Company Property sync to Salesforce Account Lookup

[cjcrittenden]

I have a company property set up in Hubspot that syncs to an Account field in Salesforce. The account field in Salesforce is an Account Lookup field. In other systems, I have set this value by passing the Account Id through the form fill out (or workflow). Is that process the same in Hubspot?

[bradmin · Accepted solution]

Hi, @cjcrittenden. There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this, and it'll involve a bit of tinkering - although probably customization you're already familiar with, from the sounds of it.

The Salesforce lookup is always looking for the ID of the looked-up record, regardless what appears in-app in Salesforce. Once you have this lookup mapped to HubSpot, you can pass a matching ID any way you like - hidden form field, .csv import, HubSpot workflows, manual edits, etc. Make sure the Salesforce field is mapped to a HubSpot property, find some way of populating the HubSpot property, and those details will be synced to Salesforce afterwards.

If this is a lookup with a limited number of choices, like Salesforce record type on an object, an alternative to creating a plain-text HubSpot property exists. You could create a HubSpot picklist to store this instead. With HubSpot picklists, you have a picklist label that appears to end-users, and a picklist value that stores the actual value being used.

With this configuration for this example, you could create a HubSpot picklist with the record type name as the picklist label, and its Salesforce ID as the value. This doesn't offer any advantages as far as the integration is concerned, but it will be easier to read and/or automate on the HubSpot side. Please note an approach like this only works where the thing being looked up has a very limited, fixed set of values - this setup is not recommended for most lookup or master-detail fields in Salesforce. 

[PVasani]

Hello @bradmin ,
Thank you for your insightful response. As you said, this approach is good for records being looked up has a very limited, fixed set of values. So what should be the approach if we have multiple set of values? For eg: 500+ values.

Thanks & Regards,
Ishan
Also can you suggest any alternatives for managing lookup fields in Hubspot.

[cjcrittenden]

Thanks! That actually perfectly solves my problem as the lookup field is dependent on a accounts of a certain record type (no more than 20 of those).

Thank you!

[bradmin]

Your human HubSpot users will thank you for that kind of specific setup. If you're a soulless automaton like myself, you'll probably get by fine on just the IDs. 

[Serious edit: You will need to manually make edits to the custom HubSpot property as the Salesforce schema changes. So if you add new record types or sunset old ones, nothing will happen automatically with your custom HubSpot picklist - that's on you to keep tabs on.]

[cjcrittenden]

I'm blessed with being the SF Admin & one of the Hubspot Admins. Fortunately, it makes staying aware of those data changes pretty easy since I'm the one making them!