Synopsis

This is a proof of concept on how PROCESIO platform can be used to integrate with HubSpot, fetch a contact list, iterate through it, make web searches based on a certain property in order to extract useful information and close the loop by posting an engagement back in HubSpot as a note containing a list of links to relevant articles along with a weighted summary of what topics are addressed in each article.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimize the inbound marketing strategy of a company in order to generate more qualified leads.

Among it's various use cases HubSpot platform allows sales teams to organize a pool of leads or potential leads as a list of contacts which are basically clients.

Properties like phone number, email, company name, status or owner are associated with a contact which help model the relationship with the client throughout all phases from reaching them to closing the deal.

In addition, each contact has dedicated sections like notes, tasks, meetings that represent different types of engagement with that contact.

For example the owner wants to keep track of what tasks they have to do regarding a certain contact. By creating a task they will remember to follow up with a call or an email and maintain the relationship with the client alive.

Also notes are useful if one wants to have some observations from previous meetings stored in a digital format not only in a notebook.

What is the goal?

Let's say a Hubspot user, typically a sales person, wants to be up to date with all that's going on in the news regarding his contacts. By being constantly informed one can have valuable insight about a client's company which might come in handy when approaching the contact.

Nowadays news run fast and it's sometimes hard to keep up with the huge amount of information that's available on the world wide web. Going through each contact in Hubspot and scrolling through the news websites to find out the latest things about them sounds like a time consuming activity.

What if, instead, you could have the top 3 most relevant articles about each contact aggregated directly in HubSpot as notes? Maybe you're interested in a certain list of topics and want to read only the articles that are related to health or investments. Having a classification of each article by topics might seem necessary.

Say you want to skip an article on Tesla (one of your contacts is working at this company) that talks about bussiness because you are already knowledgeable about this particular combination (Tesla & bussiness). Just check the next article about Tesla which happens to have been identified as approaching the environment subject.

The examples can go on and on, but the bottom line is how much amount of time can be saved by having well structured insight data enclosed in the list of contacts that you go through day by day. Data that can be easily tailored at any time in order to be relevant and up to date.

Building the solution with PROCESIO

HubSpot

  • you will be needing a HS account - preferable a development account for testing purposes (if you already have a HS account, development or otherwise, skip the underlying steps or take a quick read here although you still need a test account if you don't want to mess with your production like environment first)
  • follow this link https://developers.hubspot.com/get-started and choose Create App Developer account
  • once done with the previous step go to the Home page and choose Create a test account (for more info check https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/faq/how-do-i-create-a-test-account)
  • for API usage you will need an API key in order to make authorized calls so from the top-right corner click on the avatar and select Profile & Preferences then on the left list of settings expand the Integrations drop-down and select API Key and then create one if no active API key available and save it for later

NewsAPI

NewsAPI is a web project that allows users to search the web for news in a developer-ish way via powerful APIs and client libreries for several programming languages

  • the existence of a wide list of search parameters lets you create versatile queries
  • a similar service called newsapi.ai has APIs oriented towards analytics and one can benefit from analyzing the sentiment of a given text or the extraction of topics from a given article
  • both services are well documented and work based on API keys with regards to authorization
  • the caveat is that there are some limitations when using the free plan

Finally, it's time to connect the dots and bring PROCESIO in.