Sharing CRM information with External contributor and updating the CRM with its changes

[JoaoFerreira]

Hi all!

My company has external stakeholders which need to often update information in our properties.

We have been using google sheets to collect their updates and manually update HubSpot but as you can imagine this is a big hustle..

Would you know any way or services that we could:

1. Display selected properties values for them

2. In case they update any property, it would reflect on our CRM

3. In case WE update any property on our CRM, it would reflect on their portal/interface

Thanks in advance!

best,

[Mike_Eastwood · Accepted solution]

Hi @JoaoFerreira 

If you're lucky enough to have Service Hub Professional,Service Hub Enterprise or CMS Hub Enterprise you could add a Membership Area.

Your "external stakeholders" could then log in and make chanages, via a form, that would update the CRM. The experience would be more like forms on a web page, not the HubSpot CRM. This would require some coding and (an upgrade if you don't have Service Hub Professional, Enterprise or CMS Hub Enterprise).

Alternately, you could add another HubSpot Portal and sync the data but I think you'd be exchanging the challenges with Google Sheets to the challenge of two HubSpot Portals!

Have fun

Mike

p.s. thank you for the mention @Jaycee_Lewis 

[JoaoFerreira]

This is fantastic, thank you all!

Thank you, @Jaycee_Lewis! I tried to put together a GSheets <> HubSpot integration using zapier but I am afraid it is not designed to cover my use case.

@Mike_Eastwood and @jpsanchez, your solutions sound great! 🤔 🙌

If I may use a bit more of your kindness, I would like to follow up on your suggestions:

@Mike_Eastwood - HubSpot CMS Form:

Could you describe a bit more the concept of a membership (login & password) area on the CMS? this sounds great and could be scaled for other innitiatives of my company

So far I have thought of the following:

1. Coding a form + displaying a live Custom Record property value as bellow:

2. Sending a post request using JS to n8n

3. using n8n to update the new values back to the respective record on HubSpot

Blocker: 

I am only managing to retrieve the "warehouse_name" property info. When I try any other property, it does not display the record's property value.     i.e.: {{partnerInfos.warehouse_address}} 

Being a custom object created via API by me, would you know if I am missing something? Maybe declaring more attributes inside these custom object properties?

@jpsanchez- Middleware: I really enjoy n8n, thanks for introducing it to me!

If possible, could you guide me on the following: 

My goals using n8n is to:

1. Retrieve selected property values of a custom object record

2. Upload updates on these properties values back to hubspot

Blockers:

I managed to create an OAuth2 Credential but am having a hard time figuring out which should be the URL to paste on the field in blank... Should it be the API reference from HubSpot's documentation? which? or should it be the URL my hubspot App gave me? could you give me an example?

After this step, which would be the next action to select a given record's property values to retrieve? another HTTP request? 

I imensely thank you in advance for your help! I am sure this case could also help others' similar use cases

Have a great Thursday, you all! 

[jpsanchez · Accepted solution]

Ok, 

key Question here, How this view and update is taking place? In terms of process and second how many stakeholders and changes per day today and forecast in six months?. 

Answering this questions will give you detail overview idea of what do you need.

IF for example the VIEW AND UPDATE can be donde in each stakeholders CRM or similar. In my experience the best option is to create a MIDDLEWARE or also called orquestrator, It´s a server that can manage the extraction of the information from HubSpot , transform it and send it to where it´s need it. This can be donde in TWO WAYS so if and update are done in your END you can push to the middleware and return the update to HUBSPOT.

You can find many middlewares in the market. In my experience i´m using N8N with our own server especification works super well and the time to create a new connection etc.. is ridiculous low. 

Hope that works 

Best

JP

[Mike_Eastwood · Accepted solution]

Hi @JoaoFerreira 

If you're lucky enough to have Service Hub Professional,Service Hub Enterprise or CMS Hub Enterprise you could add a Membership Area.

Your "external stakeholders" could then log in and make chanages, via a form, that would update the CRM. The experience would be more like forms on a web page, not the HubSpot CRM. This would require some coding and (an upgrade if you don't have Service Hub Professional, Enterprise or CMS Hub Enterprise).

Alternately, you could add another HubSpot Portal and sync the data but I think you'd be exchanging the challenges with Google Sheets to the challenge of two HubSpot Portals!

Have fun

Mike

p.s. thank you for the mention @Jaycee_Lewis 

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hi, @JoaoFerreira 👋 Thank you for reaching out! Were you thinking this would be a low-code type of project, leveraging another tool like Zapier to handle some work? Or were you working with a developer to build out all the needed parts from scratch? 

Hey, @Teun @Kevin-C @jpsanchez @Mike_Eastwood.  @LMeert , have you built out a similar project? Or do you have any thoughts on how @JoaoFerreira might break this up into several smaller pieces? 

Thank you for taking a look! — Jaycee