We have a series of articles on the Salesforce integration:

This article covers a lot, so use the links below to jump to the relevant section if you would like to look up something specific!

Planhat's bidirectional Salesforce integration enables you to bring your CRM data into Planhat quickly and easily. Within Planhat, all your different data (from a variety of sources) is consolidated, meaning you get a full 360 degree view of your customers. You can analyse your data in Planhat in lots of advanced ways without requiring your developers, display your data clearly for greater insights, and automatically take action in response to data for maximum efficiency and productivity. With Planhat's unlimited user model, it's not just Customer Success teams who can benefit from all the features - Sales, Marketing and Product etc. can use it too.

In addition, you can push data from Planhat to Salesforce, so if you do have colleagues still using Salesforce, you can ensure everyone is the same page with up-to-date customer information. For example, you could sync Planhat customer analysis such as Health Scores into Salesforce to help your Sales team identify potential expansion opportunities or references. Or, since Planhat can create End User (Contact) records from various connected systems, you could consider syncing End Users (Contacts) to Salesforce if your Marketing team is working there.

📝 In this article, we will give an overview of what's synced (data mapping), sync frequency, the basic principles of the integration (sync direction, filtering, and custom field mapping), and then take you through the steps of connecting the integration and configuring each model/object section.

Some of the data mapping is predefined (e.g. the Salesforce Account object is always mapped to the Planhat Company model), but there is also a great deal of flexibility possible.

Here's an overview of the model/object pairings in the Salesforce integration.

Further details:

The Salesforce integration syncs your data automatically, making it simple to keep both Planhat and Salesforce up to date, without requiring extra manual effort from you.

You can also manually sync, on demand - either all models/objects, a specific model/object, or data related to a particular Company.

Quick summary of the main, default automatic sync:

Before we deep-dive into the details of configuring the Salesforce integration, let's go through the main principles.

Once you've connected the integration to your Salesforce account, you'll see a series of sections, each corresponding to a Planhat model mapping to a Salesforce object. The main parts of these sections are:

We'll go through each of these here.

Here, we're referring to the main sync direction for each model/object section. The Planhat Salesforce integration is bidirectional, meaning you can choose to push data to, and pull data from, each system.

You set the sync direction independently for each model/object pairing, offering a great deal of flexibility.

The default is "Not Syncing", so you select another direction to enable the sync of that model/object.

For all objects other than Case, which is a one-way sync from Salesforce to Planhat (so only "Receive from Salesforce" is possible), you can choose from "Send to Salesforce", "Receive from Salesforce", or "Both Directions".

It's possible to change the sync direction later on - e.g. you could initially select "Receive from Salesforce" when you're setting up your Planhat tenant, and then change it to "Both Directions" later on.

When you set up custom field mapping, you can also choose the sync direction for each field - we'll discuss this when we talk about field mapping later in this article.

For most model/object sections, you have the ability to apply a filter to specify which records are included in the sync from Salesforce.

A common use case is in the Company/Account section, to specify that you only want to sync in Salesforce Accounts with an "Account Type" of "Customer" - that is, they sync in when they become paying customers, rather than prospects. Here is an example of how that might look:

As you can see, the basic principle is:

For most model/object sections, you can set up custom field mapping: link up specific Planhat fields with specific Salesforce fields. (Note that the integration does not create fields, only syncing data between them, so you would need to create the fields first before selecting them in the integration.)

There are a small number of standard/default fields included in the sync - for example, Account (Company) name, and first name / last name for Contacts (End Users) - but in addition to that, you can configure which Salesforce fields you would like to map to which Planhat fields.

You don't need to sync every single field that exists in your Salesforce org; think about which fields contains relevant data for your team working in Planhat. Similarly, if you still have colleagues working in Salesforce, consider which Planhat data in particular you may like to sync back.

For the main objects at the top (Account and Contact etc.), the field mapping section will look something like this:

For each set of fields you want to match, click "map another field" to add a new row for you to complete.

From left to right, the columns are:

When setting up custom field mapping within the optional model/object sections at the bottom of integration, the field mapping is simplified:

Here's an example of what this can look like:

Now you understand the principles, let's go through the practical steps of configuring the Salesforce integration in Planhat. Firstly, we'll start with connecting the two platforms.

The first step in setting up the Salesforce integration in Planhat is to connect it to your Salesforce account. This is very simple - just follow these steps.

Now you've connected Salesforce to Planhat, you can start configuring the sections for each of the object/model pairings.

As we've already gone through the basic principles of sync direction, filtering and field mapping earlier in this article, we're not going to cover that again in detail for each object/model pair we describe, but instead we will focus on where there are different elements within the section.

Firstly though, let's start with the "Team" section at the top of the page.

At the top of the integration, you will see the "Team" section. This is for syncing details of Salesforce Users and Planhat Team Members (Users) - i.e. you and your colleagues using Salesforce and Planhat. (Note that we are not talking about End Users / Contacts here.)

Be aware that this section of the integration does not create Users in either Salesforce or Planhat. Instead, it fetches Salesforce User details and save them into the integration settings.

This information is then used when you have field mapping between Salesforce User fields and Planhat Team Member (User) fields - e.g. syncing the Account Owner of an Account/Company. For this kind of field mapping, the integration checks the list of Users saved here in the integration settings, rather than checking the Salesforce org. It looks at the Salesforce User ID referenced in Salesforce User fields, and identifies their email address, so they can be matched up to the equivalent Planhat User. An advantage of the integration being designed in this way (saving the Salesforce User details within the integration) is that it allows the sync to be faster.

To set up the "Team" part of the integration:

Now let's get started mapping the model/object pairs! In this article we'll go through each one, giving you step-by-step instructions as well as important notes and tips.

We'll list them in the order they are shown in the integration UI, but you don't necessarily need to set them up in this order.

Salesforce Cases sync into Planhat on the Conversation model, type "ticket".

The Case section of the integration is unique in that it can only be a one-way sync, from Salesforce to Planhat.

It's optional to turn on this section of the integration. If you don't want to activate this sync, simply leave the section on "Not Syncing".

It's optional to sync Tasks. If you don't want to include them in the sync, simply leave this section on "Not Syncing".

In addition to the main, pre-configured sections, you can also add additional model/object sections at the bottom of the integration. You can use this to map to new Planhat models (i.e. that you haven't mapped yet), such as Opportunity, Invoice or Campaign; or to map an additional Salesforce object to a Planhat model you have already mapped.

While commonly you may map the Salesforce Opportunity object ("Closed Won" records only) to the Planhat License model, you may also want to sync open Opportunities in Salesforce to/from the Planhat Opportunity model. For example, if you are focusing on CSQLs (Customer Success Qualified Leads) you may want your CS team to identify the Opportunity, create it in Planhat and sync it to Salesforce, or you may just want full visibility for teams in both systems.

You can use a custom section at the bottom of the integration to map extra Salesforce objects to an already mapped Planhat model - e.g. map a custom Salesforce object called "Account Extension" to the Planhat Company model, in addition to the Salesforce Account object already syncing to Company.