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Can Hubspot assign new contacts to existing accounts in Salesforce?
SOLVESep 13, 2018 2:51 PM
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!
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Accepted Solutions
Sep 13, 2018 4:17 PM
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.
Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity
I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
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