It’s really important to make sure that your HubSpot Marketing Hub Portal is properly connected to Salesforce. Integrating the two systems correctly allows you to report on marketing attribution, velocity of sales pipeline, and in turn, makes you look like a rockstar in your organization.

There are a few things that we consistently see companies not doing properly when connecting systems that cause a host of errors. Below is a list of 5 common mistakes we see when integrating HubSpot and Salesforce.

1) Not taking the time to compare field types and drop-down values between HubSpot and Salesforce.

One of the main causes of sync errors in a HubSpot and Salesforce integration are mismatched field types and mismatched dropdown field values between HubSpot and Salesforce. This can easily happen when different people are responsible for creating fields in each system or when new dropdown values get added in one system and not the other. The most common fields we see this with are Industry, Lead Source, State, and Country. Depending on the field settings, if the values don’t match exactly then the data will not pass between the systems.

2) Creating campaigns in HubSpot, but not creating them in Salesforce.

In order for you to have any chance of understanding which marketing campaigns and activities in HubSpot are helping to influence opportunities/revenue in Salesforce, you need to have a Salesforce campaign to associate those HubSpot campaigns/activities with. Most companies do a good job of creating campaigns in HubSpot, but make the mistake of not creating a corresponding campaign in Salesforce and linking them together.

3) Not properly tracking Lead Status between systems.

As a marketer, it is important to know whether a lead has been followed up by someone on the Sales team and whether or not that lead was qualified or not. To do so you need to have a well defined set of Lead Status values that are understood by both Marketing and Sales. Furthermore, you need to set proper service level agreements for how long Salespeople have to follow-up with a lead, and reach a disposition on if they are qualified or not.

A subtle nuance of the HubSpot and Salesforce integration is that by default, the “Lead Status” field from Salesforce is linked to a custom property called “Status” in HubSpot that gets created via the integration, not the default HubSpot “Lead Status” property. If you are using this for automation and reporting, be sure you are using the “Status” field in HubSpot. You may also want to create automation to update values in the standard HubSpot Lead Status field as well to keep things consistent.

4) Not building buckets for Lead Source

Another common gap we see when integrating HubSpot and Salesforce is companies not creating high-level values to track the sources leads are coming from. Unfortunately it’s not uncommon for companies to have dozens and dozens of lead sources that are far too granular. Typically a company should not have more than 10 Lead Sources so that reporting on these becomes manageable. Specific assets or programs can be tracked using additional fields or campaigns, but should not be included in your Lead Source list. Your CEO or leadership team within the organization is going to want to know what types of activities generated revenue such as webinars, content syndication campaigns, or paid search advertising. Each lead that is created needs to have a source associated with it that passes through to Salesforce so you can understand what sources/channels revenue is associated with. Don’t forget… as mentioned in item 1, make sure your lead source values match between HubSpot and Salesforce!

5) Not utilizing data from Salesforce in HubSpot to properly segment and communicate with your customers, prospects, and vendors.

Many companies forget to use data inside of Salesforce to further segment audiences and send properly timed communications from HubSpot. For example, you would not want to send an awareness nurture from HubSpot to contacts who are far along in your sales process and are actively engaged with a salesperson. On the other hand, you may want to send bottom of the funnel content to people who have become unresponsive during the sales process to help re-engage them. You can also sync opportunity and account data from Salesforce to HubSpot and use that to send those relevant communications to those audiences.

Need Help with a HubSpot and Salesforce Integration?

If you need more practical tips about integrating HubSpot and Salesforce, maintaining clean data between both systems, or if you are stuck with a specific challenge with your integration, we are here to help.