I’ve seen this movie countless times: Business Has Tons of Useful Data That’s Scattered Across Systems and Isn’t Being Used for Much (or anything).
Sound familiar?
If you’ve seen this movie (meaning you’re living it!), and it resonates with you, the next step might be figuring out how to harness that untapped data.
There are two obvious steps organizations can take to unify their data across systems,
For most organizations the road doesn't end there. The integration they’ve turned on isn’t as robust in its data sync as they need it to be or there simply isn’t an existing marketplace integration with the technologies they have.
Look no further than HubSpot's Application Programming Interface (API).
Unsurprisingly, there are countless guides and videos already out there explaining the benefits of HubSpot APIs. However, in my experience when someone hears or reads the acronym, “API”, their eyes typically glaze over, and their brains become smooth.
So let’s keep this simple – in this blog, I'll lay out three reasons to utilize the APIs, and we’ll wrap up with its ease of use.
Spoiler: The sequel to the aforementioned movie is called, Business Uses HubSpot’s APIs to Unify Their Tech Stack and their Data Takes Them to Mars. It’s truly an amazing movie, we should watch it after.
HubSpot’s APIs lets you tailor your HubSpot setup to your business’s specific needs, rather than making you conform to a one-size-fits-all approach. With the help of the API, you can create new objects, properties, and perform Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations on your data. Put more simply, you can read, change, delete, or create new instances of your data.
Have a “spaceship” object that you want to track? You can create up to 500k instances of that within HubSpot, each with its own unique information.
(Source: HubSpot API Postman workspace)
This also enables you to create middleware–software that facilitates communication and data management between different systems–should a native integration not exist.
Plus, the API is free as long as you stay under 40,000 calls per day! “Calls” are essentially an instance of you interacting with your system, whether that is adding new information, reading it, deleting it, or just updating it.
Above brings me to my second point, which is the ability to connect your HubSpot instance to all of your other platforms. While the HubSpot app marketplace has thousands of apps to use, it doesn’t cover everything. With the help of the API, you can easily send data to and from your other platforms, allowing you to keep your customer data in one central location.
The result? A seamless, unified data experience.
The HubSpot API is not only available to use within workflows but is able to trigger them as well.
For example, you could use the API to create a contact from a third-party app, and once that contact is created, trigger a custom email or other action–say have a custom email sent to that contact.
Finally, a word on the documentation surrounding HubSpot’s APIs. It's intuitive, easy to understand, powerful, and well-supported.
Too many businesses are sitting on data that could greatly help them get to the next level, and the HubSpot APIs are a major step towards transforming that data into meaningful insights and automation.