Orange Marketing
One challenge B2B marketers encounter when switching their organization to HubSpot is the need to integrate their Salesforce CRM into a separate sales enablement tool like Outreach or Salesloft. It never goes well.
HubSpot and Salesforce have an excellent integration that works really well. Adding the third sales enablement tool for sales emails like Outreach or Salesloft typically results in operational challenges and failures, however, culminating in annoyed customers, uncontacted prospects, and lost revenue.
Data Integrity: The Three-Way Dance’s Challenge for B2B Marketers
Maintaining contact data integrity is the main challenge with using three platforms, including CRM functionality, especially with different teams working in their own tool (e.g., SDRs in Outreach, AEs in Salesforce, and Marketing in HubSpot). For B2B marketers, this challenge is amplified due to the complexity and longer sales cycles typical in B2B transactions.
Each platform has its own status matrix for tracking lead progression and biases for how it works. If the definitions are not matched across all three platforms in use and data isn’t synced bidirectionally between all three, you won’t have a source of truth. It will quickly become difficult to determine where a particular lead may be in the process, especially when dealing with multiple decision-makers within target companies.
This will, in turn, cause the sales team to lose trust in the system and drive them to develop makeshift solutions (like spreadsheets) to keep track of everything outside of the systems. This will then further complicate the search for the source of truth and defeat the point of having a CRM in the first place.
Meanwhile, marketing will struggle to determine who is supposed to get nurture emails, who is supposed to get retargeting ads, who to use to create lookalike audiences, and more. For B2B marketers, these misalignments can result in missed opportunities for account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and personalized communication efforts.
How to overcome this data integrity challenge? There are two options. The easiest way to avoid having to manage three platforms is to convince your organization to use HubSpot Sales Pro for sales enablement, even if it wants to (or needs to) stick with Salesforce for Sales.
Alternatively, if your organization is set on (or locked into) using a separate sales enablement tool, you can implement procedures to ensure data integrity across three platforms. While these will consume time and energy, they will be preferred to having to unwind significant data consistency issues down the line.
Using HubSpot for Sales Enablement
HubSpot Sales Pro includes most functions offered by popular sales enablement tools. Even if your organization uses Salesforce as the primary sales CRM, your sales team can use these tools, eliminating the need for a third tool. It’s not just our team that finds HubSpot to be a great solution for increasing your sales team’s productivity – HubSpot Sales is near the top of the sales enablement and sales engagement rankings on G2.
HubSpot can be set up to automatically sync with Salesforce, so with only two platforms, you need to manage only one connection and two sets of status definitions. Additionally, if Gmail powers your email, HubSpot offers a Sales Chrome extension that allows you to track and send emails without logging in to the platform.
Avoiding a third platform significantly reduces data complexity and data management challenges. It also helps keep the number of subscriptions your team is using from growing and may save your organization from having to hire an additional ops team member to manage the complex data flows.
Stuck With Three: Now What?
Should you find yourself in a three-platform situation despite your best efforts (or join an organization using three platforms and refusing to change), you’ll want to take several actions to prevent data issues from getting out of hand:
- Create one unified set of statuses across all systems. You can create a matrix spreadsheet with each system’s available statuses and match them based on how your organization uses them. This way, you’ll be able to configure bidirectional data syncs across all three platforms to keep statuses unified.
a. If your organization is using an additional status for the calling cycle, this can be contained in the sales enablement platform, but it needs to be matched to the main status matrix to enable data syncing.
b. These definitions should clarify where a contact is globally in marketing context (i.e., HubSpot Lifecycle Stage) and indicate which team the contact is with. - Define deal and opportunity stages to keep them synced between Salesforce and HubSpot.
- Create a place to keep track of all major changes (property settings, workflow revisions, user changes, etc.) to ensure they are made in all systems. This central repository helps B2B marketing and sales teams stay informed about system updates and maintain consistency.
- Create a test plan to ensure data syncs are working as intended. Regular testing helps identify and resolve sync issues promptly, maintaining data integrity.
- Set up a monthly meeting to review changes and execute the test plan. Regular reviews ensure ongoing alignment and address any emerging issues.
As you can see, maintaining data integrity in a three-system sales and marketing environment will require a significant amount of effort and attention to detail by all teams. While some of this work will still be required even if you’re only using one system (particularly defining statuses and deal stages), the level of effort decreases significantly with each system removed from the equation.
Streamline Your Tech Stack with Orange Marketing
Managing multiple platforms can be overwhelming for B2B marketers, leading to data inconsistencies and operational challenges. Simplify your process with a HubSpot migration. Orange Marketing, a certified HubSpot Diamond Partner, offers seamless migration services backed by extensive experience and over 90 five-star reviews.
- HubSpot Diamond Partner
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- Over 100 Five-Star Reviews
Don't let a complex tech stack hold you back. Contact Orange Marketing for a free consultation and discover how our expert team can streamline your HubSpot migration and help you focus on growing your business.
