A fireside chat between Greg Furlong and Emmett Gallagher about the latest HubSpot Partner changes, HubSpot integrations, and how it all benefits businesses.

HubSpot is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) software with a remarkable range of tools and features to help businesses succeed. It’s user-friendly, customisable, and can be beneficial for all areas of an organisation.

In our opinion, too many businesses are missing out on these benefits because they aren’t investing the necessary resources into optimising HubSpot for their needs.

HubSpot Partner Program Changes

Recently, HubSpot made some changes to its Partner Program which Warbble is part of. HubSpot changed some of the partner rules so that it’s less about getting customers to buy HubSpot and more about how HubSpot can help businesses grow over the long term.

Too many HubSpot Partners were doing a quick onboarding and left customers with many questions. They want to get customers in and out the door as quickly as possible, but that left some customers thinking HubSpot is terrible leading to unnecessary cancellations.

We’ve never been fond of this approach. 

All of our customers know that we want to help them succeed with HubSpot because we know how beneficial it can be for businesses. It’s about more than HubSpot onboarding which is why we offer HubSpot monthly management for ongoing support. Part of that is to use HubSpot and other data sources, and then we analyse that information to find gaps in the business’ system and provide solutions to it.

We spoke to a prospect recently who was deciding between SalesForce and HubSpot. In this case, our advice was to go with HubSpot. It’s much better, much easier. And this person said to us they have some budget to hire someone to manage their HubSpot consistently. And we told them it’s not necessary — you can save that budget because HubSpot manages itself. If you really want to get that extra help then we can do it for you.

The Challenge: Data Everywhere

Your data is in HubSpot, but there’s a whole heap of other data beyond that ecosphere. How are you accessing that data? Is it being used productively and to boost business growth?

Take one of our customers, MaybeTech, as an example. They deal with a lot of data daily and saw that Google Analytics didn’t match up to their HubSpot statistics. Why not? MaybeTech already has several HubSpot integrations in place that sync up data, but seeing what is really going on can be challenging when there are differences from one data centre to the next.

That’s where we come in. By focusing on HubSpot as the central point of truth (since it pulls data from various integrations already), we identified potentially problematic areas and suggested ways to use this data more effectively across the organisation.

MaybeTech is now using HubSpot to pull in and analyse all their data so that the right people can make the right decisions for the business to grow.

And we know that these integrations are making a difference for our customers. Just think about what Polly had to say about it.

“These guys rock. They make hard exciting things possible, we have connected call centres processes, email marketing, and a SaaS product and there is still more to do. They are an agile and smart extension of our team.” — Polly Barnfield OBE, MaybeTech CEO

Let’s take a look at another customer example.

Pure Sports Medicine has about eight different systems which creates quite an interesting network typography but also scatters data everywhere. They already used HubSpot, but they didn’t integrate their other systems with it. It stopped the management team from seeing the bigger picture. We encouraged the team to pool all their data into one central location by using HubSpot integrations.

We make the complex simple.

Why HubSpot Integrations?

What happens is that HubSpot is set up, but it’s on its own. It’s a great tool. But then people are like ‘Did this person really call us? Did they call us 10 times before they signed up?’ They don’t know because they haven’t integrated their phone system with HubSpot.

Or maybe the questions are ‘How many times do customers watch a video before they engage with information?’ People just don’t know. So their marketing efforts are very much superficial. They send out some emails, do Facebook adverts, and hope for the best, but it all falls flat on its face.

This is why integrating is the key for HubSpot success. But many businesses can’t do it for a couple of reasons.

Why Organisations Battle With Integrations

One, they don’t have the resources. That can be fixed by investing.

And two, they don’t understand the concept of integrations properly. It’s not something that can be trained overnight.

We’ve got the advantage of being good at looking at the data, connecting it, and figuring out which HubSpot integrations are best.

Which leads us to the next question, how do you use integrations?

How to Use Integrations

There are two ways of integrating. The basic integrations are apps available within the HubSpot App Store. You find the one you want, enter your details, and that’s it. The syncing is done automatically and everything’s great.

The pros of this method is that it’s super easy. The cons are that it’s restrictive; the integration might not work the way you want it to. When this happens, you need to go with the second option — building a custom integration using APIs.

Let’s go back to MaybeTech as a case in point. We did a Xero integration for them and they wanted to know how much money they made. But, they wanted it split out so that only relevant details went to specific stakeholders. It just wasn’t possible with the standard Xero integration from HubSpot. We then built MaybeTech an integration using APIs from Xero, got the data, and displayed it on a dashboard. It’s slightly more advanced, more customised.

Not all businesses have the in-house capabilities to create these integrations, but we do, and that’s what makes HubSpot a good choice for long-term success.

We also look at it from a different perspective. Both of us come from a technical product background, working on getting products to market and growing them. We understand that businesses change as they grow and that your tech stack has to grow accordingly. The easiest way to do this is with HubSpot integrations.

Need some extra HubSpot help? Our team of experts are ready to assist you.

Focusing on One Thing

As a C-suite executive, you don’t have a lot of time to do “stuff”. You want to know about business performance, and you want to know about it now.

We see this in pretty much every business: CEOs know they need to look under the hood of their business, but realistically, they just want a report that says everything is okay or highlights opportunities and challenges. Most people in senior management are tearing their hair out because they aren’t getting that information. It’s like they are shining a spotlight on the data but beyond that is a monster hiding in the distance that you can’t see because you are only focusing on this small lighted area.

Each company should be doing one thing to drive business forward, each person within that organisation should only be focused on one thing, but employees get dragged from pillar to post.

What happens is that someone will say ‘Oh, sales or marketing told us we need to bring on HubSpot.’ But what does that mean for the business? How does it come together? They might be sending out emails manually or tracking outreach via spreadsheets. They might be using an old CRM.

In most businesses, regardless of the tools they are using, they can extract data to drive the business forward, but they aren’t utilising the data that’s available to them currently. This massive amount of information they have available is perfect for HubSpot.

Finding the Missing Links

Even with all the available data, companies don’t use it optimally. They can’t find the gaps in their analysis.

We don’t see it as you’ve bought HubSpot and that’s it. No. Our job is to find out from you that your goal is to, for example, grow the business 20% this year. How can we make your tech stack efficient so that you are only focusing on that one thing?

We’re able to see the connectors between missing information that helps businesses drive forward. Our job is to find those links. But the business needs to be aware of those missing links and act on them.

Focusing Your Team

The same goes for the people in your company — each person should only be focusing on one thing to drive the business forward. It’s possible if your tech stack works for you. 

The finance person gets their reports easier. The marketing person, their campaigns can be easier. The salesperson, they’re not spending all their time documenting stuff. The operations person can handle customer queries faster. The CEO can get reports at the touch of a button.

We’ve got the tactical capability and the background to be able to do that for businesses.

Wrapping Up

With HubSpot, it’s possible to take your business to the next level, but you have to set it up correctly to make that happen. You have to use the data available to you, pool it into one place, and analyse the information to find areas for improvement.

All in all, HubSpot integrations are a no-brainer for us; it’s exactly what you need to make your team more efficient and your business more profitable.

Spend your time on the things that matter. Let us take care of the rest.