Any SaaS platform be it HubSpot or Salesforce, no matter the small scale or large scale, offers integrations with approved third-party tools. HubSpot as well offers every service solution that it promises, but also recognizes other solution providers that are best in their niche for particular tasks. It also understands that clients might be using their preferred tools before opting HubSpot and they would want to continue with the same along with HubSpot. By not pushing their own solutions down the users’ throats and allowing them to connect with their preferred solutions is the freedom that HubSpot users love.
Types of HubSpot Integrations
- HubSpot offers default integration with the tools in its marketplace. You will find Apps for marketing process, sales process, customer service, productivity, and finance all are listed. When you integrate your HubSpot account with any of these apps using the standard instructions, then that is called native integration.
- Users can integrate any third-party tool that is not listed in the marketplace through connectors such as Zapier, Adeptia, Cyclr, LeadsBridge, Magnolia, Mulesoft among others.
- When users want something more than the listed features from an app whether it is available on HubSpot Marketplace or not, then they can opt for custom integration to make the integration work for their business goals.
Native integration and third-party integration through APIs are standard and accomplished by tweaking the settings a little bit. It is custom integration that expands the horizon of opportunities and makes things a little more complex and interesting also. You can’t just do that by reading a ‘How-To’ blog because every custom integration is unique. You need HubSpot integration experts to complete the successful connection. Having HubSpot integration experts in your team means you are free and open to adding any third-party tool to your platform. If your HubSpot developers can do HubSpot integration with any app, you will have a ball.
How HubSpot integration experts are different from HubSpot certified developers?
HubSpot developers are different from HubSpot integration experts in many ways. Their roles and responsibilities are different, their tasks are different hence their skill set is different.
HubSpot developers are the ones that set up your platform as per your business processes. They are responsible for designing the website the way you want, bringing that design to life by adding adequate functionality to it, connecting your email marketing, social media, website analytics among other features to your website.
Inbound marketing is HubSpot’s backbone and to operate it successfully, your lead generation stage cycles must be placed properly in sync. The lead generation channels, lead nurturing methods, conversions, and delighting all should work in synergy within your HubSpot platform. HubSpot developers make sure all these tasks are accomplished and they also take care of the website’s regular maintenance tasks.
HubSpot integration developers connect your HubSpot platform with third-party tools. Like a good electrical wired connection where every wire must be connected with the right one otherwise the circuit won’t be completed, in the digital ecosystem, fields of the first software must match with the fields of the second software in order for them to work effectively. Sometimes, fields are not even present on one side, in that case, the HubSpot integration experts have to create them, configure them in one software and create a match with the same field in the second software. The skill requirements for such tasks are different than standard web development tasks.
The job responsibilities, the skills required may be different but that doesn’t mean a HubSpot certified developer can’t perform integration tasks. If they have gathered knowledge for integration and have worked in the past, they can perform HubSpot integration tasks successfully. The same goes for integration experts, they too can help you set up the HubSpot platform for your website, sync everything because they work in the same ecosystem.
What skills does a HubSpot integration developer need?
Clients while hiring an integration expert should either search for HubSpot developers who can perform integration tasks as or search for integration experts particularly.
HubSpot development is related to coding, designing, programming, drag and drop, functionality, etc.
HubSpot Integration is directly related to APIs and connectivity of two different worlds of software.
Cloud computing, big data, cloud security, REST (as all HubSpot APIs are built using REST conventions) are some of the basic skills that a HubSpot integration developer should have.
A HubSpot integration expert has to answer the following questions in relation to the task at hand.
- What is the ultimate goal of the integration?
- How the data and data fields are used in HubSpot?
- What’s the relation of this data with other data fields in HubSpot?
- How the data from HubSpot will be used in the second software or vice versa?
- What part of the information do you want to share with the second software and which part to block?
- How to automate the data sharing to avoid the back-and-forth manual sharing task?
- How to keep the data sharing secured so that it doesn’t get leaked in the process?
- What field changes do we need to do in both the software to sync them perfectly?
When you are interviewing a HubSpot integration expert or a HubSpot developer, you can ask the same questions with respect to the previous projects they have worked on (they will share the information that they are authorized to share.)
Here's a HubSpot Integration Scope Template for more information
You can see that these are different than what a HubSpot certified developer does regularly but not something they can’t do or couldn’t have done in the past.
What about HubSpot apps? Can a HubSpot integration developer code a HubSpot app?
Yes, the HubSpot integration developer can code a HubSpot app but only if they had learned the language to code an app. As mentioned earlier, development and integration are different but it is normal for one person to know both. Computan’s HubSpot team has built custom apps in the past for clients who didn't get the solution from the standard apps. Our HubSpot developers built those apps and integrated them with the client’s HubSpot account.
One can learn development and integration skills with time and perform tasks successfully.
Discuss the project details with our HubSpot integration developers if you are looking for a good one.
