The client, a rapidly growing real estate brokerage, used HubSpot for its marketing operations and Salesforce for managing sales execution. HubSpot captured inbound leads from forms, paid ads, and engagement campaigns, while Salesforce tracked lead qualification, opportunity development, pipeline forecasting, and revenue reporting.
Individually, both systems worked well, but as the company scaled, it became clear that the lack of alignment between the two platforms was causing significant operational friction. Leads moved into HubSpot quickly, but they did not always sync properly with Salesforce. Some records failed to sync entirely, others arrived with missing fields, and many created duplicates.
The marketing and sales teams worked with different interpretations of where leads stood in the funnel due to lifecycle misalignment, and sales reps often received leads without a full history of marketing interactions. Marketing, in turn, lacked visibility into what happened after leads were handed off to sales, and could not evaluate the true impact of campaigns.
This disconnect created fragmented reporting and inconsistent funnel visibility, which hindered decision-making. Leadership struggled to track the flow from lead generation to closed revenue, and the company relied on spreadsheets, which were time-consuming and inconsistent. The business needed a reliable integration to unify both platforms and create a single source of truth across the customer lifecycle.
While HubSpot’s lead generation engine was effective, not all contacts synced correctly to Salesforce. Sync rules, field validations, and mapping issues caused incomplete data, delays in handoffs, and duplicates. This meant that sales teams worked from incomplete and inconsistent lists, and marketing had no confidence that Salesforce held the full volume of generated leads.
This problem resulted in missed opportunities and slow follow-up times. It also led to a lack of alignment between marketing and sales, causing friction between teams and wasted resources.
HubSpot and Salesforce had misaligned lifecycle stages. HubSpot’s lead scoring and lifecycle automation advanced leads to MQL, but Salesforce did not reflect these changes. A lead could be considered an MQL in HubSpot but still appear as a new or unqualified lead in Salesforce.
This misalignment created confusion for sales teams who couldn’t determine which leads were ready for outreach. Marketing also struggled to track progress beyond the MQL stage, leaving them without the data to measure campaign performance after the lead was handed off.
Sales and marketing teams lacked a shared view of the customer journey. Marketing tracked interactions in HubSpot, while sales tracked activities in Salesforce. This split created a fragmented experience where sales reps had no visibility into prior marketing interactions, and marketing had no insight into sales follow-ups.
Without a full view of engagement, both teams struggled to personalize communications and tailor outreach based on a lead’s complete history. This led to missed opportunities for deeper engagement and ultimately reduced conversion rates.
The integration between HubSpot and Salesforce had no monitoring system in place, causing recurring sync errors. Picklist mismatches, missing required fields, and inconsistent formatting were common, leading to discrepancies between the two platforms.
These errors resulted in significant manual effort to fix records, wasting time and resources. Sync failures piled up, leaving teams with inconsistent data and undermining confidence in the integration.
Because HubSpot and Salesforce stored separate versions of the same data, funnel reporting was inconsistent and incomplete. Leadership could not confidently track the journey from lead generation to closed revenue in a single view.
Key questions about lead volume, MQL to SQL conversion rates, pipeline impact, and campaign-driven revenue couldn’t be answered with confidence. The company relied on manually exporting data from both systems into spreadsheets, leading to slow, error-prone decision-making.
We redesigned the lead creation process in HubSpot to ensure consistency and completeness. All inbound leads from forms, paid campaigns, and third-party sources, were mapped into a single intake framework, ensuring that each new lead had consistent field values before syncing to Salesforce.
To prevent duplicates, we tightened duplicate filters and added normalization rules to maintain HubSpot’s data quality before it moved to Salesforce.
We implemented a new lead scoring model to evaluate each contact’s fit and behavior, including website activity and engagement with marketing campaigns. Once a lead met the sales-ready threshold, HubSpot automatically advanced the lead to MQL and queued it for sync with Salesforce.
This ensured that only qualified leads reached sales, reducing lead decay and improving conversion rates. The updated lifecycle model made the qualification process predictable, enabling more efficient handoffs and reducing the number of unqualified leads entering the sales pipeline.
We rebuilt the sync connector between HubSpot and Salesforce, ensuring consistent data flow across contacts, companies, and deals. By aligning field mappings and removing ambiguities, we ensured that HubSpot and Salesforce would exchange data reliably.
In addition, Salesforce sent back opportunity updates and sales activity data, providing HubSpot with real-time visibility into pipeline progression. This eliminated data mismatches and created a single source of truth.
We synchronized activity logs between HubSpot and Salesforce so that both teams could access a complete view of the customer journey. Marketing activities, such as email opens, form fills, and campaign participation, were synced to Salesforce.
Sales activities, such as calls, meetings, and tasks, were sent back to HubSpot. This provided both teams with a unified view of all customer interactions, allowing for more personalized and timely outreach.
We implemented an error management system to capture and categorize sync failures. Each error was documented, with root causes and solutions outlined for quick resolution.
Automated retries were set up for common errors, and Salesforce field requirements were aligned to prevent avoidable failures. We established regular health checks and quarterly audits to ensure sync stability and prevent errors from accumulating unnoticed.
With both systems aligned and lifecycle data reliable, we built unified dashboards that tracked the full funnel. These included lead source performance, MQL to SQL conversion, campaign-driven pipeline growth, opportunity velocity, and revenue attribution.
For the first time, both marketing and sales could analyze the same data and view a shared funnel. Leadership gained visibility into pipeline performance without relying on manual exports or spreadsheets.
The integration streamlined the lead-to-revenue process, creating a reliable system that increased efficiency, visibility, and conversion rates. By aligning HubSpot and Salesforce, the company was able to:
42% improvement in MQL to SQL conversion due to clear lifecycle rules and real-time syncing
Complete cross-team activity visibility with shared engagement logs across both platforms
Accurate and trustworthy revenue attribution, with full visibility of campaign impact on pipeline
Zero manual reconciliation between HubSpot and Salesforce, saving time and reducing errors
90% reduction in sync errors, ensuring stable data flows and eliminating discrepancies
Consistent lifecycle stages across the funnel, with clear definitions of MQL, SQL, Opportunity, and Customer
Reliable end-to-end reporting for leadership, enabling data-driven decision-making
Make every lead, deal, and report speak the same language.