Best Practices for a Seamless HubSpot/Salesforce Integration

Why are HubSpot/Salesforce integration best practices important?

Marketers and sales teams should join their efforts to develop the best customer acquisition strategies. The key to this collaboration is accurate, real-time data that lets them know what actions are working, how to improve their approach, and how to adapt to constantly changing conditions. 

If your company is transitioning towards this trend, you may have considered implementing HubSpot/Salesforce integration best practices. But where do you start?

HubSpot/Salesforce integration enables you to cross-link data between HubSpot and Salesforce seamlessly to help keep marketing and sales teams on the same page. There are different approaches to get both tools to work together, including native integration procedures.

If you can complete it successfully, you will get a robust CRM and a marketing automation platform working together with ease. Your sales and marketing teams can use this information to identify and target customers more precisely and efficiently. 

Unfortunately, native integrations are not always reliable. Typically, this results in a high number of issues requiring manual intervention and time-consuming maintenance. In addition, this will result in inaccurate and incomplete data being available to you and your teams.

Implementing the proper HubSpot/Salesforce integration best practices will save your business from headaches and will make your data consolidated, available and error-free.

Case Study Download: Liongard Aligns Hubspot and Salesforce

What do HubSpot and Salesforce do on their own?

It may be helpful to learn what HubSpot and Salesforce do on their own, which will justify why their integration is essential for businesses that simultaneously run both solutions. Since this may be your case, let’s take a quick look at their main functionalities.

What is HubSpot?

With HubSpot, you can collaborate on marketing, sales, and customer service in one place. It includes several hubs, each one powerful by itself, but together they are even more effective. Some of their popular features include meeting scheduler, social media administration, email marketing, ads, sales automation, and pipeline management.

What is Salesforce?

According to Salesforce, their platform “is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams work as one from anywhere — so you can keep your customers happy everywhere.” They offer solutions for marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, and an app development module.

While their functions may seem similar, they have many differences and complement each other. Therefore, it is not unusual to find businesses using both applications simultaneously. A faster business growth rate, the need for better data management, and other factors drive users to choose HubSpot and Salesforce natively integrated.

Related: How Marketing Ops and Revenue Ops Can Better Support Remote Teams

What are common HubSpot/Salesforce integration requirements?

If you’re thinking of HubSpot/Salesforce integration best practices, the first one is to fulfill system requirements. HubSpot recommends the following in terms of subscriptions, access, and permissions:

In HubSpot

• You should have an active HubSpot Professional or Enterprise subscription.
• You should grant account access permission in HubSpot.

In Salesforce

• You must have a Salesforce edition with API access or Salesforce Professional.
• You should be a Salesforce system administrator or be assigned the HubSpot Integration Permission set.
• Additionally, you must have all of the following administrative permissions for user profiles:
  • Enable the API
  • Enable View Setup and Configuration
  • Modify All Data on any objects (accounts, campaigns, contacts, leads, or opportunities) synchronized with HubSpot
  • Activate the Modify Metadata permission. This will let you view data in the HubSpot Visualforce window on Salesforce lead and/or contact records.
  • Access to download apps from the AppExchange
  • Visualize the task Type field be to their user profile

After you’ve verified if both systems comply with these requirements, you will be able to follow a step-by-step guide to integrate them with the native procedure. The process, however, may take time and present a series of issues we will review in the following section.

Common HubSpot/Salesforce integration issues

You believe you followed all the steps with a “by the book” approach and implemented all possible HubSpot/Salesforce integration best practices but, still, you’re running into data issues difficult to troubleshoot.

As mentioned above, this is typical. Even HubSpot created a guide with frequent API calls and sync errors to help users navigate issues. Here are some of the most common problems with their native integrations:

API call limit

There is a discrepancy between the number of calls in both HubSpot and Salesforce.

Sync errors

You will find alerts for each error type, with the number of current errors and impacted records. The most common ones are detailed below:

• Associations: A record is not syncing because it is associated with another record not yet synced with HubSpot, or it is related to another record that has exceeded the number of record associations HubSpot allows.
• Custom code: Salesforce records are not syncing due to an issue with automation, flows, or validation rules. It will be possible to view the cause of the error in the “Error Details” column. 
• Duplicates: It is not possible to create records if a duplicate already exists. In addition to the error records in HubSpot and Salesforce, there will also be a duplicate value in each record.
• Permissions: A HubSpot change cannot be synced with Salesforce if the connected user does not have permission to view this object or field in Salesforce.
• Picklists: HubSpot and Salesforce are not syncing records due to discrepancies between picklist field values. 
• Property mappings: There is a conflict between the HubSpot property and the Salesforce field, preventing records from syncing. It may be because the property and field types are incompatible or the property or field no longer exists. It may also be because you need to create Salesforce reference field mappings.
• Property values: HubSpot and Salesforce records do not sync because they include invalid property values. It is typically necessary to update individual records affected by the error to correct it.
• Other: There is an unknown error preventing records from syncing. The HubSpot engineering team receives notifications of this type of error, and if necessary, the team will investigate the issue. 

How to complete a seamless HubSpot/Salesforce integration

Even if you don’t have access to IT support or can’t code, can you leverage the power of HubSpot and Salesforce together?

You definitely can. Instead of native Hubspot and Salesforce integrations, partner with a company that offers modern integration solutions you can configure to meet your needs. Basically, you get to tell the system how and when you want the data to flow and how the standard format you want to see the data. 

You can configure your integrations on the fly, with little or no technical expertise required. It’s just drag and drop. These integrations will standardize customer data in a centralized location, allowing you to track customer relationships throughout their journey effectively. 

This means you’ll no longer need to use different apps to generate reports or manually format data from one system to the next. Your sales and marketing teams will increase their productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency by focusing on what’s important.

What to look for in a provider

Leading providers offering comprehensive integration platforms go beyond native integration capabilities and reduce errors to a minimum. Make sure you find one with the following benefits:

• Simple no-code deployment that doesn’t require technical support or a technical staff
• An easy-to-use interface designed especially for revenue teams
• A gradual implementation strategy that allows you to connect your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms and add other connections, such as revenue apps, sales enablement, and eCommerce platforms.
• A simple way to map revenue apps and move between them in real-time 
• Cleansing and enriching data in multiple layers for extra data hygiene
• Flexible pricing strategies for growing businesses
• Troubleshooting and error management guides

Only Vertify’s RevConnect system offers these advantages and more. Get unprecedented contact cleansing along with world-class integration capabilities, no-code required. Unify HubSpot and Salesforce features into a single, robust platform with the power to provide you with relevant and accurate data for your sales and marketing teams. Request a demo now.