Over the past two years, more and more small businesses are jumping into HubSpot’s massive suite of marketing and sales tools. A valuable system for many small businesses trying to keep up with the growth of their business by collecting and nurturing new leads. With a wide array of tools, HubSpot typically does it all. For the things it doesn’t cover, the platform allows for a lot of customization using external APIs and automation applications, like our good friends at Zapier. So, the real question is if the HubSpot Zapier integration is worth the Zaps to speed up your business processes. Let’s find out.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a platform of business software products focused on the customer onboarding and nurturing process of your business operations. They offer inbound sales, marketing, and customer service tools including email marketing, a CRM, SMS marketing, inhouse automations, social media, analytics dashboard, etc. etc. To consider “All in One” marketing suites, HubSpot is definitely leading the charge and worth checking out.

One of the major gripes that is consistent with HubSpot is the price point. There is a free plan that includes basic tools like limited email marketing, landing pages, website pages, and a CRM. Upgrading to a paid plan can get somewhat steep for small teams. At $45 a month to start with 1000 contacts (scaling with the amount of contacts you have) just keep in mind the tools you are unlocking to save time for your business and generate more revenue.

Worth it’s price? I believe so. Worth the Zaps? Let’s see.

HubSpot Zapier Integration

HubSpot already has a lot of automation capability internally. With a pretty defined process, they filled in most of the gaps between steps themselves. It is where other software overlap where Zapier is necessary.

CRM Contact Updates — One of the premier automations within HubSpot is its ability update contacts based on external triggers. If you have another important piece of software you rely on, you can connect both platforms to allow for a two way sync. This means if any of the contacts fields update on one side (HubSpot or the other application) it will also update on the other.

If you are using calendar or scheduling software(eg. Calendly), point of sale software(eg. Stripe), marketing software (eg. Mailchimp) you can create the two way sync. As an example, if one of your leads schedules an appointment, your CRM/pipeline in HubSpot will show the new appointment. That’s just one of the many examples so get creative. These two way syncs will save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in data entry.

Consolidation Automations — Similar to other applications, HubSpot relies on consolidation automations to add new contacts to it’s sales pipeline. Unlike other applications, HubSpot has a lot of in-house tools to collect new leads from landing pages, ads, and other lead gen methods. This makes consolidation Zaps less necessary. However, if you have important external lead gen pages like event sign ups, social groups, webinars, and ad campaigns that are not built within HubSpot then you may want to look into consolidation Zaps to move those leads into your CRM and get them on your pipeline. Save some time, send them a fantastic introductory email, gather some new information, and close the sale.

Highlight Automation:

Email Scraping — Unless you are a coder or developer, you may not know exactly what “scraping” is. Scraping allows for a mass collection of data on webpages in a very short amount of time. There are data companies that exist solely to scrape data and sell it back to businesses for thousands of dollars. With a HubSpot and Zapier integration, you can use this same process to scrape your incoming emails for important keywords and information.

After Zapier’s email app is triggered by these particular keywords or text strings, it will use it to update contacts within your CRM. For example, say a client emails one of your sales reps “I am interested in the 10hr plan” and one of your HubSpot fields is “Preferred Plan”, you can use the “interested in” and “10 hr” plan to update that field. This will save time and money on data entry and arm your sales reps with more information and better communication tools to jump on a phone call and make the sale.

HubSpot Takeaways

If your business is scaling and you‘re looking to revamp your customer service and sales processes, HubSpot is a safe bet to get more out of your software. There is a lot of value in the free plan if you’re just starting out and if you have a limited amount of contacts the starter plan is definitely worth a look. The tools you will have access to will get a good portion of the job done. In terms of Zapier and external automations, they are probably not necessary.

Even though the email scraping and 2 way sync are more than worth the money for larger companies that are scaling, for many small businesses with less than 10 employees it may create an unnecessary hassle within the workplace. HubSpot starter kit is quite limited in terms of the tools you’ll need (custom fields, dynamic personalization, omnichannel marketing) in order to have the full effect of these automations. Additionally, HubSpot has access to integrate with a two way sync to many of the necessary applications without Zapier.

If you are a large business using a lot of different software platforms with a large budget and a workforce willing to buy into the automations, this is a fantastic opportunity. Since that is vastly the minority of companies, the HubSpot Zapier integration is not worth it.