Three cool HubSpot integrations that challenged us creatively

Are you looking to integrate hospitality software with HubSpot? Have a chrome extensions that enables your sales teams to search for HubSpot contacts via LinkedIn? Or complete a bulk data migration from your existing CRM to HubSpot? In this blog post, we'll cover three creative integrations we built with HubSpot, to help our clients meet their particular needs.

For developers, HubSpot is a treasure trove of integration opportunities that flex creative muscles to find workable solutions. Often challenging — but always rewarding — these are the three HubSpot integrations that come to mind when I’m asked about projects that required creative thinking to deliver amazing results.

Integrating HubSpot with hospitality systems

At Huble Digital, we often get requests to integrate HubSpot portals with hospitality systems. As many of these systems have been around for some time, the available APIs tend to be old and clunky, while the documentation is of low quality (if you can find it at all).

Recently, we were approached for a HubSpot and Oracle integration. As many Oracle versions are also SaaS versions — i.e. online solutions like HubSpot — this can be tough because quality documentation is lacking for these integrations. Also, the documentation we do come across usually details old-style SOAP-based APIs, and offers nothing in the way of intuitive, public, and modern API functionality.

After delving a little deeper, we discovered software that would help us deliver the HubSpot and Oracle integration our client was expecting. 

Travel technologists Impala, provide middleware that connects with Oracle Hospitality and its related platforms. The middleware integrates with Oracle’s Project Management Systems (PMSs) to present an API for agencies like Huble Digital to work with. Essentially, Impala has created a standard RESTful API for integration with clear documentation that developers appreciate and love to use.

This functionality isn’t limited to just a HubSpot and Oracle integration. With the API, Huble Digital can integrate HubSpot with other hospitality systems and PMSs more easily, ensuring that valuable booking information is shared between systems and available when needed.

(P.S. Our CIO Rowan Reid recently highlighted some of his favourite HubSpot custom integrations.)

Chrome extensions to empower sales teams

For more sales and portfolio growth, sales teams need relevant and valuable information about potential leads, including whether they’re already in the database. For example, LinkedIn is a goldmine of information for professionals seeking to connect with likeminded peers or to nurture potential customers – but what if that information could be fed into or cross-referenced with contact records in HubSpot? An interesting marriage of the two ideas is a piece of software that Huble Digital’s development team scoped out for a client — a HubSpot-connected Chrome extension for LinkedIn. 

For this particular ask, the client required an extension that could identify a personal LinkedIn profile. From there, the Chrome extension parses LinkedIn’s code to figure out who the person is, what position they hold and which company they work for. As you’re scrolling, the extension window searches HubSpot to see whether they are a contact already or part of a related company. If they’re not, you can add them to your HubSpot portal. This is the kind of valuable, relevant information sales teams need to nurture potential leads or upsell existing customers.

This functionality is not limited to LinkedIn — we can build Chrome extensions that do the same for whichever site you browse. These extensions will parse the information on the page and then engage with your HubSpot portal to see if you’re connected to the person or company.

For more ideas on how to empower your sales team, read this article about HubSpot tools for sales enablement.

Bulk data migration from existing CRMs to HubSpot

Scaling businesses eventually outgrow their marketing technology, and when this happens valuable information accrued over several years needs to be safely moved across to the new CRM platform.

One such instance occurred with a client, requiring our development team to devise a way of transferring between 30 and 40 gigs worth of information from Goldmine CRM into HubSpot. The problem was that the bulk of information comprised of email attachments and notes, which can’t be imported into HubSpot using the ‘bulk import CSV scripts’ option. 

After investigation, we discovered that Goldmine CRM is built on Microsoft Stack and stores the data in Microsoft SQL Server. Luckily for the client, all of the information was there, including contact details, engagement history, notes, emails and links to the all-important file attachments. The client then provided us with a database dump with references to the file locations. 

This was basically a Microsoft SQL Server dump, which can't be imported directly into HubSpot. You need to load the data into SQL Server yourself, process the information and then output it. As we don’t make use of Microsoft SQL Servers or run anything on Microsoft Cloud ourselves, we needed to put our creative thinking caps on again to find a workable solution.

We realised that we could launch our own copy of SQL Server using Amazon Web Services. We could then import the client’s data dump into our copy of SQL Server, process the information, then export it in a format that’s workable for HubSpot.

It’s daunting to migrate from an older CRM or one that houses a huge amount of data. This is why we’re always willing to go the distance with creative strategies and solutions to ensure our clients’ valuable data is safely transferred.

If you’re looking to integrate a piece of software or system with HubSpot but have hit a wall, why not offer us the chance to meet your challenge head-on? Connect with a Huble Digital consultant and let’s chat about creative HubSpot integrations that could be your perfect solution.