10 HubSpot Salesforce Integration Problems and How to Avoid Them

10 HubSpot Salesforce Integration Problems and How to Avoid Them

Izzy

June 21, 2021
4 MIN READ

Salesforce and HubSpot are two powerful sales and marketing platforms. Strong integration between the two can help you save time, increase productivity, and improve your bottom line.

But if you're not careful, these integrations could cause more headaches than they solve! In this blog post, we'll go over 10 problems that come up when integrating Salesforce with HubSpot and how to avoid them.

HubSpot Salesforce integration problems

  1. Your update rules are incorrect.
  2. Contact properties are misaligned or missing values
  3. Too many leads in Salesforce
  4. Too many Salesforce contacts in HubSpot
  5. The integration deleted all of HubSpot's information
  6. Which contacts link to SalesForce
  7. Some contacts and accounts are not synced
  8. Deal records do not have an associated HubSpot contact
  9. Multi-currency sync problems
  10. Failing to tag contacts on campaigns on both platforms

1. Your sync rules are misconfigured

A common problem is seeing that data are not syncing property between Hubspot and Salesforce dues to a misconfiguration in sync rules. To avoid this problem, make sure that in your HubSpot-SalesForce integration settings, choose which data update corresponds to which field within Salesforce:

  • I prefer SalesForce unless blank. HubSpot will be updated with the most recent value unless the SalesForce field is empty. In that case, HubSpot will update SalesForce.
  • Always use Salesforce. HubSpot will always be updated with the most recent values from Salesforce.
  • Two-way, Both HubSpot and Salesforce will always use the most recent value available.
  • Don't sync; changes to these fields in either HubSpot or Salesforce will be updated in other systems.

sync rule

2. Property mapping problems

For data to sync correctly between HubSpot and Salesforce, the object properties need to be the same. For example, a one-line text field will not sync well with a drop-down menu. 

Here's a table illustrating the difference in property type naming between HubSpot and Salesforce

When you create a new property on each platform, double-check that the properties are of the same type.

Here is a table illustrating how each of the properties is named in HubSpot and Salesforce.

SalesForce HubSpot
String, text area Single-line text
Textarea Multi-line text
Picklist, reference Dropdown select
Picklist, reference Radio select
Multipicklist Multiple checkboxes
Boolean Single checkbox
Number Number
Date, DateTime Date picker

Here is an example of a property mapping inside the native HubSpot Salesforce integration

mapping

3. Too many leads in Salesforce

All HubSpot contacts will sync to Salesforce by default. However, if you create an inclusion list in HubSpot, only contacts that meet the criteria of your inclusion list will sync to Salesforce.

Most users choose to sync sales-qualified leads based on the HubSpot lifecycle. Therefore, it would be best if you built workflows in HubSpot to automatically assigned sales-qualified leads lifecycle stages to any contact that passes your business sales qualifications.

4. Too many Salesforce contacts in HubSpot

The native HubSpot SalesForce integration will sync all your SalesForce contacts to HubSpot. So if this is something you don't want to do because you don't want to increase your HubSpot contacts tier or due to the privacy policies or GDPR, you can solve this using selective SF to HubSpot sync.

The Salesforce User who will connect Salesforce to HubSpot "the integration user." If the integration user has read/write permission to a Salesforce record, the record is eligible to sync with HubSpot; stated differently, any Salesforce records that the integration user cannot read/write will not be eligible to sync with HubSpot. Again, your SalesForce admin can help you set up the permissions for the integration user.

5. The integration deleted all of HubSpot's information

Having two-way sync can lead to system conflicts; while it is essential to keep data updated between your sales and marketing teams, it is critical to decide upfront which system is the source of truth. Usually, we advise our customers to Keep Salesforce as the source of truth, limiting the sync for those records to a unidirectional direction.

6. Which contacts link to SalesForce

When doing your data cleansing, you probably want to know which records link to records with SalesForce. HubSpot includes SalesForce ID property with all synced records that you can use to identify the contacts or companies linked to Salesforce.

7. Some contacts and accounts are not synced

The HubSpot-Salesforce integration may encounter sync errors that prevent data from syncing. 

salesforce-sync-errors

If you search for contacts, companies, or deals in your HubSpot and can't find them check the Sync errors, you'll see cards for each error type, with the number of current errors and impacted records for each. Click an error type card to see details of the errors in the right panel. 

8. Contacts are not associated with deals

When a contact record is associated with a deal in HubSpot, the contact lifecycle stage will automatically change to opportunity. Once the deal is closed and won, the lifecycle stage will change to Customer.

Opportunities created before deal sync is enabled will not automatically sync to HubSpot. Therefore, to add these opportunities as deals in HubSpot, we will have to import them.

This contact-to-deal association is crucial as it can create a misalignment in your messaging because the marketing team is still communicating with your customers as marketing leads.

9. Multi-currency sync problems

Both Salesforce and HubSpot support multi-currency, but the problem is that when SalesForce opportunity syncs with HubSpot deal, the opportunity amount will be synced using the default currency in each system. What this means that if you have USD, the default currency in Salesforce, and EUR is the default currency in HubSpot, a $1,000 deal in Salesforce will sync as a €1,000 deal in HubSpot.

To solve this issue, all you have to do is make sure that the default currency is the same in both systems and syncing the deal amount in the base currency.

10. Failing to tag contacts on campaigns on both platforms

To track campaigns from HubSpot across into Salesforce to measure the ROI of marketing. Campaigns in HubSpot and Salesforce are entirely different things. A campaign in Salesforce is a list of contacts, while in HubSpot, it is a grouping of assets such as blogs, landing pages, workflows, emails, etc.

To do this, we will enroll these contacts in a HubSpot workflow that will set the lead in a Salesforce campaign.

SF campaignIn this workflow setting, we will associate it with a HubSpot campaign.

HubSpot Campaign

HubSpot-Salesforce integration is an essential tool for many HubSpot customers. It allows them to sync information collected in HubSpot with Salesforce and send Salesforce information to Hubspot.

If you have any questions about HubSpot-Salesforce integration, schedule a call with one of our HubSpot experts.

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Izzy

My name is Izzy and I am a co-founder of CRM Toolbox, an award-winning HubSpot Solutions Partner. I lead our team of consultants who provide professional guidance to help businesses implement the HubSpot CRM platform migrate, integrate their tech stack to HubSpot to create a seamless environment for sales reps to use. There is nothing I love more than solving the challenges that come up when someone wants to migrate an old system or integrate their tech stack with HubSpot - it's like a puzzle!

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