One of my favorite things to do in HubSpot is take information that already exists somewhere in a business and figure out how to make it useful inside the CRM.
That’s exactly what happened with one of my telecommunications clients.
The challenge
For a fiber internet provider, knowing someone’s address is vital but it isn’t enough.
The important questions are: Can we provide service at that address? If not, when will we be able to? And if they’re already a customer, what services do they have?
The company had this information in its external billing system, but it wasn’t always available on the corresponding company records in HubSpot.
That created a pretty significant limitation.
Marketing might have a company record with a perfectly good street address but not know whether that address was currently serviceable or when service was expected to become available.
Sales had the same problem. Someone looking at a record in HubSpot couldn’t necessarily tell what was happening at that location without looking elsewhere.
The data existed.
We just needed HubSpot to understand it.
The solution
We worked on syncing the company’s operational data with HubSpot so its CRM records could include important serviceability information such as:
- Service address ID
- In-service date
- Product information
But I didn’t want this to depend on someone manually identifying incomplete records and looking them up one at a time.
Instead, we built a HubSpot workflow that could identify the records that needed more information automatically.
Any time HubSpot detected that a company had a known street address but was missing its service address ID or in-service date, the record could enter the workflow. From there, HubSpot sent a webhook to the company’s external billing system, using the street address to look for a matching service location.
When a match was found, the available information from the billing system was sent back to HubSpot and added to the company record, including the service address ID, in-service date, and available product information.
So rather than treating this as a one-time data cleanup project, we created an automated process for continuously filling in missing information as records met the criteria.
That’s the part I really love about this solution.
We weren’t just moving data from one system to another. We were using HubSpot automation to recognize when information was missing, ask another system for it, and make the CRM record more useful without someone having to intervene manually.
Turning operational data into marketing data
Once that information was available in HubSpot, it became much more than billing or operations data.
An in-service date, for example, is also a marketing opportunity.
If an address isn’t serviceable today but will become serviceable in the future, HubSpot can use that information to determine when it makes sense to begin communicating with that prospect.
Instead of treating every address in a market the same way, marketing can build audiences and automation around actual serviceability and timing.
And because the workflow can continue looking for missing serviceability information, HubSpot has an ongoing mechanism for enriching records as new information becomes available.
The CRM becomes smarter because it understands something meaningful about the customer journey that it didn’t understand before.
Making HubSpot more useful for sales, too
The same data helps sales.
When a sales rep looks at a company record, the goal is for HubSpot to give them the context they need without requiring them to hunt through another system.
Is this address serviceable?
When is service expected?
What products are available?
Bringing that information into HubSpot means the CRM can become a much more useful source of information for the people actually working with prospects and customers.
And because we’re enriching the existing company record rather than creating a separate process for sales to manage, that information becomes part of the CRM they’re already using.
Why I love projects like this
This is a good example of why I don’t think of HubSpot as simply a marketing platform or a place to store contacts.
Sometimes the most valuable HubSpot projects start with a question like:
“We have this information somewhere else. What could we do if HubSpot knew about it?”
Once the data is there and structured properly, we can start thinking about segmentation, workflows, sales processes, reporting, customer communications, and all kinds of other possibilities.
And sometimes we can take it a step further, as we did here, and make HubSpot smart enough to recognize when information is missing and go looking for it.
That’s the kind of HubSpot problem I love solving.
About this project
Industry: Telecommunications / Fiber Internet
HubSpot work: CRM data architecture, workflows, webhooks, external system integration, data enrichment, automation, and segmentation
Client: Anonymous
Need HubSpot to understand data that lives somewhere else in your business?
I love figuring out how HubSpot can work with your existing systems and data to solve problems that don’t fit neatly into an out-of-the-box CRM setup.
If you’re sitting on useful information in another system and wondering what HubSpot could do with it, let’s talk about your HubSpot project.