We’ve talked about love stories before, most recently in our Dear John break up letter with WordPress, but this is a different sort of coupling. We spend a lot of our time working with HubSpot sales reps and client prospects, trying to better understand their tech stack and determine what’s important when it comes to integrating their existing software with HubSpot. Bringing on any new software is daunting and can be disruptive to workflow, impact efficiency and even impact employee happiness, resulting in increased turnover. By vetting HubSpot in advance and discussing how native and custom integrations can help your existing applications work with the HubSpot platform, you can better really change how you look at your data analytics.

Related: The Very Real Cost of a Mishandled HubSpot Implementation

Your tech stack is probably a little… bloated to say the least. The average tech stack for most small businesses with fewer than 500 employees is 172 apps, according to Zylo’s 2023 Saas Management Index. For mid-market companies up to 2000 employees? 291. The amount of data being collected by these apps, reporting dashboards, and tools and features are largely underutilized and don’t necessarily talk to one another in a way that makes sense for the workflow inside your organization at large. 

The logical next step when this happens is to hire a developer to build a custom integration to bridge your data so that you can reduce duplicate data entry and have more visibility inside the different applications that your organization uses to collect and analyze your data. Makes sense, right? 

While you might be considering reaching out to a HubSpot Development Partner to help you integrate a major line of business or enterprise application with your HubSpot platform, we have some news for you:

You shouldn’t complete any custom HubSpot integration without a HubSpot Developer AND a HubSpot Architect.

 
What’s a HubSpot Architect?

A HubSpot Architect is a technical strategist that digs into your business processes, your tech stack, your reporting and your goals to come up with the perfect configuration of integration, data reporting and tools to help you make more educated business decisions that will help you deliver on your goals. 

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? 

HubSpot Architects and HubSpot Developers are the perfect pairing to deliver you the most impactful custom HubSpot integration. In fact, we’re willing to say that including a HubSpot Architect in your HubSpot integration is a complete game changer across the board … and here’s why: 

More insight into the flow of your data.

The right HubSpot Architect will use data mapping tools to help understand how the data inside your organization flows. They’ll dig into your individual systems from sales to marketing and service and export and import data to really determine - how are your tools speaking to one another right now? He or she will dig deep into your tech stack to really understand - how is data flowing? Where are there redundancies in features across applications? What is the total budget spend for the tech stack? How can this be consolidated or reduced? 

Customers so often approach us thinking they know exactly what data they need moved from a business application into HubSpot. We’ll hear things like, “Well, accounting just wants to be able to attribute the revenue.” Or “Marketing needs to better understand the ROI of this campaign.” 

But less often do we see really comprehensive strategic planning happening with application integrations. And a HubSpot Architect? They're here to do all of that for you - and more. 

By executing actual discovery on your full tech stack, the way your data moves and the goals you’re trying to reach in HubSpot, a HubSpot Architect may make some recommendations that you didn’t even consider when it comes to integrated reporting, analytics and data mapping. And if they’re really good at what they do? The discovery process will probably completely transform the way you use HubSpot, look at analytics and data reporting, and make decisions inside your organization. 

It avoids costly delays.

Quite often, when we allow the client to be in charge of determining what data they want to move over to HubSpot, we end up in integration development delays. What one individual thought was the important integration ends up becoming a rabbit hole of discussion for additional data integration with sometimes completely erroneous data that hasn’t been adequately planned or mapped within the tools and capabilities of HubSpot. 

What if, for example, you have a big goal that you really want to achieve, and by using a different feature that’s inside a higher tier of the HubSpot Platform you can achieve that and more? You might not even be aware that this is something HubSpot is capable of, or how big of a game changer it could be towards your data and goals to unlock that feature with your integration. 

By enlisting the help of a HubSpot Architect, you map it all out before you even start the conversation of how an integration will be built. It’s strategic movement, skilled planning and it’s a real game changer for how efficiently we can get it done and how happy you’ll be with the result. 

You’ll architect a proactive integration strategy… for the long term.

What’s your goal? More insight into your sales pipeline? Understanding the most successful marketing campaigns? Determining your best customers, your highest performing account reps or the products that really move inside your business? Any goal is attainable when you get proactive about how your data moves through your applications and HubSpot. 

I don’t know how many different ways I can say the exact same thing, but sometimes repetition is needed. If you don’t have an unbiased party that really understands HubSpot and its features and tools digging into your data and seeing how it fits together like a puzzle, you're likely missing opportunities. Once you put the time in (and let us do the same) to dig into what you really need and what you don’t need, we can eliminate the noise and proactively plan. The data that you thought needed to move through HubSpot might be completely different than what you envisioned. But you won’t know until you complete an integration and tech stack audit. 

Listen - We can build simple integrations no problem. All day long. You wanna see a piece of data inside HubSpot? Sure, we can do that. Think you know exactly what you want? Tell us what to do, boss. We have no issues taking direction. But maybe you haven’t thought of everything. Maybe a simple data mapping and discovery by a HubSpot Architect can not only help you reach goals that you’ve been trying to reach, but goals that you haven’t even set yet because you didn’t know how to map them out? 

The pairing of a gifted HubSpot Developer and HubSpot Architect are what dreams are made of when it comes to a custom HubSpot integration. 

What dreams can we make come true for you?