How to connect product usage data to HubSpot

[stuartbalcombe]

One thing that is often touted by dedicated customer success platforms that seems less common in the HubSpot community is pulling product usage data (or any other data from an external system) into the CRM for reporting and/or driving behavior based actions.

So I thought I'd walkthrough how we set this up for ourselves at Arrows.to. We wrote an in-depth guide for using HubSpot for onboarding and CS here.

👀What we’ll cover:

• Which product data to pull into HubSpot
• How to sync your product usage data with HubSpot
• A workflow to keep data in sync across objects
• Example use cases for product data in HubSpot

Which product data to pull into HubSpot

Having data that shows how customers are using your product and combining it with conversations and interactions your team is having with customers in your CRM is a great way to to identify churn risks, drive adoption and ensure you have all the information you need for renewal conversations.

So which data should you pull in and where should you put it?

1. I’d suggest putting account level data such as number of team members, billing plan, or projects created from external systems into custom properties on the company record and then using a workflow like the one below to copy it to the appropriate ticket or deal in your onboarding and success pipelines whenever it gets updated.

2. If the data is user specific such as the time they last logged in or a count of a specific action they have taken you could do the same thing with a contact record.
   
   

Options for integrating HubSpot with your data sources

Pulling data into HubSpot doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch and writing a custom integration with the API, instead we can use off the shelf tools like Hightouch or Syncari. These tools make it possible to query your app database or any other data store and map that data to HubSpot properties.

It’s important to note that syncing usage data to HubSpot as suggested here will work best when you are passing calculated values such as “counts” or defined values such as whether an attribute is true or false to set the value of a HubSpot property. This will likely look different than how you might be familiar with querying usage data in event driven product analytics tools such as June, Mixpanel or Amplitude.

At Arrows we use Hightouch to pull data from our Postgres database into HubSpot company records and then push it into the deals we use to manage our self-serve and sales-assist motions. Here’s how that looks:

1. Querying the database with models in Hightouch
Connecting to a PostgresSQL database

Using models to query data with SQL

2. Creating a customer reference property

Using a query to identify all accounts in the Arrows Postgres database

Using a Hightouch sync to push account records to a reference property in HubSpot

3. Sync data to custom properties on the base record
Creating HubSpot as a destination for our product data in Hightouch

Product usage data on a HubSpot company record

A workflow to keep data in sync across objects

Now that you have product usage data being synced to a “base” company or contact record, we can use this simple workflow to copy those values to all the associated deals or tickets to make sure everyone has insight into a customers product usage when they need it.
Workflow to copy values from the company record to associate deal and ticket records

Example Usage

Having product usage data available in HubSpot opens up lots of opportunities to identify valuable insights by combining it with the rest of the customer data in your CRM, or using it to drive behavior based workflows such as email sequences or advanced reporting.

1. Account Utilization Calculated Property
   If you have a usage based pricing model, would like to use product data to inform your reporting for activation, health scoring or want to streamline how your team is notified of critical milestones in the customer journey a calculated “Account Utilization” metric can be really helpful.
   
   This calculated property could compare multiple product data points synced from your app such as Team Members Included in an accounts plan and the team members invited by that account or it could compare product usage against a static benchmark that you set.
   
   
   
2. Track Self-Serve Accounts and Loop In Sales for Product-Qualified Deals

   Creating a unified experience for customers when you have both a self-serve, product-led experience and a more traditional sales motion can be challenging if your team does not have a holistic picture of the customer journey.
   
   

   By using separate pipelines in HubSpot for your self-serve and sales motions you can quickly identify accounts that are primed and ready for a commercial conversation.
   

Would love to hear what you think, and if you've implemented similar workflows with product data yourself.

If you have questions or want to dig into anything here in more detail I'm always happy to chat and we have a ton more free resources for building onboarding programs too if you're curious.

[TiphaineCuisset]

Hi @stuartbalcombe 

Thank you for sharing this with the community!!