How You Can Use Sandboxes to Customize HubSpot CRM with Confidence

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At INBOUND this year, HubSpot released a host of new features that makes our CRM platform more customizable, more connected, and more customer-first. One of those new features is sandboxes. Sandboxes allow Enterprise customers to kick the tires, and experiment with different elements of the customer experience in a safe environment that mimics their production account.

Sounds cool -- but where should you start? With the door blown open on your ability to test and iterate on your user and customer experience, trying to leverage sandboxes in a meaningful way can be a daunting task. With that in mind, let’s take a look at three distinct use cases for sandboxes, to show you exactly how your team can start getting value out of the new feature today.

Setting up your CRM

Teams who work in the HubSpot CRM become accustomed to a certain workflow. No matter how easy HubSpot is to use, a change in your deal pipeline, or the required fields needed to create a new object can bring even the most efficient team’s productivity to a halt -- especially if everything isn’t configured exactly the way it needs to be. This could lead to your sales team sitting around and waiting for your admins to fix mistakes, potentially losing deals in the process.

Sandboxes provide the perfect environment for your HubSpot admins to build out new processes for your team without interrupting the day to day happenings of your marketing and sales teams in HubSpot. While everything is being built out, you can ensure that your team is trained on any new systems and processes you’re implementing so  no one is surprised when you take a new deal pipeline or lead rotation system into production.

Andrew Thomas, Head of Client Services at Digital 22 has used sandboxes for CRM migrations and setup extensively. "It's been an absolute lifesaver when broad changes need to be made on an existing CRM setup that is in constant use,” says Thomas. “Sandboxes enable us to introduce and test out multiple sales pipelines, deal stages, automation and brand new layouts to contact records. Having this functionality was instrumental in keeping our client in the loop and reassured on the implementation road map before we pushed live.”

Testing your integrations

Hubspot has all the tools you need to  build out an incredible experience for your customers. But in order to ensure a seamless experience for your customers across every touchpoint they have with your company, you’ll want to have all your data and information in one place, providing you with a system of record for the customer experience. 

That’s where integrations come into play. HubSpot has hundreds of integrations that can be easily installed, or you can build your own custom integrations leveraging our APIs. But installing an integration without fully understanding how shared data between two systems will impact your team can cause trouble. Take the HubSpot/Salesforce integration, for example. Depending on how you configure the integration, you could have Salesforce overwrite all the information available in HubSpot, you could have only certain objects syncing, and the integration can impact features across the entire platform.

Leveraging sandboxes, you can easily test how integrating a tool with HubSpot will impact your production instance. Never worry about overwritten data, incorrect workflow triggers, or interrupting your team’s workflows ever again.

Pro Tip: If you’re integrating with a tool that also has a sandbox environment, use that testing environment instead of your production account to test integrations with HubSpot. This will maintain your data across all your tools when testing.  

Developing the perfect website

CMS Hub removes gatekeepers from your web development process so marketers can easily create new pages or edit existing content, while developers can focus on building out more sophisticated experiences leveraging the built in data set provided by HubSpot’s CRM. When building out these experiences, developers are using more than just HTML and CSS. They’re working with serverless functions, creating dynamic content leveraging different CRM objects or HubDB, and referencing data in different systems through our APIs. Building this out in a production environment of HubSpot could mean that your marketers have access to a new module or template before your dev team has put the final closing tag on each line of code.

By leveraging Sandboxes, your dev team can confidently test how their code interacts with different parts of HubSpot, and ensure that everything is up to their standards before allowing their marketers to build pages with their new theme, template, or module.

The Lynton team has used Sandboxes extensively when developing CMS assets for themselves, and their clients. @alyssamwilie , web developer at LyntonWeb says, “Testing out new ideas and templates can quickly clog up our portals with unused content. Having a separate place for testing helps us keep organized and leaves our main portal clean with assets our marketers know are fully tested and ready to be used live.”

More to come...

The launch of Sandboxes at INBOUND is just the beginning. In the near future, you’ll have the ability to sync your workflows to Sandboxes, and push changes made in a sandbox back to your production account. Stay tuned for more information on these exciting updates.

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How are you planning to use Sandboxes? Share your use cases in the comments below.