Using Segment.com as middleware for updating Hubspot

Develop, Build & Integrate Marketplace Apps
1

Hi there,

I am in the middle of implementing Segment and have hit a big barrier. When setting up Hubspot as a destination they offer a “Contact Upsert” option, but I can’t change the mapping to use the Hubspot VID instead of email. If a user already exists in Hubspot, I don’t want to always match on email address. Our customers can change their email addresses. I want to be able to send data to Hubspot and match on VID instead.

We currently use the Hubspot API for a direct connection between our product database and Hubspot. When a new user creates a free account on our product website, then we use the “upsert contact” functionality. We search by email address and if there is a match, we update the existing record. If there isn’t a match, we create a new Contact. We then capture the Contact ID and store it in our product database. When we need to update information in Hubspot for that user, we just use the “update contact” API functionality that Hubspot provides and we update the Contact record.

My hope is to get rid of our direct integration between our product and Hubspot and use Segment instead. But that won’t be possible with this barrier in place. It actually renders Segment completely useless to us, too. We had hoped to send data from Segment and leverage Segment’s “Engage” feature. But we can’t do this if we can only identify records in Hubspot by email address. Again, our customers can change their email addresses.

Segment seems completely caught offguard by all of this even though I explained it completely during the sales process to their sales engineer. Frankly I can’t understand how anyone could use Segment in conjunction with Hubspot or Salesforce or Sugar or Zoho or any other CRM out there. Or any other system of record, frankly. That system would get messy really quickly with duplicate records that don’t align with your product database.

Has anyone figured out a way around this? Am I missing something in Segment? See the attached screenshot from Segment when configuring Hubspot as a Destination.

Segment Mapping Hubspot.jpg
Segment Mapping Hubspot.jpg953×280 26.1 KB

Hubspot Destination in Segment

Help!

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@JGood If you are unable to find a solution in Segment, there is a low cost option that can work depending on your product database. What type of database is it?

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Our database is SQL. We are looking at giving Zapier a try by setting up a private app that connects our databases to Zapier and then I can send data anywhere I want. Which is what I thought Segment would do for me, but it doesn’t.

I’m guessing the low-cost solution is datawarehouse.io…? :slightly_smiling_face:

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@JGood Actually, no. Please email me at john.elmer@bayardbradford.com and I will direct you to a solution from one of our partners. Their free tier might meet your needs.