How do I set up the HubSpot Salesforce (SFDC) integration step-by-step in HubSpot?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
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I created the below as a project for one of my customers and within days, I was sharing it and changing it for multiple customers of mine so I wanted to share the non-personalized one here. This is the bare bones for setting up a simple HubSpot/Salesforce Integration. If you require assistance for a more convoluted set up you can purchase time with a technical consultant as outlined here.

Buckle up, boys and girls…

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STEP ONE: Calibrate API limits

  • Find out from your SFDC admin:
    • What other tools are integrated with your SFDC instance?
    • What is your API limit on the SFDC side.
    • As this is a HubSpot built integration, we do not have any limits applied however this will impact your SFDC API limit so it is important that you allocate the correct amount to HubSpot so that all other integrations can work at the same time.

STEP TWO: Define your HubSpot to Salesforce Journey

  • What does a good SFDC lead look like to your sales team? Using this criteria you need to build your inclusion list which will act as the barrier for records in HubSpot that want to access SFDC
  • What happens when a new record is created in HubSpot that either exists in SFDC or not? Create a lead or a Contact in SFDC?
  • How are your State and Country fields managed in SFDC? Should the integration match to the SFDC default values?

The most common journey tends to be:

HubSpot creates a lead record --->>Sales convert into a contact ----> which automatically creates an Account ----> and an Opportunity

STEP THREE: Defining your SFDC to HubSpot journey

Your options for the below are:

  1. Create or update the contact in HubSpot OR Do nothing
  2. Delete the contact in HubSpot OR do nothing

a. When a SFDC lead is created or updated: Which option from number 1?

b. When a SFDC lead is deleted: Which option from number 2?

a. When a SFDC contact is created or deleted: Which option from number 1?

b. When a SFDC contact is deleted: Which option from number 2?

Do you want the contact’s opportunity stage in SFDC to Update the HubSpot contact’s lifecycle stage?

Identify in each object what HubSpot Property should sync in to what Salesforce field and what the rule should be. See helpful excel here for when you are planning these rules. If you want to use this excel, please select file > ‘Make Copy’.

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Make sure that the fields are compatible, you can see a helpful table here

Any Hierarchy of parent to child relationships? You may need to discuss this with your Account Manager/a Technical Consultant.

Remember Quality over quantity! Does the sales team REALLY need this information?

Create field mapping rules

HubSpot contacts will sync to Salesforce leads/contacts - you cannot turn this off

HS companies sync to SFDC accounts - you can choose to turn this on or off

HS deals sync to SFDC opportunities - you can choose to turn this on or off

HS activities sync to SFDC tasks - you can choose to turn this on or off

Decide on mapping rules (two-way vs SF preference etc.)

STEP FOUR: Inclusion Filters

HS --> SFDC sync: set up an inclusion list

Recommended: Create a model of particular actions updating the lifecycle stage of a contact. When the contact meets a particular lifecycle stage (eg. MQL) they are entered into the SFDC inclusion list and then synced into SFDC. Once in SFDC they will begin the creation of records process.

SFDC --> HS sync: auto-creation settings, manual import, selective sync

What records need to come into HubSpot? Do you need to limit access with selective sync?

If you want to use SFDC as your source of truth for objects then perhaps it would be worthwhile deleting all of the companies in HubSpot (after you have made sure all relevant data is needed) and then import the SFDC records.

I would recommend that you export all company information prior to any deletion so that information is not lost. On the SFDC side, it is recommended that you also complete a clean up of the records prior to importing the records into HubSpot.

Selective Sync?

There is HubSpot documentation on the feature and it is supported by Technical Consultants (me!) but I am not a fan, to be honest. I think that it can cause more issues than help when integrating with HubSpot.

The main risk is duplicate creation. Having said that it might be a good option in cases of non-overlapping contact segments or if there are compliance requirements to keep things out of HS

STEP FIVE: The four letters that would make any grown person cry…GDPR

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Have you planned your subscriptions and methods of communication? I would recommend making sure that both systems are aligned and get clarification from your legal team on how consent to process and consent to communication should work for your business. This should be the same in both your SFDC instance and your HubSpot instance.

This article goes through documenting your processing activities. Please note that if you do a GDPR compliant delete in HubSpot and the record still exists in SFDC and meets the requirements to sync, a new record will be created. We see it as a brand new contact as will most integrations.

OPTIONAL STEP SIX: HubSpot Intelligence Visualforce element

If you want to add the Visualforce window, the SFDC user will require a HS log in. See the steps needed to set this up here

STEP SEVEN: Connect Integration User

See the required user permissions on the Salesforce side here

It is recommended that you have a specific ‘HubSpot Integration User’ so that you will always know what system made updates. This will be very helpful for troubleshooting.

I hope this is helpful and I would recommend putting these steps into the HubSpot project tool

Moderator Note: This post was reviewed for relevancy and optimized for clarity on April 1, 2026. Thank you for your contributions to the HubSpot Community!

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PRO TIP: This needs to be a labour of love between Marketing and Sales. Without alignment between these departments then the integration will never be truly powerful!

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This is great @kaburke - thank you!

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Katie, thank you. This is a great guide. :folded_hands:

I would add just one more thing. In case you already are using Salesforce you might want to import contacts from Salesforce to HubSpot. In this case, the integration between HubSpot and Salesforce won’t import existing contacts from Salesforce to HubSpot by default. For this, you must first integrate HS and SF. Then you can import contacts:

  • Using Excel or CSV file, if there are for example only 40% of SF contacts that you want to have in HubSpot.
  • If you want to import all SF contacts to HubSpot, then you can use the HubSpot import tool (Contacts > Contacts > Import > Start an Import > Salesforce records).
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Great guide! It smooths out some pain points we run into quite a bit with the Salesforce/HubSpot integration.

In the guide, you mention “If you want to use SFDC as your source of truth for objects then perhaps it would be worthwhile deleting all of the companies in HubSpot (after you have made sure all relevant data is needed) and then import the SFDC records.”

Why is that? Is it because the deduplication process for companies is not accurate and by simply turning on the integration, you’ll end up with a ton of duplicate companies with no contacts/deals attached?

Also, would you then recommend turning off the below setting in HubSpot?

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When deleting and importing the company records to HubSpot, are you recommending importing companies and contacts to establish the relationship between the two as well? Or just import companies and let the integration handle associating objects from there? The same question applies to deals.

Again, thanks for posting this!

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Great question @mnagel ! I should have included that - I 100% recommend turning off the automatically create companies. The integration deduplication of company works differently, we dont leverage the domain. The deduplication logic for the integration works, by looking at the associated syncing contacts which have to match exactly in both systems to deduplicate the company and account. Domain does not play a role in the company/account dedupe logic of the SFDC integration. If 2 of the three contacts associated with a HubSpot company are on one account in Salesforce and 1 of the 3 contacts is on another account, the HubSpot company that all 3 contacts belong to will not dedupe with any Salesforce accounts, both Salesforce accounts will get created in HubSpot as net new companies and reassociate the contacts according to how they were associated in Salesforce.

That being said, there are some nuances and race conditions that can come into play, i.e. depending on the speed at which the accounts and contacts sync over or when they were created, it is possible that contacts may be reassociated in such a way that the original company dedupes with one of the Salesforce accounts because it’s associated contacts match exactly with one of the Salesforce accounts’ contacts. For example, I had a HubSpot company with 3 associated contacts. I had each of those contacts associated with their own unique Salesforce accounts. When the accounts synced, they one by one moved the associated contacts off of the HubSpot company to net new companies created by the sync. By the time the 3rd account synced over, only its contact was associated with the HubSpot company so since there was a match in an association, that 3rd account synced up with the original HubSpot company.

Similar behaviour plays out if 2 of the 3 syncing contacts are associated with one HubSpot company and 1 is associated with another. If all 3 are associated with the same account in Salesforce, that account will just sync to HubSpot and associate the contacts to a net new company as a result. This is because the account cannot find a logical company to sync to so it just creates one. The end result is 3 HubSpot companies, two that are not syncing and one that was created by the connector that is syncing.

Note: Contacts syncing with leads do not matter because, by default, leads cannot be associated with accounts on the Salesforce side. I hope this clears up the logic! I advise a clean up because it avoids the potential mess! Less is more is my motto :slightly_smiling_face:

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This is an incredible resource. Thank you @kaburke for putting this together!

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Hi @kaburke ,

We currently have a hubspot to salesforce integration set up. The integraition syncs hubspot contacts to salesforce as salesforce leads.

Is there any way to sync only specific hubspot contacts (based on a form submission or contact property) as salesforce contacts rather than salesforce leads?

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Hey @elanashama ! My understanding is that you want most of your contacts to sync into SFDC as leads except certain contacts that have completed certain actions? If I have understood you correctly, it’s difficult to give you a definitive answer without understanding your set up in more detail. Essentially you would need to automate the lead getting updated to a contact using a SFDC workflow or leveraging the workflow you may already have. With the SFDC integration, you can’t say X contacts should be created as a lead in SFDC and Y contacts should be created as a contact in SFDC.

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Yes, that is exactly what I meant.
So you’re saying that the only way to do this is to use a SF flow to convert the leads relevant to contacts?

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@elanashama yes you could use a SFDC flow :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ok, thanks for the help!

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@elanashama, unfortunately, it’s either/or on an account-wide level. You can create automation in Salesforce to auto convert Leads to Contacts based on certain criteria with a Salesforce developer.

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Hey @kaburke ! Great resource here, thanks for posting this. Would you happen to know if there are any improvements coming to the Visualforce window? Sales reps are quite frustrated by the limited info they get on the view and have stopped using it since one can’t even see the page view data :disappointed_face: Of course pressing the button ‘view in HubSpot’ is great but Sales don’t want/need access to HubSpot meaning that they do not utilize the marketing data and leads created by Marketing.

Thanks in advance!

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Hi @PBlomqvist ! I have changed roles in HubSpot so I am not well versed on any upcoming changes any more however I would recommend posting an idea post along with examples and linking her for anyone that comes across this post who may agree with you! :slightly_smiling_face:

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I have a question about a situation you or someone here might have come across as related to this integration:

- we plan to sync a list of contacts from Hubspot put together based on scoring

- however on the Salesforce side, the sales execs would like to have the option that if the contacts become dormant, that they mark them appropriately and they’re sent back to marketing for nurturing and disappear from the Salesforce view until they get re-qualified.

Has anyone implemented something like this and what would be the best way or best practices you would recommend?

Thank you :folded_hands:

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Hi @elitchka_ftw ! It would be difficult for me to give you a solid answer without a better understanding of your set up but dependent on what the rules are of what shows in your SFDC views you could change it around? I don’t think it would be ‘removing’ them from SFDC but maybe playing with your views. Your SFDC admin would be best positioned to assist you with this and from the HubSpot side you would need to work with a TC to look at the logic for implementing a re-qualification logic.

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Hi @elitchka_ftw ,

It’s best not to remove contatcs from SFDC.

I would suggest that you create an “active contacts” list view in SFDC that would only include non-dormant contacts. i.e. if a contact has a certain field value (based on how you categorize active contacts), enter them into the active contacts list view, and share this view with your sales execs.

You can then create a list of dormant contacts in HubSpot/SFDC for further nurturing.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks @elanashama ! :folded_hands:

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Hi everyone,

Just came across a weird issue with the sync.

When you set up your integration to delete contacts from HubSpot when the synced lead/contact is deleted from SFDC (as seen in the below screenshot), the following happens: every time a HubSpot contact syncs to Salesforce for the first time (meaning, this contact was never synced before to SalesForce), the sync causes the contact to be deleted from HubSpot!

The sync should have created the contact as a lead in SFDC, instead it deleted the contact in HubSpot.

Any ideas on why this is happening, and what’s the relation between the setting and the issue?

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