yourself an analytics field day!  To do this successfully though, you must be prepared for the potential pitfalls of integrating these two solutions and know how you want your data to move between them.

In this post, we’ll discuss five common pitfalls of HubSpot Salesforce integration and how to prepare for and avoid them.

Pitfall #1: Your Salesforce and/or HubSpot Data Isn’t Clean

The goal of integrating HubSpot and Salesforce is to enable collaborative sales and marketing initiatives. However, if your data is poor, even these superstar solutions won’t help you accomplish that. Duplicate accounts, outdated information, missing values, and irrelevant data all affect the integrity of your HubSpot and Salesforce data sets. It’s important to execute a strategic cleaning and decluttering of both systems before you begin an integration.

Without proper data cleaning, you could be generating reports that are false reflections of your true data, therefore misinforming your teams’ thoughtful efforts. Even if your company has been using Salesforce for years and it exists as your single source of truth, it’s still worthwhile to go through and analyze the data’s current state. Even companies with the highest standards of data integrity can discover significant errors in their system. Don’t just assume your data is clean, use proper data cleaning and preparation techniques to know for sure.

Pitfall #2: Your Field Types are Misaligned

To successfully pass information between HubSpot and Salesforce, the field types must match. Many businesses struggle with this aspect of the integration because the field types in each system are named differently. For example, “Dropdown Select/Radio Select” in HubSpot is called “Picklist/Reference” in Salesforce.

Your integration partner wouldn’t (and shouldn’t!) align a single-line text field in HubSpot with a Picklist in Salesforce because it won’t sync properly. There are dropdown options in a Picklist that a text field doesn’t support, and the integration won’t understand how to react to those differences. Here’s a list of the property field types you should be aware of for each solution:

Pitfall #3: You Aren’t Accounting for the Differences with Lists

Lists play a vital role in marketing segmentation. When you integrate HubSpot and Salesforce together, it’s important to understand that gathering lists from one platform and auto-creating them in the other platform is not a possibility. This is because HubSpot lists are created using defined criteria. Salesforce lists are generated from Reports. The two cannot cross over.

If you require the same lists in your HubSpot as you have in your Salesforce, the lists must be created independently within each system, using the same underlying criteria to ensure they match. Your integration partner or software consultant may be able to help.

Pitfall #4: No Plan for Custom Salesforce Objects

As great as the HubSpot Salesforce integration is, the two solutions were still developed by different companies, which means not everything is going to work perfectly for every integration need. A great example of this is the inability to see information about custom Salesforce objects in HubSpot.

If you have custom Salesforce objects (most companies do) and the information from these objects is important to be able to reference in HubSpot, your integration partner must copy the information from that Salesforce custom object into an Account or Contact in HubSpot so the record can be seen there.

Pitfall #5: Contacts in HubSpot vs. Leads in Salesforce

HubSpot stores customers based on one category and one Contact record. On the flip side, Salesforce customer data is entered as a Lead and later converted to a Contact, which creates two records. This is a finer point to be aware of when integrating Salesforce with HubSpot. To avoid errors, the integration partner must tell the integration how to handle this scenario.

Decide if you want HubSpot’s new contact records entered as “Leads” or “Contacts” in Salesforce. If you prefer to convert the Salesforce contacts manually, the record type should be “Leads”. If you’d rather HubSpot create the lead conversion for you, then “Contacts” would be the preferred choice. This decision should be made with your entire stakeholder team to make sure all departments are on board with how the Contacts/Leads will be handled.

Now that you’re armed with a better understanding of your integration, it’s time to get started. StarfishETL’s HubSpot Salesforce integrations are quick to implement, adaptable to your custom fields, fully scalable, and secure. To learn more about integrating Salesforce and HubSpot, visit this page, or contact us at sales@starfishetl.com for a custom quote.