Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

jackie-schmid
Member

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

Hey Hubspot friends!

 

I have the opportunity to create a pre-sales process, which includes all of the data to capture lead stage and conversion to opportunities and accounts. We are a Hubspot/Salesforce company.

 

My question - what are the criteria for your sales team to convert a lead into an account? At what point does the lead become an oportunity? Do you do it based on whether the lead is sales qualified, or do you wait until the lead shows interest, or is ready to start doing business with you? 

 

I'm looking for a wide variety of options and the logic behind it. 

 

(Note: We currently also suck at using Opportunity stages, so that is stage two.)

 

Thanks guys!

Jackie

0 Upvotes
2 Accepted solutions
Phil_Vallender
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

Hi @jackie-schmid

 

These are million-dollar questions that I've seen Salesforce consultants paid good money to try to answer. 

 

The three biggest challenges (opportunities?) you will face, I think are:

 

  1. The underlying sales methodologies in HubSpot and Salesforce are very different, and are not an instant match
  2. Your question, like any on this subject, contains lots of subjective and interchangable terms
  3. The HubSpot Salesforce Connector works in a very specific way

 

The first thing I would recommend you do as an organisation (and I'm sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here) is get totally down with the terminology and behaviour of both systems:

  • Leads shouldn't become accounts, they should become contacts associated with accounts.
  • Leads shouldn't become opportunities, contacts should be the source of opportunities. 

 

Best practice, with the connector, is to sync HubSpot contacts to Salesforce leads, perform qualifiation in Salesforce and then convert them into contacts and accounts. So your processes would ideally be built around this workflow. 

 

In one instance, we will be doing something like this:

  • Sync HubSpot MQLs to Saleforce Leads
  • Sales qualifies the MQL and converts them into SQL/contact/account
  • Sales works the contact in an effort to create an opportunity

 

I really struggle with the Salesforce idea that a lead is different from a contact/account, but that's the way it is. 

 

I hope some of this was useful.

 

Credit to @bradmin for helping me with my understanding of the connector. He may also have insight to add.

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency

View solution in original post

bradmin
Solution
Key Advisor

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

First, this is a tough question (even if it sounds innocuous), where the only "right" answer is the one that makes sense for your business, and your users. It's good to solicit opinions, but this isn't something that's templated. What's right for the business next door may not be right for you, and vice versa. 

 

Secondly, there's no automatic lead conversion that takes place in Salesforce - unless you have developer resources handy who can write code to accomplish this for you - so in practice, even if your conversion criteria is still dependent on some sort of HubSpot data, we're still talking about users manually converting leads in Salesforce. If you do have developer resources, lead conversion can be much more fluid; otherwise, it becomes an exercise in "What data needs to exist in order for a user to convert a lead, and which user(s) should be responsible for conversion?"

 

As Phil mentioned, the conversion screen in Salesforce converts your lead into a contact, with an account associated with it. You'll have the option of creating an opportunity automatically on conversion. This can be a fruitful thing with HubSpot, because when you do this, the lead you're converting into a contact is automatically associated with the opportunity, in a way that both Salesforce and HubSpot can understand. The contact is added to the opportunity as something called an "opportunity contact role", which is the exact criteria HubSpot is looking for to say, "This contact is associated with this deal in HubSpot, because that contact exists as an opportunity contact role in Salesforce."

 

The questions you'll want to ask yourself: 

1) Which user(s) are responsible for conversion (assuming not done automatically with Apex code in Salesforce)? You may want to consider creating reports or lead views, so the user(s) responsible can see a list of everyone requiring conversion.

2) Is it necessary to see the contact-deal associations in HubSpot, as well as Salesforce? (If so, creating the opportunity on conversion is recommended, as the opportunity contact role is automatically created in Salesforce, and synced to HubSpot.)

3) [Optional] What's the absolute minimum required in order to convert? If there is data which absolutely must exist in order to convert, you can create validation rules on the lead in Salesforce to say, "If someone tries to convert a lead with this criteria, we will not allow it." This can be a function of data in Salesforce fields, or HubSpot data mapped to Salesforce fields. 

It's easy to go overboard with validation, so if you do create validation, make sure it's intuitive and well-communicated to the teams responsible for conversion. 

 

This may sound like a lot of fuss. And it is! But the reason you're putting this much care and thought up front is to avoid arbitrary conversions, and users creating their own standards for managing data, rather than adhering to organizational standards. 

 

And the bototm line is that, as long as it makes sense to you and your users, is easy to implement and troubleshoot, standardizes the process, and aligns your conversion with business goals, then that's the solution which will work for you.


Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity
I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.

View solution in original post

4 Replies 4
Phil_Vallender
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

Hi @jackie-schmid

 

These are million-dollar questions that I've seen Salesforce consultants paid good money to try to answer. 

 

The three biggest challenges (opportunities?) you will face, I think are:

 

  1. The underlying sales methodologies in HubSpot and Salesforce are very different, and are not an instant match
  2. Your question, like any on this subject, contains lots of subjective and interchangable terms
  3. The HubSpot Salesforce Connector works in a very specific way

 

The first thing I would recommend you do as an organisation (and I'm sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here) is get totally down with the terminology and behaviour of both systems:

  • Leads shouldn't become accounts, they should become contacts associated with accounts.
  • Leads shouldn't become opportunities, contacts should be the source of opportunities. 

 

Best practice, with the connector, is to sync HubSpot contacts to Salesforce leads, perform qualifiation in Salesforce and then convert them into contacts and accounts. So your processes would ideally be built around this workflow. 

 

In one instance, we will be doing something like this:

  • Sync HubSpot MQLs to Saleforce Leads
  • Sales qualifies the MQL and converts them into SQL/contact/account
  • Sales works the contact in an effort to create an opportunity

 

I really struggle with the Salesforce idea that a lead is different from a contact/account, but that's the way it is. 

 

I hope some of this was useful.

 

Credit to @bradmin for helping me with my understanding of the connector. He may also have insight to add.

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency
bradmin
Solution
Key Advisor

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

First, this is a tough question (even if it sounds innocuous), where the only "right" answer is the one that makes sense for your business, and your users. It's good to solicit opinions, but this isn't something that's templated. What's right for the business next door may not be right for you, and vice versa. 

 

Secondly, there's no automatic lead conversion that takes place in Salesforce - unless you have developer resources handy who can write code to accomplish this for you - so in practice, even if your conversion criteria is still dependent on some sort of HubSpot data, we're still talking about users manually converting leads in Salesforce. If you do have developer resources, lead conversion can be much more fluid; otherwise, it becomes an exercise in "What data needs to exist in order for a user to convert a lead, and which user(s) should be responsible for conversion?"

 

As Phil mentioned, the conversion screen in Salesforce converts your lead into a contact, with an account associated with it. You'll have the option of creating an opportunity automatically on conversion. This can be a fruitful thing with HubSpot, because when you do this, the lead you're converting into a contact is automatically associated with the opportunity, in a way that both Salesforce and HubSpot can understand. The contact is added to the opportunity as something called an "opportunity contact role", which is the exact criteria HubSpot is looking for to say, "This contact is associated with this deal in HubSpot, because that contact exists as an opportunity contact role in Salesforce."

 

The questions you'll want to ask yourself: 

1) Which user(s) are responsible for conversion (assuming not done automatically with Apex code in Salesforce)? You may want to consider creating reports or lead views, so the user(s) responsible can see a list of everyone requiring conversion.

2) Is it necessary to see the contact-deal associations in HubSpot, as well as Salesforce? (If so, creating the opportunity on conversion is recommended, as the opportunity contact role is automatically created in Salesforce, and synced to HubSpot.)

3) [Optional] What's the absolute minimum required in order to convert? If there is data which absolutely must exist in order to convert, you can create validation rules on the lead in Salesforce to say, "If someone tries to convert a lead with this criteria, we will not allow it." This can be a function of data in Salesforce fields, or HubSpot data mapped to Salesforce fields. 

It's easy to go overboard with validation, so if you do create validation, make sure it's intuitive and well-communicated to the teams responsible for conversion. 

 

This may sound like a lot of fuss. And it is! But the reason you're putting this much care and thought up front is to avoid arbitrary conversions, and users creating their own standards for managing data, rather than adhering to organizational standards. 

 

And the bototm line is that, as long as it makes sense to you and your users, is easy to implement and troubleshoot, standardizes the process, and aligns your conversion with business goals, then that's the solution which will work for you.


Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity
I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
oscargonzalez
Participant

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

Curious if anyone in this thread has built a solution to match Salesforce Status (Leads or Contacts) to HubSpot Lifecycle stages? 

edjusten
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

HubSpot & Salesforce Best Practices: Lead Conversion

SOLVE

Hi @jackie-schmid  Great question! Tagging some of our partners here for further comment and guidance. 

 

@Phil_Vallender @Josh @shearn  Would you be able to provide some guidance here? 

 

Thank you,

Ed Justen.


Did my post help answer your query? Help the Community by marking it as a solution
0 Upvotes