The Client
When mission-critical software platforms are out of sync, everything is harder. This client came to ClearPivot hoping to resolve their ongoing dysfunction. The company manufactures robotic tools and associated products designed for the biotech industry. The sales and marketing team uses HubSpot to sell a flagship product plus associated products, consumables, and ongoing service. So there are four pipelines in HubSpot.
Because products must come into HubSpot from NetSuite for sales reps to build and send quotes to prospects, integration between the two platforms is essential. The company hired a team of NetSuite consultants to customize that platform to meet the finance department’s inventory and billing management needs. However, despite multiple efforts to adequately integrate NetSuite with HubSpot, the result was mounting frustration.
The company turned to ClearPivot for help. Their director of sales and marketing was delighted to learn the solutions analyst assigned to their project was well-acquainted with their industry and understood their sales motion and challenges, as well as the challenges of working in NetSuite alongside HubSpot.
The Challenge
The client was losing hope of successfully integrating HubSpot and NetSuite to meet their needs, as they had tried everything to no avail. They actually wound up with three separate HubSpot accounts as different teams struggled independently to figure out an integration that would work.
It was immediately obvious that we would have to be very methodical, very cognizant, and very accurate in connecting the two systems. The primary focus of the NetSuite connection would not be the company, or the deal, or the contact as it typically is, but the actual products coming over from NetSuite. We didn’t want products to go from HubSpot into NetSuite because nothing would match and everything would break.
The company inventories over 700 individual products but only about 10%, 70-80 products, are needed for the HubSpot catalog. We had to ensure that everything going into HubSpot was quotable for the sales team because deals going into each of the four pipelines have unique products associated with them.
On the flip side, we needed to tell NetSuite who is buying the products. We created a specific step in one of the deal stages that creates a sales order in NetSuite, populated from the associated records in HubSpot. This included the customer, the point of contact for that company, the billing contact, the sales rep on the deal – all the data NetSuite needs to control the process. HubSpot simply waited for a signal for any new products from NetSuite that were approved by finance and operations and which products to put on each quote.
As deals moved through HubSpot, finance would be alerted when it was time for approval. However, that brought up another challenge. Before a deal can be closed, it must be assigned a quote. These quotes list all the products sent over from NetSuite to HubSpot that will be included in the project. So the products must be listed in a manner understandable to the potential customer, not simply SKUs or inventory parts numbers. The client looked to ClearPivot to help solve this naming conundrum.
We had a lot of work to do and time was short. Normally an integration project like this would take six to eight months, but we had just three months to finish before our chief liaison went on maternity leave.
The Solution
We spent the first three weeks on foundational, current state assessment and audit from the sales perspective, looking at properties, products, and line items. We created a process flow diagram and a buyer’s journey for the client, with a Lucidchart lifecycle map. After spending another two weeks on deeper discovery, we knew it was time to get busy. As we worked, our solutions analyst used Claude to efficiently create weekly reports showing work progress, timeline, and budget status, so the client could see hours were being allocated wisely.
We immediately deprecated two extraneous HubSpot accounts and another tool they were not using. We then created workflows in HubSpot to create sales orders for NetSuite that include the list of products, the deal amount and other details syncing between the two systems. Once a quote is signed, HubSpot sends the sales order to NetSuite and alerts finance for approval. From there, the deal moves into Closed Won status. Finance can build their bill of materials, drawing on data from NetSuite. The integration is designed for simplicity: NetSuite and HubSpot only need to communicate when HubSpot signals that product data is needed from NetSuite, or when HubSpot signals to NetSuite that a sales order is incoming.
We also worked with the NetSuite team to streamline data flow. Instead of mapping everything in NetSuite to come over into HubSpot, we negotiated with them to specify products that are used by the sales team. They added a checkbox property to indicate which new products will be needed in HubSpot to build sales quotes. Unnecessary products are not be visible to HubSpot. This greatly reduced the sales team's mental load.
The most challenging part of this project turned out to be aligning product naming in HubSpot and NetSuite. The client's internal teams had strong differences of opinion about this. That isn’t unusual, and our ClearPivot Solutions Architects take pride in our ability to facilitate change management and unite cross-functional groups. In this case, after some collaborative discussion, the teams settled on using code numbers. We trained sales reps to correlate the codes with display names and also created a structure for grouping products so that specific items were associated with specific pipelines to support faster quoting.
In addition, we created a governance document to be used internally and by third parties, that describes how products are named. And we negotiated with the NetSuite consultants to use a property called Display Name that would match the display name used on quotes on deals. This compromise benefited everyone, and the documentation supports the company’s need for audit and regulatory compliance, which could have been compromised by mismatched naming.
The Results
The ClearPivot team accomplished multiple successes in a very short time.
Huge reduction in team member confusion
The sales team is now enjoying the benefits of integration-related changes, and they are excited to further optimize the sales side of HubSpot. The finance team appreciates that HubSpot now automatically sends alerts and sales documents to NetSuite, where finance can easily follow up. And, on our advice about best practices, the company created a unique email address to connect the two platforms, so that no one’s individual email would be associated with system management. This removes key person risk in the company's business-critical systems.
Infrastructure improvements
The infrastructure we created to group products according to sales pipeline makes it easy now for sales reps to go directly to the folder in HubSpot for, say, consumables, and capture product data for a quote. Overall, we were able to show progress and implement a successful integration even as the company was continuing to use HubSpot to moves deals along and close them.
Time savings
We were able to significantly accelerate this client's sales cycle, even in an industry that typically moves slowly. We also created a simple system to help sales reps understand if a new product is needed, and how to submit a product request to the finance and the NetSuite team. This submission process now takes just a few minutes, whereas in the past it often took weeks or months of negotiation among the teams.
But was our integration going to work as expected? After all the infrastructure was set up and all the workflows built, we needed a Closed Won deal to test the system. Before the project even ended, the company had a Closed Won order and corresponding sales order that flowed automatically and flawlessly through the new system.
What began as a last attempt to fix a broken integration became a foundation the sales and finance teams can build on. With HubSpot and NetSuite finally speaking the same language, the client is ready to keep improving instead of firefighting.
