How do integrations in HubSpot work?

The demand for great user experiences is sky high today, which puts a lot of pressure on businesses to do what they can to give their clients the 360 degrees experience which is possible. To be able to succeed, you need to have access to relevant information about your clients and potential ones. This is just one of many reasons for a business to integrate systems. Here we tell you more about integration and why HubSpot is a great choice of platform to integrate with.

Four reasons to integration

In general there are four reasons why businesses want to do an integration. Whilst the technology is evolving continuously more businesses are starting to see the many advantages of an integration. 

• To be able to collect information in order to take the correct decisions
• To be able to share information between systems
• To be able to format data
• To implement a more efficient use of tools

Collecting information in order to take the correct decisions

Access to important and relevant information about your business contacts is crucial for several reasons, especially for the marketing team, the sales department and customer support teams.

Using this information about your contacts helps you to create a great customer experience. There are also occasions where an integration serves to collect information from different sources can be highly beneficial, for example cross selling. Businesses often collect information about their clients in a system where access may be limited. This unfortunately, becomes a closed source of information which makes it hard for others to get full control of why your clients have chosen you as a vendor or a partner, as well as potentially missing the opportunities to identify any trends in your customer base.

Sharing information between systems 

In many cases, businesses can easily take advantage of having some information in different systems. Let's say your business has closed one deal and its delivery is recorded into another system. In this case, an integration can make sure the customer's information is also being recorded in all relevant places.

Another scenario where this type of integration can be highly beneficial, is when businesses invoice their clients. A single integration can ensure the order is being created in several systems thus reducing repetitive manual work as well as making the process significantly smoother.

Formatting of data

Integration can also be about data cleansing - phone numbers, organisation numbers and likewise to make the information work better in automatic processes. HubSpot recently launched a new Hub - Operations Hub, which you can read more about a bit further down in this article.

Implementing a more efficient use of tools 

One other reason for business to have an integration done is to easen and make processes more efficient - internal and external. A business that is  using several systems which need to be switched between in order to access information, is not only consuming additional time, but also maximising a risk of incorrectly transferring information. Without mentioning how much  additional time it takes to learn 10 systems instead of 1 or 2, maximum 3. 

One integration between your CRM System and your business system or your CMS system/platform for example, will make the above processes much smoother and efficient. 

Three ways to integrate in HubSpot

At Avidly we mainly use HubSpot and we can guarantee that it is one easy platform to integrate with your systems, especially when comparing to other systems on the market. This is partly because HubSpot provides an excellent marketing automation system, partly on their easy CRM Hub which is effortless to integrate with. Regardless if you are looking for an easier integration or a more complex one, HubSpot is a great choice. 

HubSpot’s Ecosystem

One big advantage with HubSpot as a platform is their ecosystem. Over the previous few years this has grown exponentially and is today able to integrate with over 500 systems. A few examples of popular and well used platforms / systems which today can be integrated with HubSpot are Slack, SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, Office 365 and Google Suite. 

HubSpot Operations Hub

HubSpot’s relatively new launch, Operations Hub, provides ready integrations with for example Zoho CRM as well offering the opportunity through custom code to build code directly against HubSpot´s API. You are also able to choose to integrate towards a rest-API if preferable. In this way, Operation Hub makes it possible to do something easier or much more advanced, if you want to. For example, you can connect systems through Operations Hub or you can choose to write your own code in workflows - the possibilities are almost endless.

Thanks to Custom Codes you can make smart associations between a contact and a business based on organisation number, for example.

Webhooks through a push model

HubSpot provides a service for webhooks, which gives you the possibility to subscribe to changes on an object that you are interested in following. From an integration perspective, you can work with a push model which means you can get the information you need. This differs from a pull model in the sense that you need to ask your systems about those changes. 

How Avidly works with integrations 

At Avidly we work daily with businesses who want help to integrate systems for many different reasons. We work with adjusted integrations and also with more standardised ones, such as integrating HubSpot with a regular cloud system. Before starting an integration project we have a digital meeting with the customer to discuss current API´s and expectations of an integration. In this meeting we also talk about the customer's goals of the integration, such as wanting the system to automatically send a note to another system when a deal is created. 

Following this, Avidly creates a Proof of Concept (poc) which is presented to the customer. The poc shows our findings, which solution we think is the best one and how we think it should be built. The purpose of a Proof of Concept is to ensure the integration suits the reality before we start building it. As soon as the poc is approved by the customer, Avidly begins the building of the integration. 

Want to know more about hos we work with integrations? Contact us!