The HubSpot Salesforce Integration: What You Need to Know

• Boosting sales
• Driving productivity
• And promoting “smarketing” (sales + marketing)

 

However, some users might still prefer to use Salesforce’s CRM. For those, this integration is great news. It brings the two platforms together, allowing users to reap the benefits of HubSpot’s highly-regarded inbound platform while promoting the seamless passage of data between HubSpot and Salesforce, thus maintaining consistency between your marketing and sales teams.

 

In this article, we’ll take a look at what the integration can offer, how to get started, and how to tackle some common challenges.

What Are the Benefits of Each Platform?

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most comprehensive inbound marketing platforms available. It contains essentially everything you need to run inbound marketing campaigns as easily and effectively as possible.

Here are some of its benefits:

• It’s a marketing one-stop-shop with all the necessary tools in one place

 

• It collects metrics,tracking them meticulously, and provides tools for both the tracking and improving performance

 

• It’s extremely user-friendly

 

• It comes packed with an incredibly extensive and detailed library of useful resources and education, from long-form blog posts to videos

 

• It’s well equipped for social media marketing, with scheduling and automating features built in

 

• It features over 200 powerful integrations that unite a company’s tech stack

CRMs and Salesforce

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage customer data. It uses data analysis about customers' history with the company to improve business relationships with the customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

HubSpot comes with its own CRM, which is one of the best in the market and is packed with features to make life easier for sales teams.

 

Here are just some of the potential benefits of using a CRM:

• A 29% increase in sales

 

• A 34% increase in sales team productivity

 

• An average return of $8.71 on every dollar spent

 

• Easy-to-track marketing

 

• Allows you to efficiently interact with customers and close deals

 

• Offers access to a rich mine of customer data, which can be stored easily in the CRM. This makes it easy to address customers’ needs and quickly view past information.

 

• Easy automation for tasks like filling forms and handling legal issues

 

HubSpot’s CRM can help achieve all of this and more. It provides complete, real-time visibility into your sales pipeline, with detailed reports on everything from sales activity to individual performance.

 

On top of that, it gives you access to huge amounts of data and an arsenal of tools to allow your sales team to close deals easier and minimize friction.

 

Whatever your sales needs, the HubSpot CRM has them covered. However, some companies may still decide to use the Salesforce CRM due to the following reasons:

 

• Complicated sales processes with manufacturing stages, which require you to integrate with other platforms like Enterprise Resource Planning or Priority

 

• Needing access to integrations for payment tasks like invoicing

 

• Familiarity with Salesforce, and preference to keep working with what you know and what your team understands

The Benefits of the Hubspot Salesforce Integration

 

• Information from one platform syncs automatically to the other

 

• It’s easy to share important information like email opens and page activity between the two platforms

 

• This easier access to data means you can better understand customers, personalize emails, check how specific marketing efforts translate to sales success, and much more

 

So how do you go about bringing the two together? Let’s dive in.

How to Seamlessly Integrate the Platforms

What You’ll Need

• A HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub Professional or Enterprise account

 

• Admin access in HubSpot

 

• A Salesforce edition with API access, or Salesforce Professional

 

• It’s recommended that you’re a Salesforce system administrator

How to Integrate the Platforms: A Step-by-Step Guide

 

1. In your HubSpot account, click the Marketplace icon in the main navigation bar and select Connected apps under ‘Manage’.

 

1. In the top right, click the Visit App Marketplace button, then use the search bar to locate the Salesforce integration.

 

1. You should see the Salesforce box appear. Hover and click ‘view integration’ to open the connector wizard. If connecting to a Salesforce sandbox, tick ‘Yes this will connect to a sandbox’ on the next page.

 

1. Click ‘Log in to Salesforce’ and enter your Salesforce details in the pop-up window.

 

1. Click ‘Start the Salesforce package installation’ to begin to install HubSpot in Salesforce.

 

1. You’ll be redirected to Salesforce to install the HubSpot package. Select ‘Install for all users’ and hit install. Then, select ‘Yes, grant access to these third-party web sites’ and press continue. The installation process will then begin and should take up to 10 minutes.

 

1. Once installed, go back to the HubSpot connector wizard and click ‘next’. Now you can add the HubSpot Visualforce module to Salesforce by clicking ‘Add HubSpot to Salesforce’. (This module shows the contact's likelihood to close, and allows you to view and filter contact activity and enroll contacts in HubSpot workflows)

 

1. Now you need to choose how your data will sync between HubSpot and Salesforce. A choice here between recommended setup and advanced. Click recommended and review settings. Review your data sync settings, and change any by clicking ‘change’, then hit ‘finish setup and begin syncing’.

 

1. If you selected ‘advanced setup’ the process is a little more complex.

 

Integrating HubSpot with Salesforce shouldn’t be overly challenging. However, they are two separate platforms and you may run into a handful of issues. Here are some of the more common errors you could encounter and how to solve them.

Integration Errors to be Expected and How to Solve Them

 

Problem: Contacts vs. Leads. The way customers are stored is different for HubSpot and Salesforce. In Salesforce, individuals are stored first as ‘leads’ and then converted to ‘contacts’ by sales staff later, creating two total records. In HubSpot, however, there is only one category and only one contact record. This can cause problems when carrying information between the two platforms.

 

How to solve: When enabling integration you have the option for new contact records in HubSpot to become either leads or contacts in Salesforce. If you want to use Salesforce to convert leads to contacts manually, select ‘leads’ as your record type. If you want to ignore the lead conversion function and just use HubSpot for this, you should opt for ‘contacts’.

 

Problem: You can’t see information on custom Salesforce objects. On some Salesforce objects, such as trigger workflows, you can’t see the information from the HubSpot side, meaning you could miss important data.

 

How to solve: Copy the information to a record that can be seen from HubSpot. This could be an account or contact.

 

Problem: Differences in campaigns. There are a number of differences between how Salesforce and HubSpot do campaigns and these objects don’t correspond to each other. In HubSpot campaigns are groups of assets and content linked to a specific campaign. Salesforce campaigns use marketing collateral and lists of contacts to manage outbound campaigns. This can cause some confusion when using the integration.

 

How to solve: The only option is to accept that the two are fundamentally different and treat them accordingly. Salesforce campaigns can sync some data to HubSpot, but HubSpot campaigns cannot sync to Salesforce.

 

The HubSpot Salesforce integration can be set up without an enormous amount of work and can deliver a host of benefits to your marketing efforts. At Cacao Media, we can help you through the process of setting up the integration in a way that promotes lead conversion and boosts closing rates.

 

To find out more, contact us today.