Introduction
Installing the HubSpot Salesforce integration is only one piece of the puzzle. Getting the
integration to facilitate the flow of data between the two platforms without errors is
where the real challenge starts.
Marketing Contact Management
Salesforce Lead and Contact Categorization
Salesforce URL Creation
Before you tackle the ins and outs of the integration, let’s focus on three key workflows that
will make managing contact information between HubSpot and Salesforce a little easier.
These workflows will help you manage your marketing contact volume and keep track of
Leads and Contacts in Salesforce from HubSpot. We’ll explain why we’re building each
workflow and walk you through each step of the process so you can build your own!
After integrating HubSpot and Salesforce, there are a few key workflows that you're going to
want to set up to maintain your data hygiene.
1.
2.
3.
Challenge | Managing
Marketing Contact Volume
This workflow will help you keep your marketing contact volume under control. Marketing
contacts are the billable contacts in your HubSpot account.
Marketing contacts in your account should be reserved
for contacts you want to email or target using Ad
audience segmentation in HubSpot
But, whenever that contact is no longer a good fit for marketing communications, it should
be categorized as a non-marketing contact. Then, it no longer counts towards your billable
total.
This is an important topic to cover as it directly impacts the long-term cost of HubSpot.
So which contacts should be non-marketable? Every company will have different criteria for
non-marketable contacts, but once you determine what's marketable, you can follow these
same basic steps to automate that process.
Marketing contacts enable you to only pay for contacts in HubSpot that you are actively
marketing to via email or ad audiences. Instead of paying for all contacts, you only pay for
the contacts that you market to in HubSpot. Marketable contacts allow you to add contacts
to ad audiences, send marketing emails, and engage with them for various marketing
purposes. If you have a non-marketing contact in your database, you may be using this
contact to store unsubscribe data or store information about vendors, resellers, or partners.
Automate Non-Marketing Contact
Status
This workflow will be a contact-based workflow that will trigger based on bounces and
unsubscribes in your account to set a contact as non-marketable. Some organizations choose not
to use this approach because they still want to use these contacts and ad audiences.
For reference, if you are using custom ad audiences in HubSpot, you will not be able to include
non-marketing contacts in your ad audiences.
So, if a contact has unsubscribed and bounced, you may not want to email them anymore, but if
you do want to advertise and target using the HubSpot targeting, you'll want to keep them as
marketable.
We typically recommend removing unsubscribed and bounced contacts as marketable contacts,
because our client’s primary focus is usually email marketing.
Steps to Complete
To automatically set Marketing Contact Status, create a
new contact-based workflow.
Set the enrollment criteria to Unsubscribed from all
email = Yes or Hard Email Bounce Reason is Known.
Then, add the Set Marketing Contact Status Workflow
action to the Workflow.
Select “set as non-marketing contact”.
Once you’re ready, activate your workflow to remove
marketing contact status from contacts meeting these
criteria moving forward.
This update will not immediately update
contacts to non-marketing contacts. Be sure to
keep that in mind when you're adding new
contacts or planning for your marketing contact
runway.
Automate Marketing Contact Status
Now, let’s talk about automating the Marketing Contact Status property to set contacts as
marketable.
If you want to send an email to a contact, you will need to set them as a marketing contact when
they're created in HubSpot.
There are a few ways to do this.
Set Marketing Contacts via
the Forms Builder
If you navigate to Marketing > Lead Capture >
Forms in HubSpot and navigate to the Options
tab in a form, you will see a submission setting
for marketing contact status.
If you toggle the switch to on, then all new
contacts created via this form will automatically
be set to marketing contacts and you can send
them emails. You can also turn this setting off
or new submissions to this form do not become
marketing contacts.
Set Marketing Contacts via
Workflows
If you wanted to selectively make submissions
on a form marketing contacts, you would create
a new contact-based workflow that enrolls
contacts when the form is submitted.
Then, add an If/Then branch to the workflow to
qualify or disqualify the contacts as Marketing
Contacts.
Challenge | Identifying
Salesforce Leads and Contacts
in HubSpot
Salesforce uses Leads and Contacts for contact information, and HubSpot syncs
Contacts with both Leads and Contacts in Salesforce. For marketers that need to report
on or track if a HubSpot Contact is a Lead or Contact in Salesforce, having an easy way to
distinguish the difference is essential.
Salesforce Lead IDs begin with 00Q.
Salesforce Contact IDs begin with 003.
The only way to delineate in HubSpot if it is a Contact record currently syncing to a lead or a
contact in Salesforce is to look at the ID that is syncing through from Salesforce. Lead IDs
begin with 00Q, and Salesforce Contact IDs begin with 003. To make it easier to spot this in
HubSpot, we’re going to create a workflow to automate that categorization.
Before we set up this workflow, you'll want to create a new property on the contact object in
HubSpot, called Salesforce Lead or Contact. This will be a dropdown select field with two
options— Lead and Contact. You do not need to sync this to Salesforce. In Salesforce, you'll
easily see if it is a lead or a contact, but for HubSpot, you'll want this field to be able to easily
filter Salesforce Leads and Contacts.
Automate Lead and Contact
Categorization in HubSpot
Steps to Complete
Navigate to Automation > Workflows in HubSpot.
Then, select Contact Based workflow.
Set the Enrollment Triggers to Salesforce Contact ID is known.
Once you have enrolled contacts based on the Contact ID
being known, enable re-enrollment.
To enable re-enrollment, click on the enrollment trigger and
choose the re-enrollment tab. Check the boxes next to the ID
property to allow contacts who meet the trigger to re-enroll.
Enabling re-enrollment when the Lead ID or Contact ID is
known allows re-enrollment every time this property is
updated. This is important for several reasons.
Now that we've set up our enrollment triggers to enroll
contacts when the Salesforce Contact ID is known and
enabled re-enrollment for this property, we're going to add a
decision split in the workflow. This will tell HubSpot when to
update the record with Lead or Contact in our new HubSpot
Property. To accomplish this, we will add a Workflow Action
and select If/Then branch. On this if/ then branch, we're first
going to check if the contact is a Lead, and then we're going
to check if the contact is a Salesforce contact. To do this, we
will create two branches.
The first branch name is lead, and the criteria is that
Salesforce Contact ID starts with any of 00Q. Remember that
Lead IDs begin with 00Q in Salesforce.
Now that we have set the criteria for the lead branch, we're
going to set the contact branch with the criteria, or Salesforce
Contact ID starts with any of 003. Contact IDs are 15 or 18-
digit IDs in Salesforce for the contact record that start with
003. We know if this ID begins with 00Q, it's a lead, and if it
begins with 003, it's a contact.
Automate Lead and Contact
Categorization in HubSpot
Challenge | Link to the
Salesforce Record in HubSpot
Notifications
The Salesforce Record URL is not a property in HubSpot. This is a challenge if you would
like to link to a Contact or Lead in Salesforce using an email that was triggered by
HubSpot. Linking to this URL in a notification email allows your sales team to open this
record in Salesforce directly - without having to go to HubSpot first.
Before building a workflow, we first want to create a property in HubSpot by going to
Settings > Properties > Create Property. This will be a contact property in the Salesforce
information group called Salesforce URL. Create this as a single-line text field.
This workflow will be very similar to our set Lead or Contact workflow in HubSpot. In fact, you
can build these as additional steps to that flow if you prefer as the enrollment triggers will be
the same.
Add the Salesforce Record URL to
HubSpot Contacts
Steps to Complete
Configure the Enrollment Criteria, Re-enrollment and If/Then branch following the same criteria as the
Set Lead or Contact Workflow.
Now that we added this, if/then branch workflow action, to determine if this is a Lead or a Contact, we
are now going to update the Salesforce URL.
In order to do this, you'll first need to figure out what the URL looks like in your Salesforce account for
Leads and Contacts.
To do that, log in to Salesforce and look at the URL in your browser. For Leads, you can copy the URL, go
back to HubSpot and add a Set Property Value Workflow Action under the Lead branch.
Select the Contact Property Type and the Salesforce URL property
To enter the new value to set this property, you will paste the Lead URL from Salesforce that you just
copied.
You will see the domain for your Salesforce account, lightning.force.com/lightning/r/lead.
What we want to do is remove the Lead ID that is there and insert the contacts token Salesforce Lead ID
in order to get an updated look at this ID.
Automate Lead and Contact
Categorization in HubSpot
Next Steps
If you found this how-to guide helpful, consider our HubSpot Salesforce Integration course
for a more in-depth dive into the HubSpot Salesforce integration. In this 8-module course,
we cover the integration from A to Z with step-by-step walkthroughs to install, remedy, and
maximize the native integration.
Curious? Get started for free.
HubSpot Salesforce Integration
Course Preview
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