Salesforce + HubSpot integration

HubSpot & Salesforce integration in a nutshell

Setting up a HubSpot Salesforce integration can seem daunting if your team is used to working in just one platform. But once you understand each tool’s strengths, it’s easy to see why combining them can be such a powerful driver for revenue growth.

Understanding their origins and strengths clarifies why combining them can be a game-changer for revenue operations.

The history behind the HubSpot-Salesforce integration

Salesforce, launched in 1999, pioneered the CRM space. As a global leader, it supports businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, across industries. 

Its strength lies in its unparalleled customization, robust APIs, and ability to build complex automations, making it the go-to for core CRM functionality.

HubSpot, emerging in the late 2000s, started as a marketing automation powerhouse and evolved into a full-suite CRM. It targets small to mid-sized businesses but scales well for larger operations. 

HubSpot leads in ease-of-use, particularly for marketing automation, lead capture, distribution, and attribution, with AI integrations enhancing its edge.

While these platforms compete, they’re not mutually exclusive. 

HubSpot shines in marketing and sales engagement tools, like deal tracking, follow-up reminders, and call insights, making it ideal for demand generation. Salesforce dominates in platform flexibility and enterprise-grade capabilities. 

Choosing one doesn’t mean forsaking the other; a strategic integration can harness both for maximum impact.

Revenue as the core focus

The real focus isn’t the tools themselves, it’s revenue. 

Both platforms exist to streamline marketing, sales, and customer success, driving efficient, scalable growth. Losing sight of this by fixating on technical features risks missing the point. 

A well-executed setup aligns HubSpot and Salesforce to revenue goals, ensuring teams work smarter, not harder.

Which CRM is better, HubSpot or Salesforce?

Some professionals are often surprised to learn that a company might use both HubSpot and Salesforce. At first glance, it seems redundant,after all, aren’t they competitors? 

The answer is yes, they are. However, there are many valid and strategic reasons to use both platforms in tandem.

One of the most common use cases is leveraging HubSpot’s best-in-class marketing automation tools while relying on Salesforce as the core CRM. 

Salesforce is widely regarded as the gold standard for CRM systems due to its extensive customization capabilities, scalability, and robust enterprise-level support. 

When implemented correctly, using HubSpot and Salesforce together allows organizations to benefit from the strengths of both platforms.

However, if not configured properly, using both systems can result in confusion, inefficiencies, and duplicated effort, ultimately delivering the worst of both worlds.

That’s exactly what we help our clients avoid.

While HubSpot and Salesforce do offer overlapping features, there are key distinctions.

 HubSpot often excels in usability, marketing functionality, and sales engagement features. On the other hand, Salesforce leads in CRM depth, customization, integration breadth, and overall enterprise capability.

For many of our clients, replacing Salesforce simply isn't an option. It’s too deeply embedded in their operations. 

At the same time, they want to take advantage of HubSpot’s powerful marketing and engagement tools. Integrating both platforms becomes a smart, strategic move.

That said, it’s important to understand that the native HubSpot-Salesforce integration, while easy to activate, is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution. It requires thoughtful configuration, ongoing management, and alignment between your processes in both systems. 

Turning on the integration without a clear plan can lead to sync errors and operational issues.

Already dealing with sync issues? Talk to an expert today.

Common integration challenges and sync errors

Sync errors occur when something goes wrong during the data exchange between HubSpot and Salesforce. 

This can happen when syncing records such as contacts, leads, opportunities, or accounts, something breaks in the process, and the data fails to transfer properly between the two systems.

When sync errors happen, they can create serious issues. 

One of the most damaging scenarios is when a prospect submits a form through HubSpot, someone who fits your ideal customer profile and is ready to engage, but due to a sync error, their information never makes it into Salesforce…

As a result, the sales team is never alerted, and that high-quality lead slips through the cracks. 

Unfortunately, we see this happen far more often than most teams realize. It’s a frustrating and costly problem for everyone involved.

What makes it even more frustrating is that these sync errors are often caused by relatively simple issues, duplicate records, mismatched field types, conflicts with a third-party integration, or a misconfigured automation inside either HubSpot or Salesforce. 

Resolving these issues requires more than just turning the integration on; it demands careful coordination across systems, consistent data hygiene, and ongoing monitoring to ensure everything continues to work together as intended.

Why clear platform responsibilities matter

One key piece of advice I always share with clients using both HubSpot and Salesforce is the importance of clearly defining the role and responsibilities of each platform. 

Without this clarity, it’s easy to run into conflicting automations, especially when it comes to lead routing or lead assignment. These processes should be owned by one system, not both.

For example, if you're using HubSpot to manage lead capture, lead routing, and lead attribution, it’s best to complete those processes within HubSpot before pushing the data into Salesforce. 

Conversely, if pipeline reporting and pipeline-related automation are managed in Salesforce, keep that logic confined there, and allow any necessary data to sync back to HubSpot after the fact.

Trying to build overlapping automations in both systems often leads to errors, duplication, or workflows that cancel each other out. Instead, automation and data ownership should be clearly segmented by function and purpose, and this division should be well-documented.

Establishing that clarity up front ensures both tools work together efficiently without stepping on each other’s toes.

Hubspot campaign ≠ Salesforce campaign

One important area that our clients run into with using both HubSpot and Salesforce is campaigns. 

You'll notice that both HubSpot and Salesforce have records that they call campaigns. A HubSpot campaign and a Salesforce campaign are not the same thing. They have the same name, and they kind of deal with the same things, but they are not the same tool, and do not have the same function. 

So oftentimes we'll have people who get confused, and asking how come my HubSpot campaigns won't sync to my Salesforce campaigns? 

We have more information and articles about that and we can dive into that into some,but at a high level, HubSpot campaigns deal with asset reporting, how well a landing page performs, and an email performs. Salesforce is going to track leads and opportunities. 

So the people, the companies that one is trying to sell to, how have they progressed after one has reached out to them through certain campaigns? Did they eventually become customers? Did they convert into opportunities? 

There's two different functions there, and just remember, just because they have the same name, it doesn't mean that they are the same thing.

How to approach third-party integrations

So you may go buy a third party tool like Gong or Chili Piper or any of these other marketing or sales tools that you could add on to your CRM. 

Before you just plug them in, you're going to have to ask yourself every single time. 

Do I want this integrated directly into HubSpot or directly into Salesforce? 

There are reasons why you may do either or, but typically what we recommend is that one tool becomes the one that you use for integrations. So oftentimes we'll pick Salesforce. Salesforce is going to be our hub and then everything else connected to it is going to be a spoke. 

What you don't want is Gong connected to Salesforce and Chili Piper connected to HubSpot, and sometimes the integrations are connected to both. 

You want to pick one hub where all of the integrations lock in and get connected while the other tool is not tied to integrations. 

When this happens, it's a lot easier for us to track down when something goes wrong, but when tools are connected haphazardly, it becomes really difficult to manage them.

Handling leads in HubSpot and Salesforce

Another major topic that often comes up when working with both HubSpot and Salesforce is how each platform handles leads. 

And the first thing to understand is that the term "lead" means very different things depending on the system and depending on who you're talking to.

In general business terms, a "lead" might simply mean someone interested in your product or service. But within HubSpot and Salesforce, a lead is a specific type of object with its own structure and behavior.

In HubSpot, the "lead" feature is relatively new. It functions as a sub-object of a contact, allowing teams to track a contact’s movement through the marketing and sales funnel before they officially enter the pipeline. It’s a way to represent intent and qualification within the lifecycle of a single contact.

In Salesforce, a lead is a distinct record type, essentially a placeholder object that may represent a person or company. When that lead is qualified, it gets converted into separate records: a contact, an account, and potentially an opportunity. It’s a more traditional and rigid approach to lead management.

Here’s the challenge: despite the similar naming, HubSpot leads and Salesforce leads are not the same thing, and the platforms don’t support native syncing between the two. 

This often leads clients to ask whether they can build a custom integration to make them sync. While that’s technically possible, we usually advise against it.

In most cases, if you're connecting both HubSpot and Salesforce, it’s best not to rely on the HubSpot leads feature. Instead, it’s more effective to manage the lead lifecycle through Salesforce’s objects, or even skip the Salesforce lead object entirely and work directly with contacts, accounts, and opportunities.

This is especially true for B2B businesses with a well-defined TAM (Total Addressable Market) or ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). 

For example, if you know there are 1,200 potential companies that could buy from you, and you already have 100 in your CRM, it doesn’t make sense to treat every new interaction as a lead that needs to be converted. You likely already have the account or contact in your system, so duplicating that effort creates unnecessary friction.

Many of our clients in this situation choose to bypass the lead object entirely and operate directly within accounts, contacts, and opportunities. 

While this approach does introduce its own complexities, we’ve developed a playbook for exactly this use case. We’d be happy to share it if you're considering this setup, it’s a proven method for aligning HubSpot and Salesforce without creating data chaos.

You’ve just stumbled upon integration experts

When it comes to using both HubSpot and Salesforce, RevBlack sits in a unique position. 

There are not many companies that truly are full consulting partners of both HubSpot and Salesforce.

RevBlack truly is situated where we are full partners of both, and honestly, we don't really care what your tech stack looks like. We're not incentivized either way to push you into one tool versus the other. 

We will give you an unbiased opinion on what you should do. 

We love using both HubSpot and Salesforce, but not every company should. Some companies probably should be just Salesforce and some companies should probably just be HubSpot, and if you're unsure if you have the right tech stack in the first place, we're more than willing to help you decide that.

When one makes the decision later everything should be migrated, whether it's all to HubSpot, all to Salesforce, but we help companies who use both together or who are in the process of just having one, Salesforce or HubSpot.