Why is the HubSpot Salesforce integration such big news for marketers?
HubSpot is a hugely popular platform among marketing teams for all the right reasons. Apart from it being a powerful marketing automation software it also has its own Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), which is great for:
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.
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:
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:
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:
So how do you go about bringing the two together? Let’s dive in.
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.
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.