The Most Powerful Way to Use Operations Hub

[Connorj13]

If you’re anything like a HubSpot partner, one of the most exciting things coming out of the Operations Hub announcement is the ability to build custom applications inside of HubSpot. While this is a very exciting development, most of us have to make a very big decision to make. You’ll have to ask yourself:

Do you want to deploy your new custom app to the HubSpot marketplace?

It can be very tempting to feel the urge to take advantage of the green pastures, but one thing few people know is that there are limits to the current app ecosystem. One limit that my team is currently working against is that you cannot run code with a workflow extension or other installed app, meaning you need an external service to power your application.  

There are many curveballs like this that may make you not want to list your app for the general public. 

However, with the custom objects and custom coded actions now available in Operations Hub, you are able to build entire applications native to Hubspot that might be worth the effort for your own internal teams.

Take for instance a commissions app. With two custom objects, one for a commission plan and another for a commission event, and a simple custom-coded action you can manage and calculate all of your commissions natively inside of Hubspot. 

This is something that would be endlessly valuable to your sales team and can be created in a few simple steps:

First, create a commission plan record and store your commission details on it (such as % of the commission paid on deal won, quota numbers, ramp bonuses, and spiffs). By storing a user ID on your commission plan object, you can build a custom-coded action that runs on deals being marked closed-won. 

When this happens, your action will be invoked, and search for a commission plan with the same user ID as your deal owner. Based on information on that specific commission plan, your coded action can generate a commission event directly inside Hubspot. 

You can then use these commission events and add fields for things like whether it was paid out or not, build reports on commissions, and have a fully functioning commissions application all without adding another SaaS product or external service. 

This can be extended to almost anything you can imagine and is truly the most powerful use case for Operations Hub. 

Again, this is a great tool that you might want to list on the public marketplace, but I caution people to only think about things they can build for the public. There are so many cool things we’re building for our clients that they only intend to use internally. 

Do you have an idea for an app (internal or public), let’s talk about it! Join me at our next workshop!