Overview
Cloud Pacific was contracted to integrate Hightouch to Salesforce as a new data syncing tool.
Hightouch is a tool that syncs data from any data warehouse into the SaaS tools that your business runs on. In our case, we are interested in Salesforce as the SaaS. The easiest way to understand this is that Hightouch helps to sync data between a database and Salesforce.
Set-up and Configuration
To create a connection, four elements are needed: Destination, Source, Model, and Sync. Let’s take a look at each of them and what needs to be done in order to establish a connection.
First of all, create a Google sheet with all the information needed to create a Contact in Salesforce. In this case, this data will be used to create the following Contacts:
Configuring Destinations
Navigate to Hightouch and select the option Destinations (1) on the left hand column, and then select the Add destination (2) button.
Once you have navigated to the New Destination page, in the search bar enter “Salesforce” (1) and select the Salesforce (2) option. Notice that there is an option to select a Sandbox, which is a useful feature to test functionality. Click the Continue button (3) once the destination has been selected.
After selecting the user and organization that will be used, select the Allow button which will permit access into your organization’s selected environment.
Once you receive a confirmation message (1), click Continue (2)at the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
You will be prompted to give a name (1) to the new Destination, this name is needed to identify the Destination within Hightouch, click Finish (2) to end the Hightouch Destination configuration.
Once the Destination configuration is done you will see an option to Log in to Salesforce (1). This can be used to connect the configuration with a different user or to re-login to the org. You will also find a button labeled Test Connection (2) that will check if the connection was done correctly. Once you click the button you will see a ‘Connected’ (3)notification at the top of the page, if the connection was successful.
Configuring Sources
Next, let’s create a source. A source is an element that contains all the data that needs to be loaded into Salesforce.
Select Sources (1) on the left hand column and then click the Add Source (2) button.
There are multiple sources within Hightouch but for this example select Google Sheets.
Select Log in to Google Sheets to authorize the Google account that contains the data.
After selecting the Google account that contains the new Contact records spreadsheet that was previously created, click Continue.
After connecting the Google account a notification will appear letting you know that the connection was successful.
The spreadsheet should now be available to select.
After you select the spreadsheet you will receive a notification that you have connected the Source successfully.
Lastly, give the connection a name (1) to identify it in Hightouch and then click Finish (2).
Configuring Models
Next, you will create a Model based on the spreadsheet from the Source.
Select Models (1) in the column on the left hand side of the screen, and then select Add model (2).
Select the Source you created in the previous steps or locate it using the search bar.
The option Sheet will be selected. In the search bar under Sheet Name, you can search and select the necessary sheet. In this case the sheet is called Contacts.
Click Preview and make sure you can see the data added to the spreadsheet.
Give the model a Name (1), in this case, the data is related to contacts so the name of the model will be Contact. Select a Primary Key, in this data, the Email cannot be duplicated and based on that the Email (2) column can be used as the key. Once the information is filled out, click Finish (3).
Syncing
Finally, it is time to synchronize the data using all the elements that have been created so far.
Select Syncs (1) in the column on the left hand side of the page and select Add sync (2).
Select the Model that was created in the previous step.
Select the Destination with the name that was added in the previous step.
Since the point of the connection is to create records, select the Object option.
Find and select the Contact object, which is the name of the object inside Salesforce.
Then select the type of action to perform with the spreadsheet’s data. For this case we are going to Insert data
Select Add mapping, and map the data from the spreadsheet (Source) with the fields in your selected organization (Destination).
The following options refer to when you want to make a very large data load. Ensure you split your data loads into batches in order to avoid generating errors due to limits.
There are different ways to trigger the synchronization, either at a specified time or day-specific basis. In this case, it will be left manual so that it can be executed once the configuration is finished.
After finishing the configuration, you can click Run (1) in the top right corner of the page. Once selected, the status of the synchronization (2) will appear at the bottom of the page. Select it and see the details per each operation.
In this list, you can see if the record was correctly added to Salesforce or if the operation failed and what caused the failure.
Final Review
Now let's check out Salesforce.
Navigate to the Contact object, and select the ‘All’ list view. You should now be able to see the records that were imported from the spreadsheet.
If you review the details page for each Contact record, you will see the values that were added to the spreadsheet and mapped within Hightouch.
