topic Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

EVudhiwat — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 14:21:52 GMT

We have a Salesforce integration that pushes leads and contacts to HubSpot as well as all our accounts. Salesforce contacts get automatically associated with the company in HubSpot but leads do not. We are collecting the account information for all leads in Salesforce so I'm hoping that there is a way to create a workflow or use some existing tools to automatically associate the lead and their account/HubSpot company. We'd like to do this to personalize and segment communications to these prospects.

At the moment I am able to sync in the lead's account ID as a field in HubSpot and I can potentially get the account name. I know there's a way to create a company using workflows but do not want to create duplicate companies. If possible, I'd like to ensure we can associate with the company that already exists in HubSpot.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to set this up?

Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

Crystal_Hopper — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 14:41:57 GMT

Hello @EVudhiwat!

So, when Salesforce sends a Lead into Hubspot, a new company record is being created when one already exists?

That seems odd to me because the Contact to Company association is based on the email and web domain matching. If you already have a Company record with web domain of thisandthat.com, and a new Contact comes in as a Lead using email address susieq@thisandthat.com, the new Contact (regardless of Lifecycle stage) should be associated to the existing company record.

It is the domain that creates the association in Hubspot. It's a core functionality and actually very hard to get around and do something else with contacts. I'm curious why you're not experiencing this and what is happening instead. Thank you for the insights.

Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

EVudhiwat — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:33:18 GMT

@Crystal_Hopper not quite. When Salesforce sends a lead into HubSpot it's just being created as a HubSpot contact. No new company record or association is being created. Salesforce accounts are syncing into HubSpot separately and are being associated with Salesforce contacts though, which is what we're hoping for with the leads we send to HubSpot.

We have the automation to "Create and associate companies with contacts" disabled in our HubSpot account. This is because we deal with schools and they typically inherit their district's email domain (ie Trinity High School and all other schools in that district have the same email district-level domain). We don't want to match to the wrong company and have these default the district rather than the school itself. We do capture the account information for all leads and contacts in Salesforce though.

Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

EVudhiwat — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:17:34 GMT

Turns out, there's a beta that I think I can use which will allow me to create the associations at large: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/workflows/manage-crm-record-associations-with-workflows

Just posting here in case anyone else stumbles upon this.

Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

Ben_M — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:11:57 GMT

@EVudhiwat - What you are currently experiencing is the correct behavior. In Salesforce, a Lead does not, by default, have an association with an Account, because a Lead is in a pre-qualified stage, it is yet to be determined whether they are viable and what account they would be connected with. The fields on the Lead Object map to the Contact/Account fields at the time of conversion in the field settings in the Object Manager.

If you need a more robust solution where you have as few orphaned Leads as possible, I would recommend looking into a solution like LeanData. You can then use that to try and map all Leads to accounts (assuming you have a lookup relationship between the Lead and Account objects in Salesforce), or you can simply have it try to match Leads to Accounts to auto-convert to Contacts + Accounts and then sync this data back with Hubspot.

Re: Automate Company Association for Salesforce Leads

Shweta95 — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 10:16:23 GMT

Leads from Salesforce don’t always link to the right company in HubSpot, even though the account data exists. What worked for us was syncing the SFDC Account ID into HubSpot and then using a custom workflow to match leads to existing companies based on that ID. You’ll need to make sure the Account ID is also stored on the company object in HubSpot for the match to work.

Also, if you're looking for something a bit more scalable and rules-based, we’ve had good results using LeadAngel for automated lead-to-account matching. It helps avoid duplicates and works well across both platforms.

Hope that helps!