For companies using HubSpot CRM as their “source-of-truth” when it comes to customer data, often relies on third party tools to enrich and contextualize the data. Many of these tools in the sales- and marketing space comes with a prebuilt HubSpot Connector – but there are still tools that would require a manual integration.
For these use cases - you might want to take a look at the “Send a webhook” workflow action in HubSpot Workflows. With the power of HubSpot’s automation platform and Webhooks, you can create your own “mini-integrations” using HubSpot workflows 🤯.
How it works
To demonstrate how the webhook action can be used – I’ve set up a new workflow where my goal is to check if an email is valid through the Hunter Email API.
First of all – to use the Hunter APIs, you’ll need an API key (which is free with usage limits). Visit Hunter.io here: https://hunter.io/api
In this case, I wanted to check the email validity for any contact that lands in our CRM. There are obviously cases where you would want to change this - for example tie it to contacts that subscribe to your newsletter or other communications to reduce the required API credits needed.
1. Configuring the workflow action
From reading the Hunter API Documentation, I know their API endpoint expects a GET request, with the obtained API key and Email address we want to check passed as query parameters. This configuration obviously depends on the API endpoint you’re trying to hit - and each endpoint might require different properties passed as query parameters.
To add the API key – you should store it as a “secret” in HubSpot Workflows which is more secure than adding it as a static value.
2. Sending the first test request
At this point - I sent my first request using the “Test action” feature - which returns successfully. The API endpoint does return a lot of data, and the next step is to inspect the response data, and choose the properties I want to output from the workflow. In my case, I’m mostly interested in wether the email is valid or not, which exists as a boolean (true/false) property.
When I’ve configured the output properties, I can save the workflow action.
3. Handling the response
The hard part is over - and what remains now is to handle the response. It is now possible to create if/else branches based on the webhook output. In our case I created a check for wether the email was indeed valid. I can now handle subscriptions, marketing contact status and similar operations based on the information given.
Conclusion
Even though HubSpot has become established enough so that most third party tools will have a HubSpot connector if applicable - I still find there are some use cases where no such connector exist. It might also be relevant for in-house built tools where you’ll want to notify of changes in HubSpot or fetch some additional data and enrich your data in HubSpot.
Whatever the use case is - the “Send a webhook” workflow action is really powerful if you know how and when to use it. I hope this post illustrates that it’s not prohibitively difficult.
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