case study
Best Practices in Integrating Salesforce with Hubspot for more accurate lead-to-sales management
Overview
While HubSpot provides a straightforward way to integrate with HubSpot, it only provides limited options for controlling what ends up in Salesforce. While it is possible to control which lead or contact in Salesforce is updated with HubSpot activities, it is significantly more difficult to control exactly what comes into Salesforce and what to do based on the type of activity.
For instance, form submission for content download and for demo requests have dramatically different implications for sales. However, HubSpot provides no clean way for differentiating this—both types are logged as activities in Salesforce and more custom work needs to be done in Salesforce to treat the two differently.
This case study provides how we handled this for one of our clients.
Key Challenge
The client has over 60,000 contacts in HubSpot and a similar number of leads and contacts in Salesforce. Many are employees of customer accounts who wish to be notified of various non-marketing events such as product updates, legal/regulatory updates and so forth.
The client easily sends out tens of thousands of emails each month on various updates of one product or another—in addition to marketing emails such as newsletters, new product and feature releases, and so on.
As far as the sales team was concerned, these are not marketing events and whether anyone opened or downloaded anything was of no interest to them.
In fact, they did not consider even the downloading of marketing assets such as white papers a key event since most of the people who downloaded an asset didn’t want to be contacted by sales yet.
As a consequence, the sales team was frustrated by the huge amount of “activities” logged against a contact’s or lead’s record with no easy means of really finding those ready for sales engagement.
The VP of Sales asked us to find a way for her sales team to know when a prospect wanted to be contacted so that the sale rep could reach out immediately.
What We Did
The solution came in multiple parts:
- We stopped the practice of allowing prospects to download assets from links as this created many false-positives when a virus detection software automatically checks the link and this registers as a click on HubSpot (or any other marketing automation tool)
- Instead, all asset downloads were to come from form fills. This not only ensured that a human was the cause for the download, but also allowed our client to progressively enrich the prospect’s information, and also acted as an explicit opt-in.
- We reduced the large number of forms they had (about 68) to three—one for asset downloads, one for a demo request, and one for generic contact us. This standardization enabled us to ensure that:
- Fields and values in HubSpot were identical with fields and values in HubSpot eliminating the issues of missing values in Salesforce because of data inconsistencies.
- We can ask for complete contact information when the prospects want to see a demo or to be contacted by sales, but only start with a minimal request and progressively fill more for all asset download requests.
- We then created workflows that automatically assign an open task for a sales rep to follow up with the prospect in the case of contact us and demo requests.
Results
Because of these improvements:
- The sales team saw a 127% increase in demo requests that were fulfilled in the following quarter, due to almost 100% of the demo requests being handled by a sales rep, the same day the requests came in.
- It also enabled the marketing team to better understand the kinds of leads that sales reps were looking for as the separation of demo request/contact us form fills and asset download form fills enabled improved analysis of lead sources and types of leads.
- Finally, marketing was also able to determine the true level of prospect activity as the previous use of links for asset downloads had significantly distorted the number of prospects that actually downloaded assets.
Marketing able to determine the true level of prospect activity
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