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Enriching HubSpot from LinkedIn: what to fill and what to check

The fields a profile and a company page can fill, why lookups by name need a review, and five checks before anything is written.

By Quentin Tristan3 min read

For a B2B CRM, LinkedIn is the most up-to-date directory there is. People update their own profile when they change jobs; companies maintain their own page. Used well, it fills the fields your team never types in. Used carelessly, it writes the wrong person's job title into your CRM. Here is what to take from LinkedIn, and what to check before it lands in HubSpot.

What a profile and a company page can fill

From a contact's profile, the fields that map to standard HubSpot contact properties:

  • first and last name;
  • job title;
  • current company;
  • city and country;
  • the LinkedIn profile URL itself.

From a company page:

  • website, and the domain derived from it;
  • industry;
  • company size;
  • description;
  • headquarters city;
  • founded year;
  • phone number.

A profile holds much more, such as past experience, education or skills, but if there's no property for it in your CRM, it doesn't belong in a field.

Start from what you already know

The cheapest and safest enrichment starts from a key you already hold: the LinkedIn URL. Many CRMs have it for a large share of contacts, sometimes in a non-standard property created by an old import. Recover those first, then read each profile by its URL: the result is unambiguous.

Searching LinkedIn by name is another matter. "Thomas Martin at Acme" can return the wrong Thomas, or the right one at his previous company. Treat every profile or company page found by name as a proposal to check, never as a fact.

Five checks before you write

  1. Don't overwrite. Fill empty fields only. If a sales rep typed a job title, they probably know something LinkedIn doesn't.
  2. Match HubSpot's options. Industry is a dropdown in HubSpot. Write a LinkedIn industry only when it matches an existing option; otherwise you create values nobody can filter on.
  3. Merge duplicates first. Enriching two copies of the same person means paying twice, then throwing one away at the merge.
  4. Review what was found by name before writing it, and check which company page answered a search, not just that one did.
  5. Keep a log. Record each value written, where it came from and who approved it, so a bad batch can be undone.

Respect the people behind the profiles

Profiles are personal data, even when they are public. Enrich the records you have a business reason to keep, use a tool that doesn't rely on your own LinkedIn account, and keep the raw data no longer than you need it. Your privacy policy should say which sources you use.

How Forgeo enriches from LinkedIn

Forgeo reads LinkedIn without using your LinkedIn account or cookies:

  • Contacts are read by their profile URL, found in hs_linkedin_url or in any property whose values look like LinkedIn profiles. Searching by name is a separate action, and every profile it finds is reviewed.
  • Companies are read by their page URL, or found by name; a page found by name is shown with the page that answered, for review.
  • Before anything runs, an owner or admin sees an estimate: records to read, records already known, and the cost. A job reads up to 500 records, and a record read in the last 90 days isn't read again.
  • Records in an unresolved duplicate group are left out until the group is merged or dismissed.
  • Values from your own CRM come first. LinkedIn only proposes what's still empty, industry only when it matches a HubSpot option, and every proposal goes through the same review, log and undo as any other fix.

Start with the data you already have, then let LinkedIn cover the rest.

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