Always Create a New Salesforce Lead

[MDavis57]

We implemented Hubspot in October 2021, then just migrated from Zoho CRM to Salesforce in May 2022.

Since there was no real integration between HS and Zoho, we were always able to create a new lead in Zoho every time a person completed a form on our site (created via Zapier). This made it super easy to track inbound leads and auto-assign them to the correct rep in Zoho.

After numerous calls, texts, and confused moments with HS, we don't believe we can mirror this same approach between HS and SF. Hubspot won't create a new lead if the lead or contact already exists in Salesforce. 

We have to re-think our approach...

Our initial thought-process was to create flows in SF to automatically assign the new lead to the correct owner (based upon state), then send an email notification to the marketing team and the lead owner. But if there's no new lead, we can't do that.  It also makes reporting more difficult, based upon the way we built it to manage the Zoho process.

How are other people handling these two issues:

1. Visibility - have both marketing and the correct sales rep notified, with a link to the lead/contact record in Salesforce in that notification

2. Reporting - be able to show the amount of new inbound leads based upon the most recent date the person took action

Thanks!

Matthew

[BBartlick]

We are trying to figure out what to do with this challenge right now. Our sales org will pre-populate Salesforce with a large list of cold contacts. This means if we have one contact inquire via marketing channels, it will update the contact instead of creating a new lead. It would be nice to have the option to still create leads even if the contact is in Salesforce. We are working with consultants to try to figure out workarounds but, a challenge. 

[MDavis57]

We’ve had to create a cumbersome set of flows in Salesforce, each sending out email notifications whether the new action is truly a new lead or an existing contact. It can be done, but took us months to get dialed in correctly.

[BBartlick]

Thanks. If we come up with anything - I'll post it here.

[JHaber6]

Hi Matthew, echoing what Dan said above, you probably don't want to create a duplicate record in Salesforce as that can cause another set of problems (one of which is syncing data between HubSpot and Salesforce).

I would recommend syncing the new form fill to Salesforce as activities, and then using flow to assign a lead or contact with a newly fiilled out form to the correct person based on state. This also allows you to get more granular about use cases where the lead or contact already exists and therefore, the outreach to them should be different.

Creating this flow, you may end up creating a 'roll-up' field on the lead/contact object for the most recent form fill activty. You can do this via a free app like Declarative Roll-Up Summaries/Roll-Up Helper or using an additional flow.

Hope this helps!

Jenna Haber

Vetrus Solutions

646-481-8115

[danmoyle]

Hi @MDavis57. Question for you: If the person is the same person who already exists in your CRM, why do you want to create a duplicate? If that person fills out another form, would you rather have that information updated in their contact record for historical and clean data? I would instead think about using the Deal object, lifecycle stage contact property, and perhaps the lead status contact property for managing the buyer's journey. You can create notofications when data is updated, and even create automation to help manage communication to the humans (Contacts) you're working with. That's my $0.02. 

Curious to have this discussion and see if it helps! 

[MDavis57]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Here's our thought-process, which we're taking an honest look at to see if it's still the right approach or not.

- All of our opportunity/deal management is handled out of Salesforce, not Hubspot, so we're not attempting to re-work that. No sales reps work out of HS, only the marketing team.

- We want the sales reps to be notified of the new activity, and for that notification to include a link to the record in SF so the rep can find it fast. Can't do that from HS, as far as I can tell.

- We could create a new notification from SF to notify when that contact record updates, but would likely need to create a new fields in SF to accomodate that.

- You are correct that this does create some extra work because we manually review each lead, then merge with existing contacts in SF. Would be happy to get rid of that if we can. 

Does any of that change your take on it?

[danmoyle]

Gotcha. Thanks Matthew. 

I think I'd still lean into keeping Opportunity (SF) and Deal (HS) as the thing that moves the human (Contact in HS and Contact/Lead in SF) through their journey with you. Sales doesn't need to be in HS if you've connected the systems and you're pushing data from HS into SF. Then you can have notifications based on Opportunity/Deal stages, with a secondary notification strategy based on Contact data being updated. 

I hope that makes sense and maybe answers a little of what you're looking for as best practices. It's how I've seen clients set up their two systems together. Cheers!