topic Re: Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot in Marketing Integrations

Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot

jjustinwilson — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:44:02 GMT

For a variety of reasons, we need to create multiple records in Salesforce with the same email address. For as much as we have attempted to eliminate this, for business purposes, it is necessary. But, as you can imagine, that has created obvious issues with HubSpot.

We've done our best to create workflows and processes to deduplication our records before they sync with HubSpot, but we've discovered a new problem.

When there are duplicate records in Salesforce, we can use Salesforce's marge feature merge them into a single contact that then establishes the one-to-one sync with HubSpot.

But this creates a new issue. If a user selects the non-syncing Salesforce contact as the primary account for the merge, salesforce deletes the record in HubSpot. More problematically, the now-merged contact does not ever sync with hubspot, because Hubspot thinks that record (e.g. the email address) was deleted. We tried permanently deleting the previous hubspot contact, but the now-merged contact does not sync as a new Hubspot contact, either.

We also attempted to recover the deleted Hubspot account, but HubSpot does not allow us to reestablish the sync.

How have people dealt with managing duplicate email accounts in Salesforce to prevent those duplicates from creating issues with their HubSpot sync?

Re: Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot

TitiCuisset — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:02:37 GMT

Hi @jjustinwilson

Thank you for reaching out and for the details

I want to tag some of our experts here - @LaurenRyan @Aakar @MandyDROS do you have any thoughts for @jjustinwilson on this?

Thank you!

Best

Tiphaine

Re: Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot

LaurenRyan — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 13:56:29 GMT

@jjustinwilson thanks for including so much detail!

First - HubSpot uses email as the unique identifier. So, there isn't currently a way to overcome that first challenge. HubSpot will sync with all Salesforce records that have the same email address. BUT, HubSpot only syncs with the most recently updated record in Salesforce with that email address. So, if you have a lead and a contact with the same email - whichever one you edit last in Salesforce will reflect in HubSpot. If you find an example of this type of record in your Salesforce account, look up their email in HubSpot. Then, go to Lead Status or a key field for your organization and click "Details" when you hover over the property in HubSpot. It will show you the change history and you can see that it's syncing all records with that email address. Even better, if you're syncing any Salesforce ID field - look at the "Details" for that property to see all IDs that have synced with that HubSpot Contact. This is obviously a challenge if you create Leads for existing customers - as HubSpot will sometimes recognize that Contact as a lead and sometimes recognize it as a customer. We often recommend doing away with the Salesforce lead object entirely when using the HubSpot Salesforce integration.

Second - the duplicate issues you're experiencing are super common - but easy to fix!. A few rules of thumb:

- Select the most recently synced record from HubSpot as the master record. If the record you want to be the master is not the most recently synced, resync the master record with HubSpot before deduplicating.

- Turn off the "Delete the contact in HubSpot when the contact is deleted in Salesforce" setting in the integration settings when working through duplicates. This will prevent the record from being deleted in HubSpot. Instead of being deleted, it may show "Record no longer found in Salesforce" under the sync settings. Then, you'll want to manually resync the record from the HubSpot iFrame on the Salesforce record.

- Finally, we've managed a lot of duplication projects. After hours (and hours.. and hours) of doing this manually - we tried several ways to automate deduplication. The new HubSpot data management tools really help with this on the HubSpot side - but they don't solve for both HubSpot and Salesforce. The best way to deduplicate records in HubSpot and Salesforce is using Insycle. To help demonstrate, we put together a quick 12-minute webinar with a step-by-step walkthrough of how to deduplicate HubSpot & Salesforce records using Insycle.

Let me know if this was helpful!

Re: Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot

RBozeman — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:22:48 GMT

Hey @LaurenRyan and @jjustinwilson,

Thank you Lauren for recommending Insycle! I work there as a Product Marketer. I wanted to provide a little more context about how Insycle can help deal with duplicates in HubSpot.

First, here is an article that covers how Insycle can help solve many common issues that people run into with HubSpot and Salesforce sycned. And here is an article that covers the deduplication issue specifically.

The short version is that Insycle gives you a defined process for merging duplicates in both HubSpot and Salesforce and ensuring that all records are merged down into the same master record, so that the sync stays in tact. You can use any field as a matching field for identifying duplicates, and can even use related fields (like matching a Phone Number field to a Matching Phone Number field).

Hope that helps and if you have any questions let me know!

Thanks,

Ryan

Re: Merging Duplicate Records in Salesforce breaks Sync with Hubspot

LaurenRyan — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:08:22 GMT

We will review tricky duplicate issues like this in our upcoming training session on duplicates in the HubSpot Salesforce integration. Register here!

PS - If you register in advance, we'll email you the recording after if you can't make it.