HubSpot’s features span marketing, sales and service and will be integral to many of your processes company-wide. But, while HubSpot has many strong capabilities, it doesn’t do everything — you’ll likely need other tools in your tech stack too.
For the most seamless workflows possible, you’ll want HubSpot to communicate with the other tools you use. Luckily, HubSpot supports a wide range of native integrations. If you’re considering changing up a piece of your tech stack or wondering if a tool you’re already using connects with HubSpot, you can check in the HubSpot App Marketplace.
Here are five software types you might want to consider integrating with HubSpot:
1. Project Management
If you can help manage the day-to-day of your marketing, sales and service teams through a HubSpot integration, you can enable those teams to spend more time on doing their work as opposed to managing their tasks. Additionally, integrating HubSpot with your project management tool can reduce the chances of important tasks falling through the cracks.
Your specific project management tool will dictate what the integration can accomplish, but generally, you can automate the creation of tasks in your project management tool based on workflows, deals and tickets in HubSpot.
For example, when your sales team marks a deal as closed-won in HubSpot, you can automatically create an onboarding project in your project management tool, and, when a ticket is submitted through Service Hub, you can automatically create resolution tasks for your team in your project manager.
Asana and Accelo are both project management tools with built-out HubSpot integrations.
2. Communication
Your team most likely uses messaging software, email providers and video conferencing tools to communicate with each other and the contacts in your CRM. You want all those communications to be recorded on relevant contact records so that there’s visibility into each contact’s full history.
There are HubSpot integrations available for calling software, email providers and messaging tools that can update contact records with interactions made in those tools. Plus, many of these integrations let you create lists and segments using information from the connected communication tool.
Depending on how much time your team members spend in your communication tools, it might make more sense for them to receive notifications in those platforms as opposed to HubSpot, which is another use case where a HubSpot integration can come in handy.
For example, the HubSpot-Slack integration allows you to send and respond to conversational marketing messages, get notifications about lead conversions and create ticket-related channels all within Slack.
In addition to Slack, GoToWebinar, Gmail and Facebook Messenger all have HubSpot-built integrations available, and there are a number of third-party options for WhatsApp.
3. Paid Advertising
While you can report on your paid ad campaigns and manage audiences for them directly through HubSpot, you do need external advertising tools to actually run your ads. With a HubSpot integration, you can sync leads from your ads with your CRM, calculate ROI, track keyword performance and build target audiences for multiple advertising channels within your single HubSpot portal.
HubSpot has integrations with Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads to make managing your paid campaigns a seamless process.
4. Billing and Payment Processing
Billing is one of the most sensitive aspects of a customer engagement. If the payment experience doesn’t go well, it can be a huge source of friction.
Connecting your payment software with HubSpot can make the process more seamless and allow you to have more visibility into your revenue.
For example, just as an integration between HubSpot and your project management tool can automatically create projects when a deal closes, you can also use a deal closure in HubSpot to trigger the creation of an invoice and automatically send it to your customer through an integration with your payment software.
HubSpot has native integrations built for Stripe and QuickBooks and offers integrations with Recurly and Chargebee through PieSync.
5. E-Commerce
When customers make purchases directly through your website rather than through a sales rep, you can end up with less data about them in HubSpot. However, in order to do customer marketing, provide superb customer service and offer cross-sells and upsells, you still want as much information as possible about them in your CRM.
Fortunately, your customer data can be automatically transferred into HubSpot through an integration with your e-commerce software. This allows you to trigger marketing actions based on purchasing behaviors, like cart abandonment or individual products bought; source consistent data between your deals and products in HubSpot and your products in your e-commerce tool; update purchasing details on contact records in the HubSpot CRM; and report on all those properties.
The App Marketplace has a HubSpot-built integration for Shopify, a PieSync integration for Square and third-party integrations for other tools such as BigCommerce and WooCommerce.
The Takeaway
There are a wide variety of HubSpot integrations available that can help you streamline processes across your organization. However, keep in mind that integrations and apps are relatively new for HubSpot — they’ve only become a big focus for the platform in 2019. So, many of these integrations are still being improved upon.
Additionally, just because an integration exists between HubSpot and a software you use doesn’t mean you should connect them if you don’t actually need to use those tools together.
Integrations will require maintenance over time to ensure they’re working properly, and you’ll need someone to monitor how they’re working. You don’t want to invest those resources in an integration you don’t actually need.
But if you're strategic about which integrations you use, the time and energy you'll save and the alignment they’ll create can easily justify the effort you put into them.
