Integrating Drift with your CRM and Marketing Automation System

How to integrate Drift with your Marketing and Sales stack

Integrating Drift with a single system is straightforward, but most companies with a strong marketing effort have both a Marketing and Sales Automation System. Once multiple systems are introduced the flow of data becomes an important factor in order to prevent duplicates and improper lead handling.

Below is a guide for connecting Drift to your marketing automation systems and Salesforce.

High level of the data flow

The ideal state is a cyclical flow, where Drift sends data into Marketo/HubSpot/Pardot/Eloqua, Marketo/HubSpot/Pardot/Eloqua sends to Salesforce, and Drift then reads data from Salesforce. 

• Drift is connected to both Marketo/HubSpot/Pardot/Eloqua and Salesforce
• Drift sends leads to Marketo/HubSpot/Pardot/Eloqua
• Drift sends activities to Salesforce
• Drift reads lead, contact, and account ownership from Salesforce.

   

The Set Up

First things first, let's connect Drift to Marketo / connect Drift to HubSpot / connect Drift to Pardot or connect Drift to Eloqua, and connect Drift to Salesforce

Configure Marketo

Skip to a section below if you are not a Marketo user.

Next, let's set up the lead flow from Drift to Marketo. Head to your Marketo settings and turn on the following settings.

You'll also want to configure which field in Marketo will receive the information for the lead owner (the agent in Drift who booked a meeting with the site visitor, the agent who was in the conversation, and the agent who closed the conversation) In this example, Drift Conversation Owner is an example custom field we created in Marketo. 

Configure HubSpot

Skip to a section below if you are not a HubSpot user.

Next, let's set up the lead flow from Drift to HubSpot. Head to your HubSpot settings and turn on the following settings.

Configure Pardot

Skip to a section below if you are not a Pardot user.

Next, let's set up the lead flow from Drift to Pardot. Head to your Pardot settings and turn on the following settings.

You'll also want to configure which field in Pardot will receive the information for the lead owner (the agent in Drift who booked a meeting with the site visitor, the agent who was in the conversation, and the agent who closed the conversation) In this example, Drift Conversation Owner is an example custom field we created in Pardot.

Configure Eloqua

Skip to a section below if you are not an Eloqua user.

Next, let's set up the lead flow from Drift to Eloqua. Head to your Eloqua settings and turn on the following settings.

Configure Salesforce

Let's start by sending the chat and meeting activities into Salesforce, and turning off the lead flow into Salesforce. Head to your Salesforce configuration page and set up the following (note - you'll want to configure the retry time to fit within your processing window; e.g. how long it takes for you to generate a new lead from your MAP into Salesforce):

Lastly, let's set up the ability for Drift to read ownership data from Salesforce. This is done in two parts

1. Drift Salesforce Ownership Routing, which is available on the professional plan and above.  
2. Drift Salesforce Account Syncing, which is available on the Premium (formerly Company) plan and above which allow reverse-IP intelligence with Drift Intel.

You're done!

Thanks for reading and going through the setup with Drift, marketing automation, and Salesforce. Let us know what works, what you found out, and what challenges you faced going through this process. We use customer feedback to improve our suggested practices!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why send leads into Marketing Automation instead of sending them into Salesforce directly? 
Sending leads directly into Salesforce will prevent your marketing automation platform from recording the website attribution that marketers love so much. Because Drift passes along the MAP's Cookie when we create a new lead in your marketing system, your marketing team will be able to track the original source and the website journey of these leads before they ever interacted with Drift.

Why send activities into Salesforce and not Marketing Automation?
Unfortunately, the activities that Drift sends into marketing automation systems are not able to be synced into Salesforce in all cases because they are custom activity objects. You can still use these activities in your marketing automation platform to start workflows, rung programs, or attribute success to Drift interactions; however they are not able to be passed to your Salesforce instance in a readable, sales effective format. If you are using Drift with only the bot (no agents), this is less of an issue as all data captured is purely Marketing data. However if you have any agents live on the platform or calendars connected, you should send activities also to Salesforce so they get proper attribution and into the hands of salespersons properly. 

What happens if I send activities into Salesforce but the lead from my marketing automation system hasn't synced over yet?
If the lead/contact does not exist in Salesforce yet, the activity will fail to append to that record. When connected with Salesforce, we'll retry after a configurable delay, set in your Salesforce Sync Settings!