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Connecting HubSpot and Salesforce: Configuring, Syncing and Field Mapping

Today we’re taking a deep dive into HubSpot and Salesforce integration, covering what you need to know about key aspects of the connection, how to find them, and how to ensure the sync settings are customized properly to fit your business needs.

HubSpot has a great guide outlining the process to integrate Salesforce. But, once the initial connection is configured, it’s important to ensure you maintain the connection properly by standardizing field creation and field mapping behavior to prevent problems down the road.

Whether you’re implementing new instances of HubSpot and Salesforce, or if you’ve inherited the systems and need to reverse engineer things, this blog (and its accompanying videos) will show you how to successfully integrate HubSpot and Salesforce.

Salesforce and HubSpot Integration Settings

Step 1: Find and understand Hubspot’s Salesforce integrations settings page. This page is where you’ll find all things related to your HubSpot and Salesforce integration. Here you can see important information like your account details, how many API calls the integration has made that day (and your daily limit), your object sync settings, your Salesforce inclusion list, Contact creation and deletion settings, and much more.

Watch as SmartAcre’s Director of Marketing and Sales Technology Jenay Sellers takes you through the specifics:

[Video Transcript:] Let’s get started. Click the gear icon from the top of your HubSpot dashboard to be taken to your settings page. On the left-hand side, you’ll see a section for integrations. Click on apps. Here you can see all of the apps connected to HubSpot. From the Salesforce drop-down, click on view details to be taken to the Salesforce settings page. From here you’ll see general information like your Salesforce connected account as well as your API call use. The API call use section is important because it tells you how many API calls you’re allowed to have between HubSpot and Salesforce in a given 24 hour period. As you can see we’ve used 242 API calls for today. The API call limit is based off of your Salesforce subscription. If, for some reason, you exceed your API call limit, don’t worry it resets at the end of each day and data will resume syncing once the limit is reset.

Scrolling down, you’ll see a section for sync settings that allows you to configure how data from HubSpot passes into Salesforce. We’ll revisit this section later. In addition, you can configure timeline sync settings to determine which marketing and sales activities in HubSpot pass through to Salesforce in the form of tasks. The next section is important, it revolves around creating and deleting contacts between HubSpot and Salesforce. The “Creating records in Salesforce” section tells HubSpot what to do when a net-new name, that isn’t present in either database, is created from HubSpot. For example, someone filling out a completely new form. Should that data pass through to Salesforce as a lead or a contact? In addition, you can take advantage of an inclusion list to only pass the most sales-ready leads into Salesforce. This can be useful if you’re running a lot of content focused marketing campaigns where those names might not yet be ready for sales follow up. By creating an inclusion list and leveraging something like lead scoring, you can ensure only the warmest names are passed to sales

Last, but not least, we’d like to tell HubSpot what to do when things are created or edited on the Salesforce side, for Salesforce leads or contacts. It ’s also equally important to determine what happens when things are deleted. You should note that HubSpot will never delete records from Salesforce. However, you can check these boxes to tell HubSpot what to do if a lead or a contact is deleted on the Salesforce side. At the bottom of this page there are some more sync settings, however, we wanted to run through those that are most important for configuring your Salesforce and HubSpot integration out-of-the-box.

At SmartAcre, we help our clients review these settings to ensure they’re configured to meet their individual needs. We’d be happy to talk to this further with you.

Mapping HubSpot Properties to Salesforce fields

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the various options and how to best choose the right synchronization settings for your business, it’s important to set up how HubSpot maps each field to Salesforce.

You probably knew HubSpot automatically syncs contact fields with Salesforce, but did you know that you can also sync data between the Companies (Accounts in Salesforce) and Deals (Opportunities in Salesforce) objects to make even more data available and actionable for your marketing use in HubSpot?

In the following video, Marketing Technology Specialist Kayla from SmartAcre® will walk you through the Contact object field mappings page, while showing you how to manage default and custom field mappings, including a thorough discussion about the various sync behaviors available between Salesforce and HubSpot.

[Video transcript:] Now that you have that overview of the Salesforce HubSpot integration setup page, let’s take a closer look into your contact properties. From this page, we’ll want to scroll down here to your sync settings and click manage mappings. This mapping page will be your system of record for your HubSpot and Salesforce field sync. If you don’t see a field on this page, it is not passing data between Salesforce and HubSpot. This could be a great way to troubleshoot. If you’re not seeing something you think you should be seeing in either system, come here and check if that field has even been set up to sync.

So, at the top here you’ll have your standard mappings. These are the default mappings that come when you install the HubSpot to Salesforce integration. Although they’re a default that can be edited over here with the gear icon.

Scroll down and you’ll get your custom mappings. These will be unique to each business so when you set up your custom fields to collect information that you think your sales team will find valuable this is where you map them. Andrew will go a little bit further into how to map those new fields later but for now let’s just talk about the different update rules that you can choose.

Clicking on the gear icon you’ll select edit. You’ll get an edit field mapping window and different update rules that you can use to pass data between HubSpot and Salesforce.

The top one, “Use most recent value” means that the system in whichever the value changes will change the other system. So, say you’re updating a phone number in Salesforce, that will change the phone number in HubSpot. But, if you’re a HubSpot user that updates that same phone number, it will change the phone number in Salesforce, too. Be careful about using this if you want Salesforce to be a strict system of record on key contact properties.

The next option “Use Salesforce value unbless blank” means that HubSpot will only be passing data to Salesforce if Salesforce doesn’t have that field currently filled. This one is a popular one because it allows Salesforce to maintain a system of record but it also allows HubSpot to pass key crucial fields to Salesforce such as your custom fields.

The third one, “Use Salesforce value only” means that HubSpot will never pass data to Salesforce and Salesforce will only be updating HubSpot. So, again a great way to keep Salesforce your system of record and if you want to ensure a field is only updated in Salesforce.

This last one, “Disabled” means that the systems will not communicate that field value at all so make sure this is only for fields that you don’t want synced between HubSpot and Salesforce.

Those are your update rules and now Andrew is going to talk a little bit about creating a new custom field at HubSpot and Salesforce and mapping that.

Creating & Mapping Your Custom Fields

Armed with this new info about the integration’s default setup and the out of the box sync settings, you’re now ready to create and map to your own custom fields. After all, the whole point is to pass information between the two systems accurately. There’s likely lots of valuable information your sales team is collecting as part of the sales process, so we’d encourage you to identify the most important customer or prospect data so you can pass it back to HubSpot for use by your marketing team.

Marketing and Sales Technology Consultant Andrew can walk you through the exact steps for creating and syncing new fields between HubSpot and Salesforce. He’ll even cover some idiosyncrasies and best practices to look out for — watch now:

[Video transcript:] Now that you’re familiar and comfortable with the initial setup, we’re going to talk about how to map fields between HubSpot and Salesforce. The first thing that you’ll need to do is go to your settings page, scroll down to properties and create a new property in HubSpot. 

Next, go to the object manager in Salesforce create a new field here and take note of the API name. You can see that we’ve created a picklist field with the same options as what exists in HubSpot. Then, go to your integrations page. You can see what maps here between HubSpot and Salesforce –  the different objects – so HubSpot contacts will map to leads or contacts, companies to accounts and deals to opportunities.

For this example, we’ve created a lead field in Salesforce which will map back to a contact field in HubSpot. You’ll then click this manage mappings button. From this page, click, “Add new field mapping.” You have the option to create a new HubSpot property, however, this doesn’t give you the option to customize it as much from this page. Since we already have it created exactly the way we want it, we can choose it from the drop-down. Next, you’re going to want to pick which field in Salesforce you would like to map it to. Again, just search for the field that you’ve already created.

In the sync settings, make sure you pick the one that is appropriate for the use case for this field and for what works best for your business. For example, we’ll select “use the most recent value” so that any data that comes through HubSpot or Salesforce is going to update the sync. Click save mapping. It’ll give you the option to sync all contacts now. 

Once done, you can scroll down to your custom fields. You’ll see that the example pick list is mapped to the example pick list. As I mentioned, it’s important to take note of the API name because this is what’s going to sync one-to-one between HubSpot and Salesforce.

One last tip: once this has all been created, make sure you test the sync behavior between these fields. We recommend using a test or generic account that you can simply update the property value on either HubSpot or Salesforce and make sure that the value syncs between the two.

By now, you should be comfortable with the general integration settings and sync behaviors as well as how to map contact and lead fields between Salesforce and HubSpot. If you’d like any further help with your HubSpot and Salesforce integration we at SmartAcre consider ourselves experts in both tools would be happy to help if you just contact us.

What Happens Next: Successful HubSpot and Salesforce Integration!

Anyone can connect HubSpot and Salesforce, but not everyone can really integrate them. Armed with these tutorials, feel confident to begin navigating the process and optimizing your account settings and field synchronization rules.

If you need more help setting up your HubSpot/Salesforce integration, would like to troubleshoot a pre-existing condition, or just want to talk through what your business needs from its sales and marketing automation tools, our certified Salesforce and HubSpot experts would love to chat with you! The SmartAcre team specializes in all things Salesforce and HubSpot, and we have officiated many a marriage between the pair. Get in touch and we’ll set up a time to discuss your integration in more detail.