5 Benefits of HubSpot-Salesforce Integration

If you’re already on SalesForce, integrating Hubspot is like adding a booster rocket to charge up sales. Use the power of inbound marketing and integrate sales channels to align internal teams managing both functions.

That's because integrating HubSpot and SalesForce opens up immense possibilities. HubSpot and SalesForce share an open relationship with each other, making your marketing and sales work together towards meeting company goals. Both companies have similar audiences and features, but they serve different purposes.

HubSpot’s CRM works as a free enhancement to the main software for sales and marketing teams, while Salesforce’s CRM forms the core platform that the company’s thousands of apps, integrations, and features interact with. And both companies understand the value of each other’s platform, as they offer integrations for you to get the best of both worlds.

How do HubSpot and Salesforce work in tandem?

1) Streamline lead Hand-off Process

Once a HubSpot contact meets the inclusion list criteria, that record will be synced into Salesforce for the sales team to follow up. Consider how critical it is to follow up with leads quickly, this is a key measure to minimize any delays and get prompt answers to the questions of your prospects.

2) Access to HubSpot Intelligence from Salesforce

While previously, a custom intelligence object existed within the layout, the integration moved to incorporate this information at the field level to increase data usability. Users can also leverage the same filtering capabilities in the new iframe design for timeline activities. Now, you can see a contact’s activity and engagement with various marketing initiatives at a glance, which will provide the context needed to begin the conversation at the right point in the initial outreach.

3) Pipeline Visibility

By syncing your Salesforce pipeline with HubSpot CRM, your marketing team will finally have a window to look at the data post-handover. Marketers invest all their time and energy to generate leads, which they hope will be qualified, but they never know what happens to those leads after they are handed over to the sales team. This visibility addresses concerns such as lack of alignment, inability to make data-driven decisions, and decreased motivation.

4)Assign contacts to particular Salesforce campaigns

Using the HubSpot workflow tool, you can assign members to their respective status based on specific marketing activity and engagement to more accurately measure campaign success and overall ROI. You can also create and assign tasks to Salesforce users based on different triggers; for example, the contact owner could be assigned a follow-up task after a lead visited the pricing page 3+ times in a month.

Tips to keep in mind during this Integration

Once you integrate these two platforms, possibilities for sales and marketing actions are endless. The integration of HubSpot and Salesforce has enabled HubSpot users to incorporate rich data related to lead tracking into their Salesforce platform so the sales teams can have data at their fingertips when they contact leads for the first time.

Here are a few tips we have compiled for you to watch out for during the integration process.

1) Know your Sales Process from A to Z

Knowing your sales process will help you understand what information is most important and what you need to capture in HubSpot. Start by outlining what information about a prospect you need. Then, move down to leads.

By digging into some details like what qualifies them? Do you care about their title or company size? Is there a single piece of information that automatically turns a lead from an MQL to SQL? These will help you ensure that you’re solving for every step of the buyer's journey and creating proper fields prior to setting up the integration.

2) Sync only what’s necessary

Sometimes it may make sense to have complete open sync, but these situations are usually counted on one hand. The last thing you need your sales team not to do is to hunt through unnurtured or irrelevant records to find those amazing sales-ready leads. You can ensure that your Salesforce installation runs smoothly by creating an inclusion list that segments only those truly qualified, "chosen ones." This also prevents you from using HubSpot Activities for Salesforce storage space.

According to Podbox, "It takes up 2 KB of storage space every time you sync a HubSpot activity with Salesforce." That could result in a huge amount of data, considering the number of possible activities. And besides, removing Salesforce activities is no small task.

Including only those above a certain lead score is a great way to segment the leads. This way, you will know what is going on in your database by updating only the best SQLs while the rest are still being nurtured in HubSpot.

3) Use hidden fields

Hidden fields can help segment and streamline internal processes. You can set different fields such as lead source and lifecycle stage or even assign a particular lead owner. For example, if you have multiple bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) forms, add a hidden checkbox to indicate a BOFU form fill. Then, you can use that single field to spin a list in HubSpot or Salesforce and avoid multiple smart lists with hundreds of forms feeding them.

4) Understand Leads, Contacts, and Accounts in Salesforce

There are some basic variations in Salesforce between leads, contacts, and accounts. Fields in each record are very similar, and usually will have the same values, but the actual field names will differ, and that’s what matters. 

When you are setting up lead mapping, note that Leads and Contacts (in Salesforce) will be mapped in the Contacts field mapping. However, the account fields must be mapped under the mapping section of the Company field. The setup is exactly the same, different in only some areas of the integration. Paying attention to what information is on what record type and mapping accordingly will allow you to easily segment records with all of your information living in Salesforce.

Talk to BlueOshan’s HubSpot implementation and integration specialists to understand how we can help you get the best out of this integration.