Integrating your ERP system with HubSpot offers immense benefits, from streamlining workflows to providing better insights for your sales and marketing teams. But before you can fully harness the power of this integration, data preparation is the critical first step. Ensuring that your data is clean, well-organized, and mapped correctly is essential to make the integration seamless and efficient.
In this post, we’ll discuss why data preparation is so important for a successful ERP-HubSpot integration and how ERP Bridge can help simplify and optimize this process.
Integrating data from your ERP system into HubSpot is a powerful way to centralize your business operations and customer data. However, ERP and HubSpot store data in different formats, and if not properly prepared, this can lead to errors, inefficiencies, and miscommunication between teams.
Data preparation is a crucial phase that ensures:
Accuracy: Inaccurate data can cause delays, errors, and poor decision-making across both systems.
Consistency: Mismatched data fields can lead to confusion and lost opportunities. Ensuring that data from your ERP maps correctly to HubSpot is vital.
Efficiency: Well-prepared data ensures that the integration process is smooth, reducing the need for manual intervention or fixes later on.
With ERP Bridge, this process becomes much easier. The platform is designed to handle data mapping, synchronization, and transformation, so you don’t have to manually clean and align your data before integration. But first, let’s look at what’s involved in data preparation.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to mastering data preparation before connecting your ERP system to HubSpot:
Before syncing your ERP data to HubSpot, it’s essential to clean and organize your data. This means:
Removing duplicates: Ensure you don’t have multiple records for the same customer or contact.
Standardizing fields: Make sure that key data fields, like phone numbers, addresses, and product SKUs, follow a consistent format across both systems.
Fixing errors: Correct any missing or incorrect information that could affect the quality of your data once it’s synced to HubSpot.
Proper data cleansing ensures that the data flowing into HubSpot is accurate, reducing the chances of errors that could impact your CRM.
Data mapping is the process of aligning fields from your ERP system to those in HubSpot. For example, customer names and addresses in the ERP system need to correspond with the right fields in HubSpot’s contact records.
This step is essential for:
Ensuring compatibility: ERP systems and HubSpot often store similar information in different formats, so data mapping ensures that these records align properly across both platforms.
Custom fields: Your ERP system may have custom fields that you want to map to custom properties in HubSpot. For example, product details, order status, or customer tier.
ERP Bridge provides built-in templates that simplify data mapping, allowing you to easily map your ERP fields to HubSpot properties without having to do this manually for each integration. This saves you time and reduces the risk of mapping errors.
Sometimes, the data you need to transfer from your ERP to HubSpot requires transformation. This could involve:
Changing formats: For example, dates in your ERP might be in one format (e.g., DD/MM/YYYY), while HubSpot expects another (e.g., MM/DD/YYYY).
Currency conversion: If your ERP stores prices in multiple currencies, you may need to standardize them for HubSpot or perform currency conversions.
Adjusting data types: Ensure that numeric fields in the ERP map correctly to numerical fields in HubSpot, or that text fields are properly formatted.
With ERP Bridge, data transformation is automated to a large extent, so you don't need to manually adjust each piece of data before synchronization. The platform handles data conversions and transformations in real-time, making sure that the data remains compatible and ready for use in both systems.
Once your data is cleaned, mapped, and transformed, it’s time to define how and when this data will be synchronized between your ERP and HubSpot.
Real-time synchronization: If you need instant updates, set up your system to sync data continuously between both platforms.
Scheduled synchronization: For less frequent updates, you can define a specific schedule for data sync (e.g., daily, weekly).
ERP Bridge supports both real-time and scheduled synchronization, allowing you to choose the best method based on your business needs. Whether it’s updating sales orders or refreshing contact data, this step ensures that the data in both systems remains current and consistent.
Data preparation is often the most time-consuming part of the ERP-HubSpot integration process, but with ERP Bridge, much of the heavy lifting is automated. Here’s how it helps:
ERP Bridge comes with pre-built templates for popular ERP systems like SAP, Dynamics 365, and others, allowing you to easily map data between your ERP and HubSpot without needing custom development. These templates provide you with a head start, so you can focus more on business logic than technical configuration.
With ERP Bridge, you don’t need to manually map every field or transform data yourself. The platform offers intuitive tools for data mapping, and it automatically adjusts for format discrepancies, currency conversions, and other common challenges that arise during integration.
One of the core features of ERP Bridge is its bidirectional data sync. This means that data can flow in both directions between HubSpot and your ERP system, ensuring that updates in one system are reflected in the other. With automated synchronization, you reduce the risk of outdated or incorrect information and ensure smooth operations across both systems.
While ERP Bridge provides templates, it also offers advanced customization options, allowing you to fine-tune the integration to meet your specific business needs. You can customize data mappings, set synchronization intervals, and even integrate additional third-party tools if necessary.
Data preparation is the foundation of a successful ERP and HubSpot integration. By cleaning, mapping, transforming, and synchronizing your data before the integration, you can ensure that your systems communicate smoothly and efficiently, driving better results across your business.
With ERP Bridge, the process is simplified, automating much of the data mapping and synchronization, and ensuring that your teams always have access to accurate, up-to-date information.
If you're ready to streamline your ERP and HubSpot integration, start with ERP Bridge, the tool designed to handle data preparation and integration tasks with ease.
For a step-by-step guide on how to integrate your ERP system with HubSpot, check out our How-to guide here.