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At most organizations, sales and marketing work together to bring prospects into the funnel and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
What is not so intuitive is putting the proper infrastructure in place to create the perfect sales-marketing synergy. Marketers are often left piecing together different data streams to understand the impact of their campaigns on sales opportunities, which can be complex and time-consuming. This can also result in misattribution, disjointed views of the customer journey, and an inaccurate understanding of campaign outcomes—all of which will hinder your organization's ability to scale.
If you're looking to continuously grow and scale your business, it’s imperative that your sales and marketing systems seamlessly integrate to deliver holistic and accurate insights.
One way to ensure this is with a HubSpot and Salesforce integration. These two platforms offer a fast and easy way to sync with little technical setup to ensure comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM), whether in sales or marketing and across both.
Read on for our guide to everything you need to know about HubSpot Salesforce integration to maximize your use of both platforms and build an intelligence program that fuels business outcomes.
How Do HubSpot and Salesforce Fit Together?
As a marketer, you've probably encountered or at least heard of HubSpot and Salesforce at some point in your career. Both are key players in the CRM space, but each offers unique strengths in the customer lifecycle that complement one another when integrated.
- HubSpot is renowned for its comprehensive suite of inbound marketing tools, empowering businesses to attract and engage potential customers.
- Salesforce, on the other hand, is widely regarded for its robust capabilities in managing complex sales processes.
Integrating HubSpot with Salesforce will allow you to leverage the strengths of both platforms. HubSpot excels in generating leads, which can then be seamlessly transferred to Salesforce. From there, Salesforce's analytics, reporting, and automation tools help your sales teams effectively manage and nurture these leads, driving them through the sales funnel to a customer relationship.
What Are the Benefits of a HubSpot Salesforce Integration?
You may be wondering what value you can get from the HubSpot Salesforce integration when you're already comfortable with your existing process. Below, we dig into the unique value you'll receive from taking the leap to integrate. Hint... there are plenty!
- Get a Unified View of Your Prospect or Customer — Marketing and sales interact with prospects and customers differently. Each garners a wealth of information that can be valuable throughout the marketing and sales funnels. Unifying this information through the HubSpot Salesforce integration will allow both of your teams to better understand the customer journey and customize services to each individual, ultimately leading to better outcomes.
- Improve Your Lead Management and Nurturing — HubSpot captures and nurtures leads, while Salesforce manages and converts these leads into customers. The integration enables leads generated through HubSpot to be transferred to Salesforce for better qualification and management. This ensures that none of your leads fall through the cracks and that your sales team has access to how customers came to know the brand, including engagement history and behavioral insights. The result is that both your sales and marketing teams can deliver more personalized content and product offerings to your customers.
- Align Your Sales and Marketing Functions More Closely — Marketing has insight into what content drives the most qualified leads, while sales professionals receive detailed information on a lead's journey and interactions with marketing efforts. Automated data syncing between HubSpot and Salesforce ensures that both systems are up to date with the latest information. By aligning these quantitative and qualitative insights, both your teams can create more targeted and effective marketing strategies with higher conversion rates.
- Round Out Your Reporting and Analytics — Consumer needs and preferences evolve at a record pace, so staying on top of what’s working (or not) with data-driven learning is imperative. With different insights from both platforms, your teams can look at performance from different angles and across the entire funnel. For example, you can leverage HubSpot to demonstrate how the leads came into the funnel and turn to Salesforce to reveal the deal value of previous engagements. Together, these insights help both your teams see across silos to get the full picture.
- Scale Your Operations — The HubSpot Salesforce integration offers the flexibility for your organization to grow and evolve. As your business expands or changes, an integrated system will allow you to adjust in real-time or scale to accommodate more complex workflows and a higher volume of customer data. This will position you for long-term success.
What Are the Key Features of the HubSpot Salesforce Integration?
Now that we've discussed why the HubSpot Salesforce integration is beneficial, let's dig into how it will improve marketing and sales functions.
Lead Management
Sales and marketing teams interact with leads in different ways. With the integration, you can custom-sync existing accounts, opportunities, and events to better align those interactions. When a new lead in HubSpot is created, it is automatically added to Salesforce, offering a consistent view of the prospect and their lifecycle with the brand. If a deal is closed in Salesforce, HubSpot will also update the title to “Customer.” This automation eliminates manual data entry and reduces errors while also boosting the productivity of your team.
Lead Scoring
As your business scales, lead scoring becomes increasingly essential for marketing and sales to understand where to allocate time and resources. Salesforce does not have a native lead-scoring feature, so HubSpot can empower sales to better gauge the value of a lead. From there, sales and marketing can work in concert to prioritize leads most effectively and stay aligned on overarching goals.
Outreach Optimization
Marketing and sales leverage email extensively to reach prospects and customers — but often take different approaches to content. Integrated systems allow both parties to see outreach and understand the effectiveness of messaging, creative, CTAs, etc. In turn, this allows sales to seamlessly continue the conversation started by marketing based on what has already resonated with the prospect. Not to mention, they can automate personalized email sequences at scale to save time and resources.
Sales Enablement
To most effectively engage leads, sales reps should be informed and equipped with the necessary context. They can leverage segmented data to understand the profiles of their leads and tailor sales approaches. Customized automated workflows, such as follow-ups and reminders, ensure a smooth handoff from marketing to sales long-term.
How Can I Start the HubSpot Salesforce Integration Process?
While Salesforce and HubSpot have worked to create a fairly seamless integration, the process will largely depend on your unique systems and needs. So, we've outlined a step-by-step guide to help you get started.
Prep, Prep, Prep
The integration is not a one-and-done deal and requires some preparation to ensure success. This starts with conducting a thorough audit of your current data in both systems to ensure accuracy and completeness. We recommend spending some time cleansing outdated or duplicate data. This will set you up for success as you dive into the integration process.
To get the most out of your integration and ensure everyone is aligned, you should also define the specific objectives for each time and identify key data points and processes that will be synchronized. Not only do your marketing and sales need to be aligned, but your IT teams should also be ready to assist. This will be a team effort.
Choose an Integration Method That’s Right for Your Business
How you integrate is also an important piece of the puzzle. Every organization is different, so be sure to take the time to understand what works best for your unique needs.
Right now, you have two options. Run them by your teams to understand the full implications before jumping into the process.
- Native Integration: You can use the HubSpot-Salesforce native integration, which is often sufficient for standard use cases.
- Third-Party Tools: For more complex requirements, third-party integration tools like Zapier or custom APIs can sometimes be more effective.
Set Up the HubSpot Integration and Preferences
To work out the integration on the HubSpot end, navigate to the “integrations” settings and find the Salesforce integration option. Follow the prompts to connect your Salesforce account to HubSpot, granting the necessary permissions. From there, you will want to define how data will flow between HubSpot and Salesforce, specifying which objects will be synced based on your custom needs.
Set Up the Salesforce Integration and Preferences
Next, navigate to Salesforce to install the HubSpot integration package from the Salesforce AppExchange. Similarly, you will set up sync preferences in Salesforce to outline how data from HubSpot will be managed. Make sure that both sales and marketing teams leveraging the platform are fully aligned on how this integration should be approached.
Define Customer Field Mappings and Data Sync Rules as Needed
Your business is only as good as the intelligence informing it, so you must align the fields between HubSpot and Salesforce to ensure that data is accurately transferred between the two systems. This includes both standard and custom fields. From there, define rules for data synchronization (i.e., which system takes precedence in data conflicts) and how often syncs should occur.
Test the Integration to Identify Bottlenecks or Inconsistencies
Don't forget to perform an initial data sync between HubSpot and Salesforce to ensure that data is being transferred correctly.
A comprehensive analysis will include:
- Checking of sample records in both systems to verify that data is syncing as expected and that there are no discrepancies.
- Resolving any data conflicts or errors that arise during the testing phase.
Train Your Teams on the New Process to Maximize Value
Getting your team on board is essential for their workstreams and ensures they get the most value from the integration. Conduct dedicated training sessions for marketing, sales, and IT teams to familiarize all parties with the integrated system and new workflows. HubSpot offers a free certification course to help team members understand how to use the integrated features effectively.
Monitor the Integration During the Initial Phase to Ensure Smooth Functioning
Technology isn’t perfect, so you should regularly audit the data and integration settings to ensure continued accuracy and performance. Gather feedback from users early and often to identify areas for improvement and optimize workflows accordingly. These insights will be invaluable in unlocking each platform’s full potential for your business.
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All screenshots in this article are sourced from the HubSpot Knowledge Base article, Install the HubSpot and Salesforce Integration.
