Vtiger - HubSpot Integration
Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system has been proved as a winning solution in customer management, where customer is placed at the centre. Although the underlying philosophy is to have all the information and all the interactions with the customer in one system, we often collide with the reality of software that perform better on some process than others.
e-Soft has been working in the open source world for years, marrying the idea of integration between systems in order to exploit the advantages of each one. In particular, we are specialized in Vtiger CRM personalization, so we made an integration with HubSpot, of which we briefly want to talk about today.
HubSpot is a platform that helps manage customers merging marketing, sales and customer service functions. The price of the service depends on what functions you want to use. The system is very versatile in configuration and provides an APIs library for integrating data with external sources/destinations. However, compared to Vtiger Open Source, it does not offer the same flexibility of functionality customization.
Our client wanted to take advantage of the possibilities offered by HubSpot in acquiring new customers, while maintaining his Vtiger installation already customized over the years for the sales and after-sales processes.
Our integration takes advantage of the APIs made available by HubSpot to identify new acquired customers or updates to existing customers, and keeps the master data aligned in the two systems, creating or updating Organizations and Contacts on Vtiger. If we had to use 3 words to define this integration we could say: unidirectional, periodic, incremental.
-
Unidirectional: On HubSpot you can enter new data or update existing records, then these are reported in VTiger. Changes or entries on the Vtiger side are not automatically reported on HubSpot.
-
Periodic: the refresh rate is customizable. It’s not possible to activate a real-time modification of the individual entities, as there are no "events" to capture on the HubSpot side but it is a third-party executable.
-
Incremental: the data updated/entered in a period of time are retrieved and the values are reported on Vtiger only when there are changes.