Changing primary email addresses for Employee Contacts in HubSpot

[Phyllis_Stewart]

Hello!

Our company uses HubSpot for emailing both leads and employees. We use a customized Salesforce Contact object to manage the recruitment of new employees. Prospective new employees typically apply for a job on our website...and a new record is created in both Salesforce and HubSpot using their personal email addresses. We need them in HubSpot...and frequently send invitations to potential employees thru HubSpot. If we hire a new employee, we give them a company email address...and move their personal email to a secondary email addresss. so we can send them employee newsletters thru HubSpot. If they leave the company, we update the status from Active Employee to Inactive / Rehireable, AND update their primary email address to personal email in Salesforce.

Our problem is that we have 2 records for each employee in HubSpot - one with a personal email and one with a work email.  This is also causing data-integrity issues as changes are only going to one record in HubSpot (not both).  I understand that I can use workflows to copy the secondary email address to the primary email address. I tested a workflow to change the primary email address of an ex-employee from work email to personal and it failed because the personal email already existed in HubSpot.

Can you help me with ideas on a process that prevent multiple records from being created...and that can help us manage current email addresses for employees AND ex-employees? Thank you!

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @Phyllis_Stewart,

Definitely an interesting usage case.  

I'm not overly familiar with SalesForce, so possibly not the best-placed person to assist here.  

You can always deduplicate or merge contacts (though not en masse).  But, from your post, it sounds like you're looking for a more automated process for this?  I'll leave it to other Salesforce users to assist further!

[StefaniUAT · Accepted solution]

Hi @Phyllis_Stewart,

I think I broke my brain trying to figure this out, lol! I tried to figure out a way to copy the 2 email properties into other custom property fields and then copy them back over into the correct property, without ever leaving email (required) blank. Are you able to create the following workflow successfully?

1. Create a new contact property: Secondary Email - Copy

2. Create a new contact property: Primary Email - Copy

3. Copy the Secondary Email into the Secondary Email - Copy property

4. Copy the [Primary] Email into the Primary Email - Copy

5. Clear Secondary Email property

6. Copy the Primary Email - Copy into Secondary Email

7. Set a 30-second delay

8. Copy Secondary Email - Copy property to Email property

Optional: 9. Clear Primary Email - Copy 10. Clear Secondary Email - Copy

If you are updating fields in HubSpot that is syncing to HubSpot to make HubSpot the master in the integration settings for those properties!! Otherwise, you can make updates in HubSpot all day, and then as soon as it re-syncs to SalesForce it will override the information!! Sometimes it even syncs for small things and overrides the information when you didn't manually update information... However, SalesForce matches based on the primary email address. You may want to try it this way and test/audit a couple of records to see if this solves the issue completely.

Also, if you are willing to do this manually, you can create a workflow to send your HR human or whoever, an automated task based on stage changing to New Hire OR  Inactive / Rehireable. We actually have automated tasks to our HR when someone is hired/fired/quits. It is important to create or revoke their access to the CRM/Database and more. Plus, changing the primary address when someone becomes inactive takes 3 seconds when there is a task or clickable link to the contact. HubSpot Instructional. 

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @Phyllis_Stewart,

Definitely an interesting usage case.  

I'm not overly familiar with SalesForce, so possibly not the best-placed person to assist here.  

You can always deduplicate or merge contacts (though not en masse).  But, from your post, it sounds like you're looking for a more automated process for this?  I'll leave it to other Salesforce users to assist further!

[natsumimori]

Hi @Phyllis_Stewart ,

Thank you for sharing your question in the Community.

@AdamLPW and @Krystina, could you share your ideas on this?