Power User Clinic: Tuesday, Feb 25 | Salesforce Integration

[lalexander]

It’s time to get answers to your most gnarly, burning HubSpot questions . Each week, we’ll be tackling the opening a discussion thread, hosted by a HubSpot expert from our Professional Services Team. 

Come with your issues and woes, and your host and your fellow Power Users will help you solve them.

Up this week: HubSpot Senior Success Consultant Amanda Danielson will be answering all of your complex Salesforce integration questions. Drop the most challenging issue you’re facing with your HubSpot-Salesforce setup below and we’ll solve it together.

Reading this after the fact? The HubSpot Professional Services Team offers several different consulting options.

[ernopyykko]

Howdy @lalexander ,

We're having quite some trouble with matching contact ownerships between Hubspot and Salesforce accurately. 

Due to the directories we've used in the past, we have a scenario where some our our US based reps own EMEA based contacts and wise versa. 

This causes a challenge with demo requests which are submitted through our website. 

These requests run through a workflow in Hubspot to get the owner assigned based on the requestors location. 

All of these contacts are part of the inclusion list between the Hubspot and Salesforce integration. 
These same contacts already have an owner in Salesforce, which then synced into Hubspot when this assignment workflow runs. 

Any suggestions on how we could have the Hubspot owner assignment prioritised over what's already stored in Salesforce? 

We have the sync between contact owners in Salesforce and Hubspot to a two-way sync. This seems to make the sync to always favour the Salesforce owner, although in our case we should end up with an owner assigned by the Hubspot workflow. 

[skalka]

My idea would be to create another property that you don't sync with Salesforce. You can use this property to assign the right owner or you can copy the value from the new property to the old one when they don't match. But using a different property it's the way to go in my opinion.

[skalka]

Hi Lucy and Amanda, I use the space here to present what is our current use case we are tyring to solve.

We have the Salesforce integration in place since the beginning (more than 3 years now), we started by syncing only the contacts (created as Leads in Salesforce) that reach the MQL status, later on we added Deals/Opportunities.

Now we want to add the missing piece, the accounts but here I have some doubts that I am planning to solve by testing with the dev enironment and a Salesforce sandbox, but maybe you can steer me to the right direction.

Current Status:

• We only sync the Contacts that are MQLs
• Salesforce is not and will not create contacts on HubSpot
• We have Companies in HubSpot at the moment, they have been created with the automatic feature based on the email domain match
• We sync Deals
• We don't have a system acting as master, most of the times Salesforce acts as master, but we have bi-directional sync on many properties

We are planning to delete the existing accounts (not needed) and sync the ones that are in Salesforce, we want to disable the automatic account creation based on the email domain.

Desired outcome:

• Salesforce accounts are synced with HubSpot Companies
• Salesforce contacts associated to Accounts needs to be associated in HubSpot as well (if available, rememeber we don't sync everythin and we don't want to create contacts in HubSpot from Salesforce)
• We want to keep using the HubSpot Insights database for lead enrichment
• We need to create Leads in Salesforce from HubSpot, we cannot switch to Contacts

What's the best way of achieving this?

My concerns are related to 2 topics: links between Contacts and Companies and usage of HubSpot Insights database.

About the link between Contacts and Companies, is this working out of the box? Is it a problem that we sync with Leads and not with Contacts? The integration correctly keeps track of the Leads when they are converted to Contacts, will this work for the connection between the 2 objects?

About the usage of the database. What are the properties that HubSpot uses to match an account within the database? Is the Company Domain Name or you use more than that to figure out if there's a suitable entry in the database?

Is there anything I forgot to mention that is super importnat to help me solve this?

Thanks in advance, I love this community 🙂

Cesare

[a_schumacher]

Hi Cesare- thanks for your post! It's great that you are planning in advance and testing in preparation for this transition. 

Removing all of the HubSpot companies and importing your accounts from Salesforce via a Salesforce accounts import is the easiest path for transitioning to syncing companies when you already have companies in both Salesforce and HubSpot. The reason for this is because of how our connector deduplicates companies and accounts between HS and SFDC. 

As you may already be aware, the HubSpot-SF integration deduplicates companies and accounts based on syncing contact associations. For a net new SF account to sync with an existing HS company that hasn’t synced before, the connector logic checks that the contacts associated to that company in HubSpot are:

1) Syncing with CONTACTS and not leads in Salesforce. If a HubSpot company’s associated contacts were all leads at the time the sync happened, a dupe company will be created. 

2) The HubSpot contacts’ equivalents in SF that they are syncing with are associated with the SF account in question.

So when you do the above (deleting all HS companies, importing SF accounts), you can expect that the contacts in HubSpot that are currently syncing with Salesforce leads will not have associated companies in HubSpot after you do the Salesforce import. (My understanding is that this is how the lead object in SFDC interacts with accounts as well-- lead objects in SF do not typically have associated accounts) However, the contacts in HubSpot that are syncing with Salesforce CONTACTS will have the SFDC account pulled in and associated. 

You should still be able to get HubSpot insights updating your company records that are pulled in from Salesforce as long as the following are in place:
1. Make syure the accounts you imported have a company domain name
2. Make sure the setting under "Contacts and Companies" to enable HubSpot insights is On.

Please let me know if you have any follow up questions-- I know it's a complicated subject!

Best,

Amanda

[Driek]

Hi Lucy and Amanda,

We have a Hubspot-Salesforce interface to push RFQs to Salesforce as leads. It works well 99% of the time so pretty happy with that.

Here are some of our next steps that we want to implement this year, but frankly do not have a clearly defined approach for. What advice can you give me if we want to accomplish the following:

1) Nurture Salesforce open leads in Hubspot - particularly making the nurturing dependent on the status of the lead in Salesforce and e.g. account type/size - regardless of the origin of the lead; 

2) We'd like to be able to segment contacts and companies in Hubspot based on the assets those companies have in Salesforce. I.e. the products and services that they have bought from us (their installed base if you will). Obviously, we do not want to manually have to replicate and manage our product master data in Hubspot. If we can get that asset info into Hubspot, we can make any interaction from Hubspot a lot more relevant.

Hope this makes sense, if not I'm happy to clarify our intentions.

Thanks,

Driek 

[a_schumacher]

Hi @Driek ,

These are both great questions/discussion points! Here are some of my thoughts on each piece: 

1) a. Using lead status for nurturing & automation- "Lead status" (API name is 'status' in SF) is a property that gets mapped by default when the HubSpot-Salesforce integration is enabled. So if you want to nurture leads in HubSpot with a specific SFDC lead status, you could pull active lists in HubSpot based on leads who have a certain SFDC value for "lead status" and use it for emailing. Or you could use lead status as enrollment criteria for workflows and include if/then branches to send additional emails/perform other actions based on their lead status or engagement.

b. Nurture contacts based on account type/size- I am assuming that "account type" and "size" live in fields on the lead record (since typically SFDC leads don't get associated with accounts). If that is that case, you can also map those SF fields to HS fields to pull in that data to use for your segmentation. Example: you could build a workflow that enrolls all SFDC leads (enrollment critiera could be 'SFDC lead ID is known & SFDC lead status = "Nurture"') and have an if/then branch that sends enrolled contacts a different series of emails depending on "If number of employees > 1,000"

2) Currently the HubSpot "products" and "line items" objects are not supported by our native connector. So if you are using the "product" object in Salesforce and associating those products/service objects with your opportunity objects, what I usually recommend is using a Process flow in Salesforce to copy information from the product (or other custom object) into a multi checkbox field on the standard opportunity object. From there, you can map that opportunity field to the a custom multiple checkboxes field on the deal in HubSpot (assuming you have opportunity sync enabled with your SF-HS integration).

In HubSpot, you can build contacts list based on "Deal property X is equal to Y". Alternatively, if you have contacts directly associated with the deal, you can send emails to all associated contacts on a deal through a deal workflow and include deal tokens in that email to pull in the values from the deal for that custom products field. Here is a video my colleague made on how to copy fields from custom/non-standard objects into standard objects using the process builder: https://www.loom.com/share/ec70651aa14c47fd87b732af0ed5d5bb

Best Regards,
Amanda