How to connect Hubspot and Zapier

The native integration and beyond, limitations and solutions

No matter how sophisticated your use of Hubspot is, at one point or another it’s almost inevitable that you’ve needed, or will need, to connect it to 3rd party applications.

Bring in Zapier.

Using Zapier to connect Hubspot to other applications lets you import a range of data into Hubspot, for example:
 — create or update HubSpot contacts from new Facebook Lead Ads leads
 —create or update HubSpot contacts from new MailChimp subscribers
 —create or update Hubspot contacts for new Calendly invitees or new form submissions

It will also enable you to react to Hubspot changes, and trigger external workflows:
 —save new HubSpot form submissions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet
 —create Zendesk tickets from new HubSpot form submissions
 —post messages to a Slack channel when new contacts are added to a list

and so on and so forth…

Hubspot actions and triggers

Hubspot is natively capable on Zapier to react to some events (triggers):
 — New COS Blog Article
 — New Calendar Task
 — New Social Media Message 
 — New Contact in List
 — New Form Submission
 — New Contact
 — New Contact Property Change

and to let Zapier tasks modify its database (actions):
 — Add Contact to Workflow
 — Create Calendar Task
 — Create Social Media Message
 — Create or Update Contact
 — New Enterprise Event
 — New Form Submission
 — Add Contact to List
 — Create COS Blog Post

Bugs…

Zapier is supposed to support Finding A Company by name, but the feature will crash if you have more than 250 companies in your database.

Zapier support has acknowledged that the Find Company Search won’t support querying more than 250 companies

…and missing pieces

Not only can you not find a Hubspot company in a Zap, but you also won’t be able to:
 — Trigger a Zap on a New Company or a Company property change
 — Trigger a Zap on a New Deal or a Deal property change
 — Find a contact
 — Get contacts for a company
 — Update a company

If you’ve managed to automate your workflows completely into Zapier but are stuck on these few missing Triggers, Searches and Actions, that might be frustrating!

The solution

Like we discussed in this article, Hubspot is very flexible in terms of integration, and anything you can’t do through existing integrations, you’ll be able to do through its API.
Zapier is very flexible as well, and since they allow you to run code in a Zap, it means you can call any remote API.

Implement new Hubspot triggers in Zapier

For the missing triggers, you will have to set up a webhook like we discussed in this other article. Set up the URL of your webhook’s application so it matches the one given to you by Zapier:

The Webhook URL you need to setup in your Hubspot Webhook configuration

Implement new Hubspot actions in Zapier

Now for the missing actions and searches, you can implement them from scratch by executing a snippet of Javascript or Python code that will call the API.
The code will have to embed your Hubspot API key, so that the API requests are authorised.

Fetch a Hubspot company info

Fetch a Hubspot company’s contacts’ emails

These are only a couple of examples, but the same principles apply to any API endpoint of Hubspot.

I hope this article was useful.

If you’re looking into integrating your software with Hubspot, I encourage you to have a look at my other article or even to get in touch. Shoot me a message on LinkedIn!