Lynton Fully Integrates HubSpot and NetSuite for NetFortis

The Problem

Colin Eddy, Senior Marketing Manager of Operations and Analytics for NetFortris, knew they were struggling with a limited integration between HubSpot, NetFortris’ inbound marketing platform, and NetSuite, their customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

Back in 2015, NetFortris had some fundamental and familiar problems with the management of its marketing campaigns: The company was running both inbound and outbound campaigns with limited ability to automate the process of generating and managing them and no mechanism for measuring the success of each.

The company relied on NetSuite for CRM, and it was utilizing HubSpot to automate many of its marketing functions. But while a unidirectional sync was in place to move contacts from HubSpot into NetSuite, there was no communication between the platforms in the other direction, forcing the NetFortris team to rely on manual processes for creating email campaigns and tracking their success.

NetFortris leverages emails, website visits, webinars and events to generate interest in its offerings, and it utilizes these campaigns to build relationships with contacts that attend these events. NetFortris found that the time its sales and marketing personnel were spending on the manual processes involved in creating and executing these campaign activities was significantly limiting the time they were able to spend actually nurturing these relationships.

NetFortris needed to better equip its marketing team and numerous sales teams to share information easily and collaborate more closely, all with an eye towards providing a more seamless and customized experience for NetFortris contacts while enabling better visibility into marketing campaign performance.

“Our marketing teams are responsible for a broad range of activities, and we have a varying degree of expertise across and within our teams when it comes to setting up campaigns in Hubspot and tracking their effectiveness. We were relying on a lot of manual processes, and that was time and attention being taken away from the orchestration of the campaigns and from our prospects, themselves.”

The NetFortris team knew it needed to leverage the full capabilities of both HubSpot and NetSuite through greater marketing automation, so the company turned to the Lynton team to improve the connectivity between the two platforms.

The Solution

Lynton created a bi-directional sync between HubSpot and NetSuite so that campaigns created in NetSuite by a NetFortris marketing manager could be automatically replicated in HubSpot, making the hand-off from the marketing manager to the email marketing specialist smooth and efficient.

Being able to mirror the NetSuite campaigns in HubSpot allows marketing managers to concentrate their time and energy on providing the best possible marketing and sales experience for prospects and allows the email marketing managers to assume orchestration of the touch points with the event participants and attribute follow-up behavior to the appropriate campaign and the specific outreach.

“Lynton helped automate the campaign creation process,” Mr. Eddy said, “so now our marketing managers don’t have to search through a bunch of campaigns and make sure all the parameters like names and IDs match up properly. They just select the right campaign from a dropdown list and off they go. It’s saved us a lot of time and made everyone’s job much easier.”

The Lynton team relied on best practices to structure their engagement with NetFortris by triaging their approach to NetFortris’ desired outcomes. Initially, Lynton mapped out the functionality that was already in place in the existing unidirectional sync between HubSpot and NetSuite. Lynton developed and shared with NetFortris detailed documentation of the technical integration, from which the two teams derived a prioritized list of pain points the Lynton team would address in the bidirectional integration.

In the second phase, Lynton’s next steps involved scoping functionality for the bidirectional sync based on the strengths of the HubSpot platform. “We had been doing manual list pulls out of NetSuite to get updated contact information into Excel lists and then import them into HubSpot,” said Mr. Eddy. “It was an incredibly manual process for this day and age. But through the bidirectional sync, we are able to assign each contact to the right internal sales team and deliver targeted and personalized messaging quickly, which has resulted in an incredibly high conversion rate.”

“Lynton helped us understand the realistic boundaries on the functionality of the platforms. They encouraged us not to spend an inordinate amount of time or money pursuing a specific path to an outcome that could be achieved more simply and cost-effectively for us by taking a different approach. It was clear that Lynton was looking out for our best interests every step of the way.”

Mr. Eddy went on to say that the longer range goals included having the Lynton team provide technical training to NetFortris on many of the fundamental functionalities the NetFortris team would need to manage field mappings and other desired changes on their own. “We were able to take the latest stage of our project live without Lynton’s help. Being able to customize our own environment was a huge step forward for us,” Mr. Eddy said.

The Results

Through the personalization NetFortris was able to inject in its email campaigns as a result of the bidirectional sync from NetSuite to HubSpot, email open rates on their campaigns went from a best-case of 75 percent to a best-case of nearly 90 percent.

The automation also provided a big boost to the speed of NetFortris’ campaign execution.

“Prior to the bidirectional sync, we were averaging an email send rate of roughly 20,000 per month. Through the automation, we are now operating at an email send rate of approximately 100,000 per month. This multiplier in email send rates results in higher revenue each month.”

Beyond automating the campaign creation process, the bidirectional sync also allowed for delivering updated contact data to NetFortris’ paid advertising platform, also integrated into HubSpot. “Having contact info that’s accurate and updated constantly allows us to improve our in-market retargeting. We’ve seen nothing but all-around improvement since the Lynton team made the effort to get to know our business, our environment, and us.”

If you need help with HubSpot integration, contact Lynton for a consultation.

“We could move data from HubSpot into NetSuite, but there was no way to automatically pull data from NetSuite into Hubspot. And that was an issue for us.”

Colin Eddy
Senior Marketing Manager of Operations and Analytics for NetFortris