I have searched for help on this but have not come up with any good solutions. I’ve just started at a new company and was told that a Salesforce integration would have to be done. However, I found out after starting my new role that we do not have a normal Salesforce instance. We have something called Agent Dealer.
The biggest difference is that we cannot use the Opportunities or Lead objects in Salesforce. The only way we can really update contacts within HubSpot is to manually import updated contacts from a Salesforce export. We also have a handful of inside sales reps in Sales Hub who are working new leads there. Once they are qualified, they are passed over to Account Executives and deals are created in Salesforce, as well as HubSpot.
There used to be a sync between the two systems but I shut this off because it was creating a mess of duplicates, etc. Planning to use Insycle to clean this up, but once that is done I need to figure out how to get the two systems talking. Does anyone have any ideas? I feel like this is a huge mess.
The good news is that Agent Dealer (and similar vertical-specific Salesforce flavors) doesn’t have to be a dealbreaker. It just means you need to rethink the integration architecture a bit.
Since you can’t rely on the native Opportunities or Leads objects, I’d suggest moving away from thinking about this as a traditional bi-directional sync and instead treating it more like a one-way data pipeline with manual checkpoints.
For the Salesforce to HubSpot flow, your current manual export/import process isn’t ideal long-term, but it’s actually not a bad stopgap. You can automate a lot of this pain by using a middleware tool like Make (formerly Integromat) or Zapier to watch for Salesforce contact updates and push them into HubSpot on a schedule. Even if Agent Dealer doesn’t support native API triggers, scheduled exports to a shared location like SFTP or Google Sheets can be picked up and processed automatically.
For the HubSpot to Salesforce flow, once your inside sales reps qualify a lead in Sales Hub, you could use a HubSpot workflow to fire a webhook or notify the AE team automatically, then have a lightweight process for the AE to create the deal in Agent Dealer. It’s not fully automated, but it keeps the handoff clean without risking the sync chaos you had before.
Let me know if this helps, or if you have any other questions!
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Thank you for the response! This may work for us. I have a question about closed deals. How do these get back into HubSpot? Through the automated exports as well?
Been through this exact kind of setup before so I feel your pain. Brandon’s advice is solid, and to answer your follow up about closed deals, yes you’d need some way to push deal status updates back from Salesforce into HubSpot. With the middleware approach (Make, Zapier) you could set up a scheduled sync that watches for deal stage changes in Agent Dealer and updates the corresponding HubSpot deal. The catch is that with vertical Salesforce flavors like Agent Dealer, the object structure is different enough that Zapier’s native Salesforce connector sometimes doesnt see those custom objects, so you might end up needing to use the Salesforce API directly through an HTTP module.
One thing I’d flag though. The reason your previous sync created duplicates is probably because there was no proper record matching or conflict resolution in place, and thats exactly the kind of problem that comes back with middleware chains too unless you’re very careful about deduplication logic. Before you turn anything back on, make sure Insycle has your data clean and that whatever sync solution you go with has a way to match records by email or some unique identifier rather than just creating new contacts every time.
On a broader note, this is the kind of problem we solve at Stacksync. We do real time bi directional sync between Salesforce and HubSpot with support for custom objects, which is important in your case since Agent Dealer doesnt use the standard Salesforce data model. You get built in conflict resolution and deduplication so the mess you had before doesnt happen again. Might be worth a look given the complexity of your setup, especially with the closed deal flow going both directions. Note This response was written based on my own experience and lightly reformatted with AI for clarity.
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