Salesforce Source

Salesforce is a leader in on-demand customer relationship management.

Take your company’s analysis to the next level by adding Salesforce as a Source to Segment. Segment automatically collects objects like Accounts, Campaigns, and Tasks and loads them into your data warehouse. 

Getting started

1. From the /sources page in your Workspace, click Add Source.

2. Choose Salesforce.

3. Give the source a name, add labels, if applicable, and select the Salesforce environment you’d like to pull data from. To use data from a Salesforce sandbox environment, select Sandbox from the Salesforce Environment dropdown and contact Segment Support. The support team will configure your source to use sandbox data.

4. Connect Segment to your Salesforce environment and authorize Segment to connect to it. In order for Segment to collect and sync your Salesforce data, you must enable API access for the user that you are connecting to Segment with. For more information on how to confirm or change API access for a Salesforce user, follow Salesforce’s recommended documentation.

5. Choose a data warehouse to connect Salesforce to.

6. In the Salesforce source settings you can customize the source nickname and schema name. The nickname is a label used in the Segment interface, and the schema name is the namespace you query against in your warehouse. Both can be whatever you like, but Segment recommends that you use something that reflects the source itself, like Salesforce for nickname and sfdc, salesforce, or sfdc_prod for the schema name. Configure Selective Sync to retrieve only specific objects and properties from Salesforce.

Components

Sync

The Salesforce source contains a sync component, which means Segment makes requests to the Salesforce API on your behalf on a 3 hour interval to pull the latest data into Segment. In the initial sync, by default Segment downloads all the Salesforce objects (and their corresponding properties) according to the Collections Table below. Segment writes the objects into a separate schema, that corresponds to the source instance’s schema name you designated upon creation. For example, you name the schema sfdc_prod, the leads collection is accessible at sfdc_prod.leads in SQL.

If you configure Selective Sync, Segment only retrieves the objects and properties you specify. Use Selective Sync to avoid unnecessary Salesforce API consumption.

The sync component uses an upsert API, so the data in your warehouse loaded using sync will reflect the latest state of the corresponding resource in Salesforce. For example, if ticket_status goes from open to closed between syncs, on its next sync that tickets status will be closed.

The source syncs and warehouse syncs are independent processes. Source runs pull your data into the Segment Hub, and warehouse runs flush that data to your warehouse. Sources will sync with Segment every three hours. Depending on your Warehouses plan, Segment pushes the Source data to your warehouse on the interval associated with your billing plan.

Collections

Collections are the groupings of resources Segment pulls from your source. In your warehouse, each collection gets its own table.

Custom objects

Select and add custom objects from the Selective Sync page in the Salesforce source settings.

Deleting records

Segment supports the use of soft deletes in Salesforce. If you perform a soft delete on a record in Salesforce, your next one to two warehouses syncs will change the value of is_deleted for the associated record to True.

Segment does not support hard deletes in Salesforce. Use of hard deletes will result in the data remaining in the warehouse with is_deleted set to False.

Collection properties

Segment performs a one-to-one mapping of all publicly available fields (standard and custom) from Salesforce. To see the full list of the standard fields refer to the Salesforce field documentation linked in each collection above.

Adding destinations

Warehouses are the only supported destination for object-cloud sources.

Historical data

When a new Object/Collection is enabled, Segment automatically runs a full historical re-sync on that Object.

However, for custom properties/columns, Segment only populates the custom property with data that comes in after the custom field was enabled. In order to populate the new custom field(s) for records that have previously been synced, you need to initiate a manual re-sync.

For Salesforce, Segment uses the SystemModstamp(system_modstamp) field to checkpoint collections that sync incrementally. When enabled, Segment syncs collections incrementally. When disabled, Segment syncs collections fully. If you’d like to force a collection to sync fully on the next run to bring in historical data, you can disable the SystemModstamp field on the collection, allow the next sync to complete and then re-enable SystemModstamp so the collection syncs incrementally in the coming syncs.

If you’ve added and selected custom fields to an existing collection and would not like to use SystemModstamp to bring in historical data, contact Segment Support to configure them to sync. You do not need to include the field names.

Version upgrade changes

On March 25, 2024, Segment upgraded the Salesforce source integration from version 39.0 to Salesforce’s API version 58.0. With the upgrade, there are deleted fields and added fields.

Deleted fields

Added fields

Salesforce version 58 has between 350 to 550 newly added collections and between 800 to 1000 new columns. To see which collections and fields you can access in Salesforce version 58, refer to the Salesforce documentation.

Troubleshooting

If you are syncing data from a Salesforce sandbox environment and see an “Invalid credentials” error, contact Segment Support to configure your Segment source to use sandbox data.