Primary Company Feature in Deals Changing SFDC Account

[Nexus2Nicholson]

Hi Folks:

I wanted to reach out to this community to see of others experienced our problematic issue with the HS primary company feature in Deals.

Until the adverse incident occurred, neither I nor anyone else on our team were aware of Deal's primary company feature. Here in a nutshell is what happened:

1. I made a minor change to Salesforce opp field that was mapped to a HS counterpart. That in turn invoked a full sync of opp/deal records.

2. Within minutes, I started getting Salesforce alerts that opportunities were getting moved from one Salesforce account to another, thereby setting off new closed won/lost email alerts.

3. It took me a while to figure out what was causing our Salesforce opportunities to be reassigned to other accounts. Needless to say that this was a very serious incursion where closed opps were being moved to other accounts without our consent or knowledge.

4. I went on to determine that in HS, there was this primary company designation being made to the HS deal, whereby one deal may have a few different companies assigned to it, where one is designated as the primary.

5. If the company assigned as primary to the deal was different than the Salesforce account in which that counterpart opp was assigned to, HS changed the Salesforce account assignment of the opp to become the account that corresponded to the assigned primary company associated with the deal in HS.

6. This was a nightmare since HS had in essence taken over our Salesforce opportunity assignments and was making changes to them based on its primary account settings in Deals. Suffice it to say that it required us to shut off deal sync and restore the Salesforce opp account assignments back to their rightful associations.

HS responded that there was no opt out from this primary company "feature" in Deals, and that the only way to ensure these reckless reassignments could not be made was to sever deal sync.

Have others experienced this situation? And if so, what recourse if any did you pursue to prevent any further incursions into your Salesforce opportunity account assignments? Thank you for any insights.

[Nexus2Nicholson]

--Disregard.

[Nexus2Nicholson]

Hello Bérangère: 

That's incorrect. There are no open cases corresponding to this matter:

Case 11253977: opened on the day of the primary incident. Rep completely missed the mark, did not understand the situation, so I closed the case. 

Case 11263278: opened this new case to further the dialog about this situation. Resulted in the aforementioned CSM call with Orazio where he recorded the repro of the issue. That case was then closed.

Since then, at my behest, Orazio went to your product team who ultimately communicated through him that 1) this was how they designed feature to work so there was no issue to resolve and 2) they had no intention of providing an opt out of the feature for customers so this incursion could be avoided (but would consider it in the future). So I asked Orazio to champion this for us and monitor if an opt out was going to be implemented. As an aside, I asked to speak directly to the product team responsible for the genesis of this feature and was denied that conversation. I found that telling as most product managers are eager to speak with customers about the the UX of their new feature. I could see -- in the face of a feature that was not adequately thought through -- why they may not want to discuss its shortcoming. 

In recent months, I asked him for an update and was told his CSM duties were passed to Paulina Wyszynski, with whom I spoke to recently. She is aware of the situation and can only wait-and-see if your product team actually makes this needed course correction. 

While we wait for that, I would like them to respond to the questions I asked above. That is a wholly reasonable ask.

[BérangèreL]

Hi @Nexus2Nicholson, I hope that you are well.

Thanks for the detailed and precise information.

While looking into the Support tickets, I do see that this is actually another topic, sorry about this.

I meant to ask you to refer back to the Support Team since Support and your Customer Success Manager are your best point of contact for such topic.

We also have shared your feedback with an internal member of the team.

Thanks for your understanding.

Best,
Bérangère

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Nexus2Nicholson,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community and for this detailed post!

I would like to invite our subject matter experts to see if they have insight.

Hi @LaurenRyan, @Aakar, @HFisher7 - Do you have any recommendations for @Nexus2Nicholson?

Thank you! 

Best,

Kristen

[Nexus2Nicholson]

Thanks Kristen. For some additional context, we reported this issue to HS last year through our CSM Orazio. After conferring with their product team, he confirmed that this was intended behavior and that we could not opt out from it. 

To this day, I am still incredulous that there is a HS "feature" that can/will overtake our Salesforce opp assignments. Moving an opp in Salesforce, especially a closed won opp tied to booked revenue, is a fairly rare manuever even in day-to-day Salesforce administration. Occasionally there may be a reason to do it, but mostly, moving opps from one account to another is somewhat uncommon. 

Neither I nor our marketing ops resource had even heard of this primary companies feature in deals. And we certainly had no idea it could intrude into our Salesforce accounts and move opportunities around. It took me hours on the incident day to figure out what was happening. Finally after testing, I watched HS move my Salesforce opps from one account to another by changing the primary company flag in the deal from one company to another. So by changing the primary company tied to the deal, HS took it upon itself to come over to our Saleforce org and move the opp. 

I've been working with Salesforce for 14 years, and I can say with certainty that I would never, ever cede control of Salesforce opportunity account assignments to any other application, HS or otherwise. It still shocks me that HS created this feature that overtakes opportunity account assignments in Salesforce. 

That night, I severed deal sync and we have had to keep it severed ever since. This because we under no circumstance are amenable to ceding our control of Salesforce opp account assignments to the whims of the primary company settings in HS deals. I cannot imagine any SFDC admin who would find that acceptable. 

And finally, I have to believe others have run into this issue and I hope they can share their experiences here. 

[LaurenRyan]

@Nexus2Nicholson, sorry that happened to you! Unfortunately, the integration can go wrong when it's not configured/managed by someone with deep expertise in both tools. Sneaky things like this go missed and even minor changes can send things into a tizzy. 

HubSpot didn't design the primary deal designation in order to do this in Salesforce. HubSpot developments are no more designed to appeal to Salesforce users as Salesforce developments are designed to appeal to HubSpot users. Understanding how changes/developments in one tool are going to impact the other again requires deep knowledge & testing in both tools.

That being said, do you have a use case for why you have multiple HubSpot Companies associated with the Deal? Typically the issue you're describing comes from having duplicate Companies in HubSpot. It's really important to manage your Company creation in HubSpot & sync to Salesforce to avoid issues like this. Here's info on how to identify if you have this duplicate Company challenge & steps to fix it.

All of that being said, HubSpot is only able to do what the integration user is able to do in Salesforce. If there is a specific permission you need to keep from HubSpot, be sure to take that capability away from the connected integration user.

Hope this helps!

[Nexus2Nicholson]

Thanks much Lauren as your response was indeed helpful. I don't know how the underlying condition of multiple companies getting associated to a deal was established in HS. The feature itself came out in Spring of 2022, so when it deployed to our HS instance, it interacted with the data that existed there, which then set us up for this incident. 

What I am still seeking from HubSpot is a clear explanation about:

1. Why was this feature designed to send the action to Salesforce to reassign the opportunity's account there? What is the thinking on why they think that's helpful when it is actually a serious, unwelcome incursion into the Salesforce opportunity assignments. What is HS's use case for changing Salesforce opportunity account assignments? 

2. The simple ask is reasonable. We don't want to cede control of our Salesforce opportunity assignments to HubSpot's primary company feature. In fact, we do not want to cede control of our Salesforce opportunity assignments to HS at all. We shouldn't have to be worrying about this rogue feature that will assert that control, but at the least, we should be given the ability to opt out of this feature. And HS should be forthright about the implications this feature carries for Salesforce opportunity assignments, i.e. the risk it poses to them unless Deal Sync is shut off. 

3. While I appreciate the idea that could we tweak the running user profile to safeguard us from this incursion, I would rather see HS address this on their end. By simply introducing some controls on what is an overbearing feature.   --Jeff

[LaurenRyan]

@Nexus2Nicholson understood! The main point I was conveying is that HubSpot likely doesn't test its new features for how they impact Salesforce. This new Deal association feature wasn't designed to harm Salesforce - it likely wasn't tested at all in Salesforce as HubSpot's development is focused on usability in HubSpot and not the thousands of other tools it integrates with. 

I understand the desire to be able to remove flexible associations for Deals and only allow one Company to be associated with the Deal. If you want to learn more about associations - you can do so here. However, the documentation doesn't support turning it off.

There are many things that Salesforce does that do not play well with HubSpot. Whenever you have the two systems integrated, (just like any two integrated tools) you'll run into issues like this one. Salesforce doesn't test in HubSpot when rolling out - and it doesn't go the other way. 😕 

Ideally, you get the ability to opt out of the new core feature in HubSpot! I just advise not to put weight into HubSpot not testing in Salesforce - because it doesn't happen in either direction. 🙂 Having these two. tools integrated require fairly frequent maintenance and monitoring to make sure that data is flowing correctly and that new releases on either side haven't caused something to break. 

[Nexus2Nicholson]

You raise fair points Lauren. I think what sets this situation apart from others is that it is a serious and consequential action to take when you move a Salesforce opportunity from one account to another. It is not a common action for Admins to take, and we do so carefully and conscientously when it's done. This is not some low level field update. HS is making these consequential changes with this feature without explanation, so it rises to higher level of urgency. Their product team is aware of this behavior (via 30 minute recorded meeting with our CSM where he watched as I changed Salesforce opp account assignments back and forth from within HS by toggling this feature) and have pushed back, telling us that this is how they designed the feature to work. 

To put a real world perspective to this, when HS moved over 20 of our opportunities in the main incident, it took closed won opportunities from active customer accounts and moved them to old prospective and former customer accounts. Now imagine our CFO runs a bookings report for our active customers an hour later. The sales data that had been impeccably clean up to that point is now compromised and inaccurate. It really does not get more serious than that, when the veracity of your sales data is getting compromised by this HS behavior. 

Thanks again Lauren for your insights and perspectives. I still hold out hope that someone from HS will answer these questions above. 

[TRowe]

Hi @Nexus2Nicholson 

We recently experienced this issue too. We have gotten no resolution from HubSpot. Have you had any success? Whether a HubSpot fix or some sort of workaround you've designed on your end? Appreciate any insights you might have on this. 

[BérangèreL]

Hi @Nexus2Nicholson, I hope that you are well.

Thank you for this additional information!

I would like to apologize for the frustration, data issues, and business impact this has caused.

I can see that you currently have a ticket with our technical support team.

I would invite you to continue working with them as this may require deep troubleshooting and direct access to your account.

Thank you!

Best,
Bérangère