Sync activities and tasks between HubSpot and Salesforce

After installing the HubSpot-Salesforce integration, you can sync HubSpot marketing and sales activities with Salesforce tasks. Syncing HubSpot activities like email opens, clicks, and form submissions with Salesforce tasks gives your team a complete view of the customer journey, interactions, and activities in a single, unified system, improving collaboration and efficiency. You can also report on HubSpot activities within Salesforce.

Before you get started

Before you begin setting up the sync, please note the following: 

• Turning on the sync will not automatically import all task data from Salesforce to HubSpot. Individual records will sync when they are created or updated in Salesforce. To import all data into HubSpot, use an import.
• Once you select a HubSpot activity to sync to Salesforce, all HubSpot activities of that type will sync.
• Emails created in Salesforce using the Einstein Activity Capture tool don't sync to HubSpot, as they aren't created as task (email) activities in Salesforce.

Types of syncs between HubSpot and Salesforce 

Depending on how your Salesforce activities are set up, whether you want the sync to be one-way or two-way, and which activities you want to sync, there are two types of sync you can choose from: 

• Timeline sync
• Activity sync 

Timeline sync 

It's a one-way sync from HubSpot to Salesforce that syncs HubSpot timeline events to Salesforce as tasks. 

HubSpot events supported by the Timeline sync 

The following HubSpot events are supported by the Timeline sync: 

• Form submissions
• Marketing email sends, opens, and clicks 
• Sales email sends, opens, and clicks
• Meetings scheduled 
• Calls made
• Notes created
• Sales content viewed
• Tasks created
• Events from installed integrations

Sync timeframes for HubSpot timeline events to Salesforce tasks

Please keep in mind the following timeframes, after the sync is turned on:

• Sales emails, tasks, meetings, notes, and sales content views: these activities will only sync after the contact has been triggered to sync. Any activities from prior to the contact sync will not be synced retroactively. 
• Marketing email events: only marketing email events that occurred within 30 days of the contact being synced will sync to Salesforce.
• Form submissions: only form submissions that occurred within one year of the contact being synced will sync to Salesforce. 

Please note:

• Every time a contact opens or clicks a marketing email sent from your HubSpot account, HubSpot deduplicates each type of activity on the object record timeline. If you have set up these email activities to sync to Salesforce, the corresponding Salesforce tasks are created via HubSpot's Email Events API, which does not deduplicate activities.
• If a contact opens or clicks a marketing email multiple times, multiple Salesforce tasks will be created.
• If a contact forwards a marketing email to another recipient, any subsequent email opens and clicks will be attributed to the original contact, and more Salesforce tasks will be created.

How to set up the Timeline sync

1. In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the top navigation bar.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Integrations > Connected Apps.
3. Search for and select Salesforce. 
4. Click the Activities tab. 
5. In the Timeline section, next to the respective HubSpot event, click to toggle the switch on to sync that event to a Salesforce task.
6. To specify the Salesforce task type for the activity, click the Salesforce Task Type dropdown menu and select a task type. If you don't select a specific task type (i.e., -- No task type -- is selected), the activity will sync to Salesforce as a task without a type.

Activity sync

It's a two-way sync between HubSpot and Salesforce. This type of sync allows for bidirectional syncing, giving more granular control over what syncs and in what direction. 

To turn on the Activity sync: 

1. In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the top navigation bar.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Integrations > Connected Apps.
3. Search for and select Salesforce. 
4. Click the Feature Discovery tab. 

5. On the Enable new Activity Sync card, click Install. 

Please note: if you turn on both the Activity sync and the Timeline sync for the same event type, ‌the Activity sync will override the corresponding Timeline sync setting to prevent duplicate records from being created in Salesforce.

HubSpot events supported by the Activity sync 

The following HubSpot events are supported by ‌Activity sync: 

• Tasks
• Emails
• Calls
• Meetings

How to setup the Activity sync

1. In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the top navigation bar.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Integrations > Connected Apps.
3. Search for and select Salesforce. 
4. Click the Activities tab. 
5. Click the Tasks, Emails, Calls, or Meetings tab to sync the respective HubSpot activity.
6. For the event type that you want to sync, click to toggle the sync switch on. 

7. In the Creating and Updating [Activity] section, review what happens when an activity event is created or updated in HubSpot and Salesforce.
8. In the Deleting [Activity] section, select what happens in HubSpot and Salesforce when ‌an activity event is deleted.
9. In the Deduplication by Field Mapping section, click the dropdown menu and select the field mapping that you want to use to deduplicate the activity events. 
10. In the Resolve Sync Conflict Rule section, click the dropdown menu and select the app that should be preferred to resolve any conflict of data.

11. In the Associations section, if you want to sync the contact association and the account association, click to toggle the Sync Account association and Sync Contact association switches on. 

• • For each association, click the Primary association field dropdown menu and select the field you want HubSpot to use to associate the two objects.
  • Click the Association label dropdown menu and select the association label you want to use.
  • Click the Sync direction dropdown menu and select how you want the association to sync between HubSpot and Salesforce (Two-way sync, Salesforce to HubSpot only, or HubSpot to Salesforce only).

12. In the Property Mappings section, review how Salesforce fields sync to HubSpot activity properties. Hover over a property and click Actions, then select Edit to edit the mapping or Delete to delete the mapping. Click Add new mapping to add a new field mapping.

Report on HubSpot activities in Salesforce

1. Navigate to your Salesforce account.
2. Click the Reports tab.
3. In the top right, click New Report.
4. In the left sidebar menu, click Activities to see a list of all activity-based reports.
5. Click Activities with Contacts or Activities with Leads (separate reports must be created for contacts and leads).
6. In the top right, click Start report.

7. To filter by a specific activity type or activity date, click the Filters tab in the top left. Then click the existing default filters to edit them, or click Add filter to search for other filters you wish to apply. 
8. In the top right, click Run Report to run the report or click Save to save the report. 

Troubleshoot activity sync errors

You may encounter the following error message when syncing HubSpot marketing and sales activities to Salesforce tasks:

Problem getting task info from Salesforce. We're having trouble getting task type data from Salesforce. This could be because the Salesforce user doesn't have permission to read the Type field.

To resolve this error, follow the two steps below. 

1. Ensure that the Type field is visible to all profiles in Salesforce

1. Navigate to your Salesforce account:

• • Salesforce Classic:
    • In the upper right, click Setup (or [Your Name] > Setup).
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Build > Customize > Activities > Task Fields.
    • In the list of fields, click Type.
  • Lightning Experience:
    • In the upper right, click the settings gear icon and select settings Setup.
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Platform Tools > Objects and Fields > Object Manager.
    • In the list of objects, click Task.
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Fields & Relationships. 
    • In the list of fields, click Type.

2. Click Set Field-Level Security.

3. In the header row of the Field-Level Security for Profile table, select the Visible checkbox.
4. At the top, click Save. This will make the task type field visible to all profiles.

2. Ensure that the Type field is visible on the Task Page Layout in Salesforce

1. Navigate to your Salesforce account:

• • Salesforce Classic:
    • In the upper right, click Setup (or [Your Name] > Setup).
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Build > Customize > Activities > Task Page Layouts.
    • On the left of Task Layout, click Edit.
  • Lightning Experience:
    • In the upper right, click the gear icon settings and select settings Setup.
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Platform Tools > Objects and Fields > Object Manager.
    • In the list of objects, click Task.
    • In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Page Layouts. 
    • Click Task Layout.

2. Click the Type item in the toolbar and drag and drop it into the desired location on the page layout.
3. In the top left of the toolbar, click Save to apply your layout changes.

After you've made the Type field visible to all profiles and added it to your task layout in Salesforce, check if the error is resolved in HubSpot:

1. In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the top navigation bar. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Integrations > Connected Apps.
2. Click Salesforce. 
3. Navigate to the Activities tab. 
4. If the error has been resolved, the error message will no longer appear in this section.