Appreciation post: that third try finally got our CRM integration right

I spent like 3 weeks trying to get our Salesforce and HubSpot talking to each other. The first pass through the API docs took me 8 hours and broke our lead pipeline. Second attempt with a middleware tool took another 4 days and still had duplicate contacts. Finally hired a contractor who fixed it in 2 hours by just mapping the fields differently. Has anyone else burned way too much time on a sync project that should have been simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

val_ramirez7d ago

Oh man, tell me about it! I had a similar nightmare trying to sync Mailchimp and our own custom database a few years back. I thought I had the fields mapped right, but after two weeks of wrestling with it, I found out the date formats were totally off and it was saving every contact's birthday as January 1st. Totally trashed our automated birthday email campaign, and I had to manually fix like 500 records. What kills me is that if I had just tested it with one dummy contact first, I would have caught it in ten minutes. The contractor thing hits close to home too - I finally had my intern watch a YouTube video and he fixed the whole thing in an afternoon. Feels like we all learn these lessons the hard way, but it still stings every time.

dylan_sanchez7d ago

Four hundred emails is a lot but honestly who even opens birthday emails that much?

laura_black7d ago

Honestly, isn't that what testing environments are for lol? If you spent 3 weeks on it without validating field mappings first in a sandbox, that's kind of on you. A contractor fixing it in 2 hours just proves the original approach was the real problem.