Overview

If you’re using HubSpot as your marketing automation platform and Salesforce as your CRM system, then your tech stack is already off to a powerful start. In order to leverage the capabilities and work with the limitations of both platforms, you’ll want to strategically integrate the two. The HubSpot and Salesforce integration allows your marketing and sales teams to exchange data in a consistent, streamlined fashion. And depending on your marketing ops maturity, the integration can facilitate more unified data overall and improve your automated processing goals.

What are the benefits of integrating HubSpot with Salesforce CRM?

One of the biggest benefits of integrating HubSpot with SFDC is the ability to gain a comprehensive view of your prospects’ & customers’ journey. The bidirectional sync between the two systems means that more accurate data is consistently reflected across all systems. With this access, you can enable your team with real-time visibility into your sales pipeline and have a better understanding as to which marketing campaigns are having a major impact on your revenue goals.

Since the integration allows for better data availability, your sales team members will find that this access to relevant data points will help close opportunities with less friction along the way. And for your marketing team, this means you can build detailed customer profiles and better understand your prospects and in a way that will help to personalize emails, content, and overall buyer experience.

Also, integrating different systems across different teams means that anyone who is a part of the process will need to cross collaborate with one another to make sure all objectives are being met. This kind of team dynamic will be crucial even after the integration phase, since implementing new processes will be required of everyone involved. On a similar note, an integrated approach across your marketing campaigns means you can have better marketing and sales alignment for a seamless prospect experience. For example, SFDC is known to be a powerful sales tool on its own, but will lack fulfilling marketing specific efforts; while on the other hand, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Services Hub can fill in these gaps.

Why should companies integrate HubSpot with Salesforce?

If your company is in a position to scale and is working towards big revenue goals, then as the marketing ops team, you’ll want to make sure that the platforms you’re using can do so as well. As mentioned previously, integrating systems will help align your marketing, sales and customer service teams to better evaluate performance and prioritize the resources and initiatives that impact revenue.

When you enable SFDC to sync with Hubspot, your team can more easily see the prospects’ entire buying journey (from the moment they’ve engaged to the sales opportunity) and find ways to better personalize the experience- without trying to find answers across multiple systems. So your marketing ops folks can work more efficiently to build infrastructure that will support lead creation and lead intake automated processes.

If your team is looking for a better way to grow business based on objectives, then you’ll know that reliable reporting is key. Integrating Hubspot with Salesforce allows for easier access to more unified data, and with that comes more accurate reporting. Not to mention, HubSpot’s comprehensive reporting capabilities will help automate data collection, so your team can rely on easy-to-use dashboards rather than having to hunt for specific metrics. Not to mention, having the capabilities of reporting in both systems allows you to measure the revenue impact of your marketing campaigns.

When should a company integrate their CRM and HubSpot?

If your teams have been using Salesforce to keep track of sales activity and HubSpot for marketing purposes, then the next step to consider is integrating the two systems. If the company is using several tools, and is having to search for answers and having to maintain each tool separately, this will quickly become a cumbersome endeavor for the team to manage in the long term. So, an integration between your most used systems (in this case, HubSpot and Salesforce) would make the most sense for a marketing ops team that is interested in creating an effective tech stack.

How should a company integrate HubSpot with Salesforce CRM?

The details of your specific integration setup will depend on several components such as your team’s marketing ops maturity, the business processes already in place, and user experience of each system. Fortunately, HubSpot prides themselves on being a marketing ops platform that can seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. And if you believe that your specific integration may be more challenging, you’ll find that there are a lot of consultants and supportive documentation that can help guide your team to the right direction.

Here are some of the high level steps you can take to integrate HubSpot with Salesforce:

1. Install Salesforce integration from the Hubspot App Marketplace

• In your HubSpot account, go to ‘App Marketplace’ and select the Salesforce integration to install the app.
• If you’re trying to connect HubSpot to a Salesforce sandbox instance, make sure to select the ‘Yes, this will connect to a sandbox’ checkbox.
• Before moving forward with the option to ‘Log in to Salesforce’, make sure you have administrator access to your Salesforce account and that your Salesforce edition has API access.

2. Work through the Integration Setup Steps

• After clicking “Allow” for the “Allow access” pop-up, start the app installation process. You will have to log in again.
• Select “Install for All Users.”
• Select “Yes, grant access to these third-party web sites” and then “Continue.”
• The installation process can take up to 10 minutes. And you’ll receive an email after the installation is complete.
• After the package is installed, you can navigate back to HubSpot connector wizard to add the HubSpot Visualforce module to Salesforce. This module will demonstrate a contact’s likelihood to close on a sales seal and allows you to view and filter contact activity as well as enroll contacts in HubSpot workflows. You can opt to ‘Skip this step’, and therefore, install the Visualforce module another time.

3. Update Data Sync Settings

• The next step will give you the option to go with a recommended setup or advanced setup. You can change these settings at any time.
• If you decide to choose the advanced setup option, you’ll need to set up the following sync settings:
  • Contact sync settings: You have the option to sync all contacts or only contacts from a HubSpot list.
  • Activity and task sync settings: You have the option to automatically create a task in HubSpot when a task is created in SFDC. You can also select the task type that will be created in SFDC.
  • Object and property sync setting: At this screen, you’ll configure the sync type for standard properties for Contacts, Companies, or Deals. A table will display the standard HubSpot object properties and what their SFDC field equivalents are. And for every property sync, you can select from the following sync types- Prefer Salesforce (default), Always use Salesforce, or Two-way.

4. Review Your Selected Sync Settings

• Before you ‘Finish setup’ and begin syncing, make sure to review your selected data sync settings and if you want to make any changes, select ‘Change’. If you’re all set, you can ‘Finish setup’ and you’ll be redirected to your Salesforce integration settings. At this point, data between HubSpot and Salesforce will start syncing! Hurrah!

Conclusion

As your marketing ops team implements more best practices, consider consolidating all of the different tools in your tech stack by taking advantage of the available integration services. When you allow systems to “talk” to one another via an integration, you help to keep data in sync, enhance the productivity of new business processes, and improve the overall performance of your technology infrastructure.