Database-Driven Website and A Single Source of Truth

With constantly growing and changing offers, it's hard to keep the data organized. We built a website that automatically populates and updates offers through CMS and CRM from third-party platforms.

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Imagine you’ve got over 200 (constantly growing and changing) offerings of different products and services that you want to display on your website but you are already using a third-party platform to store them. Moving all of them to HubSpot would equal to undertaking a lot of menial manual work. But there’s a solution!

The Goals

At ClickRay & Storylead, we pride ourselves in problem-solving skills that aim at alleviating the technical burdens from our clients. The client recently acquired HubSpot’s CMS and CRM, and for the purposes of this project ClickRay built a new website in Themes based on the designs provided by Storylead, an inbound marketing & sales agency. The website development involved creating multi-language variations among others. In order to best serve their clientele, our client wanted to display the whole customer journey on their website: beginning at the pain points and challenges of their own clients, followed by bringing them to the appropriate products and services. The main challenge was to showcase the client’s products and services on the website through CMS and use these offerings within their sales process in the CRM while eliminating the excess work for our client resulting from manual data transfers and updates. Our client is a tech-driven company that has an in-house team of developers who are in charge of creating custom connectors. While their main goal was to retain a single source of truth, they asked us to direct them on how to create APIs that would connect HubSpot’s both CMS and CRM with their third-party platform (the client was already using Airtable to store their offerings data). ClickRay guided the client through the process of creating custom connectors that would work well with HubSpot.

The Work

However, this project required a lot of thinking out-of-the-box to create a solution to a complex problem. Each data point of the offerings contained a lot of additional information. We asked the client to provide all the data points that have to be showcased on the website and connected them to the corresponding template designs while working with the designer to achieve the desired data structure outcome. We created the data structure in HubDB and connected the database to a dynamic site so that the client’s offerings would be automatically displayed and updated on their new website. The client’s in-house dev team used Zapier to create a connector with Airtable, which the client used as a single source of truth. All of it together resulted in the transfer and any updates of the data to be done automatically, straight from the third-party platform, fulfilling the main goal of the project - to achieve efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy of the systems. Using this solution, ClickRay, along with Storylead that worked with the client on the CRM, ended up empowering the client’s sales team in their inbound marketing campaigns, allowing them to use the full potential of HubSpot CRM’s custom objects and products functionality in conjunction with HubSpot CMS’s HubDB, which was used to showcase the offers on the website.

The Final Product

The project was a collaboration between ClickRay, a web design and development company, and Storylead, which was in charge of the whole project. This project involved a lot of redesign and development work, therefore required a joint collaboration between different teams: ClickRay, Storylead, a design agency, and the client’s in-house dev and marketing team. The key takeaway is that HubDB and dynamic websites, in conjunction with HubSpot CRM’s custom objects and products, can be a powerful tool in an inbound marketing and sales process, especially if the single source of truth doesn’t require any additional manual work.

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