HubSpot setup guide

When to use this guide: Use this guide when you are onboarding OutboundSync or validating initial setup.

Here is every step required to connect your new OutboundSync account with HubSpot and start syncing data.

If webhooks or CRM activity look wrong after setup, use Troubleshooting and check OutboundSync logs before contacting support.

This guide is broken into three major steps:

Connect OutboundSync: Connect and configure your account.
Review in HubSpot: Verify your data synced and enable visibility.
Connect Sales Engagement Platform: Add your webhook URL to get data.

This is designed to be self-guided for users creating a test account. However if you are interested in getting help from our team, please contact service@outboundsync.com .

Create your OutboundSync account

If you do not have an account yet, follow Create your OutboundSync account first. OutboundSync uses passwordless email login at app.outboundsync.com — there is no separate sign-up page, and new accounts are created automatically on first successful login.

If coworkers need to see the same HubSpot-backed webhooks and logs after you connect, their own sign-up email is not enough on its own — see How teammates get OutboundSync account access. Agencies and consultants setting up a client portal should also read Agency and consultant access handoff.

Initial setup

Connect your HubSpot account

First, have your administrator sign in to the OutboundSync app (or create an account on first login), where you will connect through your HubSpot account.

Then approve permissions for OutboundSync to be able to access your HubSpot account.

Once you’re logged in, you will see that you don’t have any webhooks created yet. You must create a webhook and attach it in your sales engagement platform to start syncing your data.

Determine your routing policy

Now that HubSpot is connected, you need to decide how you want to route the data. You can use a single webhook for all your campaigns, or you can generate unique webhooks for each user in your HubSpot account. Let’s compare these two methods.

Route in HubSpot. Generate a single webhook for your entire account. You will create dedicated workflows in HubSpot to route the leads once they’re synced to HubSpot via OutboundSync. This is the most popular method and used by most OutboundSync users. We recommend this by default. Leave Assign Contact Owner, Assign Company Owner, and Create Task off on the webhook receiver so routing stays flexible in HubSpot workflows.
Route by Webhook. Generate a webhook for each member of your team. In this case, they will attach their webhook to their campaigns in your sales engagement platform and handle routing “upstream” before it arrives in HubSpot. This approach is specifically useful if you have individual reps running full cycle outbound motions and you want to auto-assign objects without using HubSpot workflows.

Generate and copy your first webhook URL

Under the webhook receiver menu, the next thing you need to do is select which HubSpot account you want this webhook to be associated with.

Then, OutboundSync will prompt you to make the following selections. The recommended configuration is set by default.

Select Owner: Select the HubSpot user you want to associate the webhook with. This list will be pulled from your HubSpot account.

Create or update company: Create or update the company in HubSpot when a webhook occurs associated with that domain.

Assign Company Owner: Assign or re-assign the webhook owner as the company owner in HubSpot when a webhook payload is received.

Assign Contact Owner: Assign or re-assign the webhook owner as the contact owner in HubSpot when a webhook payload is received.

Contact handling: Choose whether OutboundSync should create or update HubSpot contacts by default, or use Update Only. With the default create/update behavior, OutboundSync searches for a matching contact and creates a new one if no match is found. With Update Only, OutboundSync updates and logs activity only when a matching HubSpot contact already exists; unmatched prospects are skipped instead of being created.

Use Update Only when HubSpot is your source of truth and you want outbound activity only on contacts your team has already qualified, imported, or approved for CRM tracking. Salesfinity uses dedicated update-only controls, so this general HubSpot contact handling setting does not appear for Salesfinity webhook receivers.

Create Task: Create a task for each reply and assign it to the person associated with the webhook for followup.

Custom Contact Properties: Create a Contact object custom property group and set of properties, and continuously update those properties.

Email Service: Select which Sales Engagement Platform you are using for your campaigns (for example Smartlead, Instantly, EmailBison, HeyReach, Salesforge beta, or GetSales beta).

Category-based filter: This is an optional feature that allows you to filter only certain events based on the lead category or status in your Sales Engagement Platform. By default, this feature is disabled.

Additional endpoints: This is an optional feature that allows you to forward OutboundSync data on to additional endpoints (e.g. Clay, Make, Zapier, n8n). This is only needed for Smartlead users where Smartlead limits the number of webhook endpoints users can add. By default, this feature is disabled.

Recommended webhook receiver settings

The app defaults match what most teams need. Use this table when you are unsure which toggles to change:

Setting	Recommendation	Why
Assign Contact Owner / Assign Company Owner	Leave off	The webhook owner is one static HubSpot user. Multi-rep routing belongs in HubSpot workflows — see Routing replies with a workflow.
Create Task	Leave off	Same idea — use workflow actions for reply follow-up instead of a static assignee on the webhook.
Contact handling (Update Only)	Leave off for cold outbound	With the default create/update behavior, OutboundSync creates a contact when none exists so activity has somewhere to land. Turn on Update Only only when HubSpot is your source of truth (see above).
Create or update company	On for typical B2B domain lists; Off when contacts are preloaded with correct company associations	OutboundSync associates companies from the contact’s email domain, not a company name from your sales engagement platform. Wrong-domain associations can appear on Gmail-heavy lists — see Gmail and personal email addresses.

If HubSpot may contain multiple contacts with the same social profile URL — for example, inactive former-role records and newer active records after a job change — configure Optional Alternative Property on your HeyReach webhook receiver and pass the target HubSpot record ID as os_objectlookup_id in each HeyReach lead list. Without a unique lookup key, OutboundSync falls back to URL matching and selects the contact with the most recent create date when multiple records match.

See Lookup method options for HeyReach sync and Using custom lead/contact object lookup ID for setup steps.

Then click the Create Webhook button.

You can change these settings later by clicking the corresponding webhook settings button after you’ve created your webook.

You must click Create Webhook to activate and use your webhook.

Once the webhook is created, you will see it on the screen under Existing Webhooks. If you don’t see it there, it has not been created.

Send a test webhook payload

Click here a detailed guide on how the Testing Modal works.

We’ll see this in HubSpot later. But while we’re here in OutboundSync, click the Sync Test button to send a test webhook payload over to your HubSpot account.

Configure the payload if you want to modify it, or just click Test Sync to send it.

Final Steps

See synced emails

Once you have campaigns in your Sales Engagement Platform, you will start seeing emails logged in your timeline. Note that there may be some processing time before the data is visible in your HubSpot account.

If you have the Create or update company setting enabled, emails will be associated at the Contact- and Company-level. This is possible because OutboundSync handles associations for you automatically. If not, they will only be on the Contact object.

Remember the test webhook we sent earlier? We’re getting back to that now. If you have HubSpot notifications enabled for new records, you may have already received an email about the contact created by the test webhook (and the company, if Create or update company is enabled).

Start with a contact that you know was enrolled in a sequence. Start by going to CRM > Contacts in the side bar menu or simply search for the contact in the search bar. By default, the test contact’s name is Jane Dough.

Then go to the individual contact record for that person.

After the test sync, you should see the following on the contact record (depending on which webhook settings you enabled):

An OutboundSync timeline event with campaign, step, and message details (visible after you enable Filter activity below).
A native email activity logged with from and to fields set so you can reply. Replying from that activity sends from the rep’s primary connected inbox, not the sequencer’s secondary sending address — see Where to reply: HubSpot vs your sales engagement platform for when to use HubSpot vs the SEP inbox instead.
Company association, only if Create or update company is enabled on your webhook receiver.
Contact or company owner assignment, only if you turned on Assign Contact Owner or Assign Company Owner — most teams leave these off and route in HubSpot workflows instead.

Next, we will enable the activities filter.

This will pull all the additional data that we’re getting from your Sales Engagement Platform so they’re visible in your HubSpot account.

Enable OutboundSync Filter activity

There is currently no portal-level method to set Filter activity in HubSpot. This means each HubSpot user must enable visibility for OutboundSync activities, as shown below, if they want to see them in their timeline.

First, go to any individual contact record in your HubSpot portal by going to Contacts > Contacts in the top menu.

Then, go to the Activities tab and click the Filter activity menu.

Make sure that the OutboundSync box is checked under Filter activity when you’re logged in. Go to a contact record, click Filter activity, then check off OutboundSync:

Now that these have been enabled, see what the record looks like, clicking the OutboundSync text and icon to expand the timeline event:

More examples of synced records

Here’s an example of what synced sent emails and replies should look like in a Contact record when Filter activity is not enabled:

With Filter activity enabled for OutboundSync, it should look like this. Note that you see the OutboundSync logo in the timeline with more details about the events:

You can see what this looks like in the company record by clicking on the company name:

In this case, you can see that OutboundSync is not only associating the company and contact record, it is also associating the emails with both the company and contact records.

Connect Sales Engagement Platform

To finish the process, add the newly created OutboundSync webhook URL into your Sales Engagement Platform.

Find instructions on how to do with with the following supported platforms:

Salesforge beta and GetSales beta are also available right now as direct one-way integrations for email and social activity. Dedicated guides are coming later, so use the onboarding steps provided by the OutboundSync team for current setup.

It is vital that you properly add and configure your webhook in your Sales Engagement Platform. If you don’t do this, OutboundSync won’t receive data and your data will not show up in HubSpot.

This guide is the self-serve setup path. For optional guided onboarding on a paid rollout, contact support.

Next step

Run a webhook test payload