The debate between Marketo and Hubspot has never been as fierce as it is now. Seems every day someone is turning orange. This article covers the main differences between the Hubspot and Marketo integration into Salesforce. If you are considering platforms or you are trying to understand the differences between the integrations this is a good starting point.
The debate between Marketo and Hubspot has never been as fierce as it is now. Seems every day someone is turning orange. There is no denying the pace at which Hubspot innovates and ads new features. By the time I write this article, odds are it will be out of date already.
The reason I am writing this is because I’ve searched the web for articles that describe these differences and honestly there is nothing that really describes the differences other than fluffy surface level stuff.
This by no means will be technically exhaustive but it will go deeper and talk about real differences and why they matter.
I am going to dive into the differences between the Salesforce integration between Marketo and Hubspot and why it matters to the business.
This article is not going to dive into every nook and cranny of the differences between the syncs but it’s going to go over the main differences in hopes to help you better understand how the salesforce syncs work and to help you determine what platform will work best for you and your situation.
The sync to your CRM matters because if you ever want to get accurate reports, stay in sync with sales, or make sure you customers have a good experience you need your technology to talk well to each other.
If you don’t, your customers won’t get follow up that they are expecting. You won’t have the slightest idea what marketing is working for the business, and sales won’t respect marketing and ops because they will feel that the system is constantly broken.
The CRM is where you customer data lives. It’s where sales is working(hopefully), keeping track of their relationships with customers and potential customers. It's really not that complicated but the modern b2b sales cycle can sometimes trap you by being too into the weeds.
All B2B SaaS go to market systems are building off of the data that lives in there.
So knowing that, if you don’t have your sales data synced into your marketing operations platform and have marketing data going into the CRM to be matched with Sales data, you have no chance of ever knowing what marketing is working or more importantly is not working.
With that understanding in mind lets dive into the differences of how these platforms stay in sync and the impact that will have on the business.
Both platforms sync and integrate with salesforce nicely! They have some differences but most don’t have a significant impact on how well the system will run for your go to market operations.
What matters more is the system you set up with the tool you have.
How often do they both sync to salesforce: Marketo syncs every 5 minutes. Hubspot syncs over every 15 minutes. This is not really that significant.
Speed to lead won’t be affected because you can force syncs when you need them to happen in both systems.
Once you set up the integration and connection in Marketo there is no going back! You can only sync to that salesforce instance and no other.
Hubspot allows you to disconnect the sync and you can resync with another salesforce instance.
Hubspot is more forgiving and agile, which may be a surprise.
You really need to plan out your fields and the mapping before you sync the two systems. I recommend having this all mapped in a spreadsheet before making the connections.
In Marketo when an update is made in one platform the update is made in the other platform.
With Hubspot that's not always the case. Hubspot allows you to set field priority rules in your mapping, like update if empty or always update regardless of where the change was made right within the integration configuration.
In Marketo you have to create the field first in Salesforce and then it will automatically sync down to Marketo and they will be in sync.
In Hubspot you need to create the property in both systems of the same type and values. Then you need to map them in Hubspot.
Hubspot by default will sync all contacts, unless you setup an inclusion list. You use this list if you want to keep salesforce clean and only include the contacts that are sales ready, which you may call MQL. If you want to limit the records that are coming from Salesforce into Marketo you need to set up the selective sync in Salesforce which is only available with an Enterprise edition.
Marketo by default will sync down everyone from salesforce when you launch the sync. After that initial sync the every 5 min sync will apply to everyone in the initial sync.
For anyone new you have to sync with a “Sync Person to SFDC” flow step in a marketo program. Once synced those records will remain in sync. To limit what is coming down from salesforce you need to setup a Boolean field in Salesforce with a value like this: “Sync with Marketo = False.”
What syncs bi-directionally:
People sync with Leads and Contacts
Programs and Statuses sync with Salesforce Campaigns and campaign statuses. This data and setup is key for how marketo reports
What syncs one way:
Accounts and Opportunities sync down from Salesforce into Marketo and are read only. This data is also key for reporting.
Hubspots sync is much the same except you have more bidirectional syncs available.
What syncs bi-directionally:
Contact sync with Leads, Contacts
Company syncs with Accounts
Deals sync with Opportunities
What syncs one way from Hubspot to Salesforce?
Tasks sync with Activities.
Engagements with Activities.
What does not Sync at All:
Campaigns. These are fundamentally different in Hubspot and Salesforce. What you decide to do here will greatly effect the maintenance to launch marketing campaigns, and how you will report on their effectiveness at the end.
Duplicates can greatly affect your reporting. So its worth understanding how each system handles them.
Marketo does not deduplicate leads coming down from salesforce. If it's coming from Salesforce even with the same email address it will still be created. This is one reason why many recommend a 1 to 1 sync between Marketo and Salesforce. (Yes I know there are reasons to not do this.) But it is one benefit of doing it.
You’ll need to account for how you want to handle duplicates in Marketo.
Hubspot dedupes leads/contacts based on email address. It will automatically dedupe salesforce leads or contacts by email address when they sync. If there are dupes then Hubspot will sync with the record that was most recently updated by salesforce.
Hubspot deduplicates Accounts by associated contacts. Once a contact is associated to a company that is also synced with Salesforce it will not sync to a different Salesforce account.
There is no deduplication on Deals.
Whats difference between Marketo and Hubspots integration into Saleforce and how will that impact the business?
If you have Hubspot you will have a flexible system that will allow you to customize the sync to the way your business runs with enough data to report on whats working and deliver an excellent customer experience. You won’t have to worry about duplicates as much if you choose to limit who is synced between both systems.
Hubspot is more forgiving, say sales leadership wants to burn down salesforce and start over from scratch, you can just roll with it and connect to the new salesforce instance. You don’t need to burn it all down with them. ( Been here before?!)
You will need to decide what a campaign is and how you will build and measure campaigns whether thats with Hubspot's definition of a campaign, or Salesforces definition of a campaign or both.
If you have Marketo you will have an integration that is designed to sync with Salesforce in every way. It will feel like they were built for one another. (Which they were, Marketo is not a CRM, where as Hubspot does have a CRM.) If you choose not to do the 1 to 1 sync of databases then you will have to figure out a way to handle records coming down from Salesforce into Marketo with the potential for duplicates.
For campaigns you just need to decide what a campaign is and what that structure is like once. How you measure campaigns and what you decide will be true in both systems.
Once you are connected there is no going back without a rip and replace
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