Can Hubspot assign new contacts to existing accounts in Salesforce?

[#1]

When contacts meet certain criteria in Hubspot, we sync them over to Salesforce via an inclusion list.  Right now...we have to manually associate new  contacts being synced over from Hubspot  with existing accounts in Salesforce.  

Many of our new contacts are associated with exisitng Salesforce accounts. We don't sync companies / accounts between Salesforce and Hubspot yet.  If we sync them Hubspot companies and Salesforce accounts, will we be able to associate Salesforce account IDs to our contacts in Hubspot?  Would hubspot be able to associate contacts to the existing accounts in Salesforce using the account id?  Thanks for your help!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Phyllis_Stewart. As a general rule, if you set HubSpot Owner prior to the initial sync, and that Owner value is one of your Salesforce owners, the owner assignment from HubSpot is honored when the record syncs to Salesforce for the first time - whether it's creating a new record, or updating an old one matching on email address. 

It sounds like you want your Salesforce record assignment to happen in HubSpot, when contacts from a "matching" account in Salesforce are already owned, and you want to know whether account sync will need to be enabled to accomplish this. That answer is yes, but the automatic associations you want won't be available through Salesforce account IDs.

When you turn account sync on and import your Salesforce accounts, they'll be represented in HubSpot as company records. Automatic association of companies with contacts only happens through an in-app setting in HubSpot. When you enable this, the matching only occurs, based on the domains of the email addresses of contacts and companies, and not Salesforce data. 

What you're asking is feasible, and is probably more work than you'd like. Here's how I'd approach this, if I had to try - and it'd still come with a caveat at the end: 

1) Turn on account sync. 

2) Go into HubSpot company settings and enable the setting which does automatic association with contacts, based on email domain, from that help article.

3) Import your Salesforce accounts.

This will get the initial Salesforce data you want into HubSpot. Going forward:

4a) Create a HubSpot workflow designed to stamp the Salesforce acount owner as the HubSpot owner on the contact, once an association is made. Since you've never enabled companies before, you shouldn't run into issues with data integrity.
4b) Your workflow should fire when some company property that exists on every company (like Name) exists, but the contact property Last Salesforce Sync Time is unknown. This property is updated with the sync time on every single successful sync, so if it doesn't exist, a sync hasn't occurred.

4c) Your workflow should do two things: Copy the company owner value into the contact owner, and copy the company's name into the contact property Company Name.

Even if you do all of this, the connector can only create leads OR contacts, and you have to pick which. The default is that the connector will create leads for unsynced records. [I do not recommend choosing the contacts option; even if you create the necessary account associations in HubSpot, it will not write them to Salesforce. It will create an accountless contact called a "private contact", which is only visible to the integration user, and anyone who has View All privileges on Salesforce contact records. Even then, you'd need development resources to do the appropriate associations for you in Salesforce. It is not a viable option for most orgs.]

So, even if you build out a workflow like I described, a brand-new lead would be created in Salesforce, and would need to be manually converted there. It would contain the matching owner info from the Salesforce account you wanted to associate, however. 

I understand this sounds like an unwieldy process, and it is. While what you're asking is straightforward, the HubSpot and Salesforce schemas are very different things, and customizations are sometimes limited and inflexible, as a result. This particular use case is a painful one, and it's not one conveniently solved for without a lot of Salesforce-side development resources.

[#3]

Thank you so much for your detailed response.  Our set-up is unique...and thus we actually do create a contact in Salesforce (not a lead) when a new contact is synced over from Hubspot.  

I thought that by enabling the Company sync...that I might be able to both:

1.  Assign new contacts directly into the right account ( But I suppose this wouldn't work...as Account ID couldn't be "mapped" until the contact was associated...but not before?)

2.  Sync Account level information to the contact ....versus having to be manually associated.

So, I think what I am hearing is - if an account exists in SFDC, and all the contacts have an email address that contains @xyz.com company....I cannot pull / sync data from the account in SFDC to the Hubspot company fields or contact fields who have email addressses that contain @xyz.com in Hubspot?

Thanks again for your patience!

[#4]

I won't be able to respond until tomorrow, but if you're creating contacts by default right by now on the initial sync, you may want to test enabling account sync, setting a Salesforce account ID on an unsynced record, then adding it to the inclusion list, to see if it will add to an existing Salesforce account.

I hadn't included this originally, as I have little experience with that setting, and it's infrequently used among the customer base.

If that test is successful, you can proceed with the workflow option, and also copy the company's account ID to the contact.

[#5]

Said differently, if you are creating leads by default when no match exists, attempting to push a new record into Salesforce matched by the account ID will not work. 

If you're creating contacts by default, try adding the account ID on the HubSpot contact, as a contact property, then syncing. If that works, you'll have the desired behavior, and your HubSpot workflow should also copy the account ID from the company to the contact, in addition to the other field values. 

[#6]

@Phyllis_Stewart, this isn't exactly the same thing you originally asked about, but I saw @Phil_Vallender post about a beta feature which allows you to make associations between HubSpot objects via import. I don't think this solves for your original use case, but could be a help with similar sorts of tasks.