How to prevent certain leads from syncing with Salesforce CRM

[#1]

Hoping you could give some guidance to establish a solid criteria for excluding certain leads to sync over into Salesforce.

Use Case: We have a list of leads from an event. We have partial information on them (some missing important info like phone, job titles). They are not dully qualified to speak with sales, so we want to nurture them and then for those who engage with our content and we acquire more information from them, we would then sync them to salesforce.

I've read the documentation on Salesforce inclusion lists. And from what I understand, I need to build an inclusion list which includes any contacts I want to sync over to SF. Any contacts who aren't on this list would not sync to SF.


Question: Is there away to do just the opposite. I'd imagine that would be much simpler, to segment certain contacts i don't want to sync?


Question 2: If I create an inclusion list and add them to the Salesforce integration, what would happen to all existing contacts? What ripple affects would impact these contact records?

Is there a list criteria you'd recommend using based on the use case. Like would using a contact records Lifecycle Stage be most effective.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @ROKK 

1) You can absolutely create an inclusion list that actually excludes certain contacts - for example until they meet certain criteria or have certain properties populated. Two things to be aware of:

• Use rules that will not give you false positives - a property being unknown is the same as it being null, which can be a state for lots of properties momentarily after a contact is created
• Suggest you build in a rule that ensure that once a contact has synced it syncs forever

2) Changing the inclusion criteria will change which contacts stop and start syncing, but will not directly result in the loss of any data in either system.

2a) Lifecycle stage can be an effective inclusion list criteria but you could also use more explicit and specific criteria if you wish.

Hope this helps.

[#3]

Thanks Phil. In chatting with Hubspot Support I was told different. That I couldn't exclude. Could you point me to or give me an example of what the criteria rules would look like. Also, followup to your first response: can you give an example of a rule where once a contact is synced it syncs forever? And is there any other documentation or training I can review. I've only been able to find one help doc on this matter. Didn't know if there's a online session I can check out.

Thanks again.

[#4]

What support told you is technically correct, but you're both saying the same things. The inclusion list only syncs records meeting its criteria; anyone not on it just doesn't sync. The trick is creating conditions which your HubSpot contacts will always satisfy.

What that looks like is a function of your organization's needs, but the functionality is straightforward, as it's just a smart list.


As for ensuring previously-synced records always remain on the inclusion list, add an OR condition onto your inclusion list which looks for the Last Salesforce Sync Time property being known. This will ensure if they've ever synced before, they'll continue to do so. (If there are circumstances where this is undesired, this approach won't work.)