April 4, 2019
As a team of HubSpot integration experts, we know one thing for sure: merging the rich data of your CRM system with the power of HubSpot can only benefit you and your company. We've discovered this through years of experience and answering both typical and tough questions surrounding integration.
Here are the answers to those questions that, hopefully, will show you the power of a HubSpot integration as well.
A HubSpot integration combines your CRM system – Netsuite, Dynamics, Salesforce, SugarCRM – with your HubSpot account, allowing them to function together seamlessly. Because sales and marketing teams use HubSpot and CRM platforms almost daily, integrating the two can help your organization never miss a beat.
How? An integration can keep your marketing and sales teams and their databases aligned through a bi-directional sync. This ensures changes in one system automatically sync to the other. So, if you update a contact’s lead score in HubSpot, your CRM (and thus, your sales team) will receive that info too. Similarly, data input into your CRM, like details about a contact, will show up in your HubSpot. Then your marketing team will have more information to personalize campaigns.
Field mapping involves aligning a field from your CRM to a field in HubSpot. For example, the standard field of “Company Name” would map to the field “Company” in Dynamics. Seeing as there are different fields across different CRMs, many people wonder what fields they should be focusing on during their integration. Here are three suggestions:
A HubSpot integration comes with standard field mappings right out of the box, which includes common information like name, email, contact, address, or phone number. However, many companies create fields in HubSpot that are not standard and do not exist in a typical CRM system. An example of this might be a field titled, “How did you hear about us?” or “What time is best to contact you?” on a HubSpot form. Mapping this field can provide useful information to your sales and marketing dashboard.
Mapping your CRM data to HubSpot can help your marketing team create stronger and more targeted email lists. What makes this possible? Most CRMs have fields that indicate when a sales representative last contacted a prospect. An integration would map that information into HubSpot as a date field. After it’s integrated, your marketing team could see that information then enter them into a list that triggers a specific marketing workflow, like a re-engagement campaign.
This data can also be useful for marketing to add to their dashboard so they can see which of their efforts are working, what campaigns drive the best results, and what can be addressed to perform better.
Fields that help sales know more about their prospect’s activity should be mapped to benefit the company. This may include information about what case studies or other sales collateral is being downloaded, or what pages of the website are most visited. Why would this information be useful to a sales representative? With it, they can see what products are top of mind with your contacts, and what specific information about them is resonating the best.
As noted, the verbiage between CRM platforms and HubSpot may differ, but in essence, a sales opportunity in a CRM is equal to a deal in HubSpot. And it is something worth mapping because it can:
Help your marketing team nurture any contact associated with a particular deal. HubSpot shows the stage of each contact associated with a deal, giving marketing insight into where they may be in the buyer’s journey. With that information, they can tailor their campaigns to move them along your conversion pathway.
Helps sales and marketing align. We may sound like a broken record, but mapping any information between your two systems is only beneficial for the marketing and sales departments. This data can help marketing assist sales by giving the enablement material they need, or re-engaging with a lost deal until its ready for sales.
Helps position marketing as a critical piece in generating revenue. Mapping sales opportunities to HubSpot Deals gives marketing the chance to support sales but also provides them with a record of how their campaigns helped close an opportunity.
Provides closed loop and revenue reporting. Mapping these two fields provides data to create great reports that may include won/lost deals and the number.
We approach integrations as a managed service, with support from start to post-launch. This involves four steps:
Discovery. Before beginning any work, we take the time to understand your company and your integration needs through a kick-off meeting to review your sync’s logic, any customization options you need, and all of your field mappings. You’ll meet your dedicated team in this call.
Building. Once we are ready, we begin developing everything that was scoped out in our discovery meetings.
Testing and Launching. After we test our sync flows and process test data, we start a full initial sync to populate both systems with all your available records. Then, we review this data with you to ensure everything synced properly and provide any necessary integration training.
Supporting. Just because your integration is live doesn’t mean your team at Lynton says goodbye. We proactively update any needed changes to HubSpot or CRM, provide general troubleshooting, and make any requested changes.
A standard integration, meaning one that doesn’t involve any custom field mappings or similar customization, takes anywhere from 30 – 60 days.
A custom integration may take longer in the building, testing, and launching steps. However, our integration team at Lynton sees an average custom HubSpot integration take 90 days to complete.
If your CRM highly-customized, needing even more custom field mappings or custom sync logics, it may take even longer. That being said, the integration team at Lynton will take whatever time necessary to complete an integration appropriate for your company.
While it may be helpful to have a developer, it is not necessary with our integration offerings. Lynton’s HubSpot integrations require no IT experience. All the heavy data importing is done on our end, with no integration software to learn. Other important technical aspects to note:
Lynton’s integration team is made up of experts, with many having HubSpot and other integration certifications. We are also a HubSpot diamond agency.
Lynton is a managed service, meaning we proactively check on the health of your integration. If we see a problem, we fix it before you even ask us.
A HubSpot integration improves the quality of your data because your company goes through the process of deciding what fields to sync and what logic to sync. Due to this, your reporting will benefit. You can utilize HubSpot’s standard reports that pull in information from your integration to show in your marketing and sales dashboards or create custom reports to fit your data’s needs.
If you have a HubSpot account and you have a CRM system, you’re already ready for an integration! Hopefully, most of your CRM questions were answered. If not, contact us today to learn more about integrations in general. Or, if you feel you’re ready to start your integration project, reach out now.
