Pushing the boundaries of HubSpot

Representing one of the core companies of the Mitsubishi Group, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries combines experience and cutting-edge technology to manufacture innovative solutions that support industries spanning energy, logistics, industrial machinery, infrastructure, aerospace and defence.

Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks, a key MHI brand, needed a multi-lingual, multi-integration website to do the heavy lifting of their business development across Europe. They wanted to move away from their existing custom-built website platform to a more SaaS-orientated approach. In this case, HubSpot was the chosen platform due to its enhanced marketing automation software and lead generation. Hubspot would be used to develop a further eight country sites.

One of the main requirements was to show Mitsubishi’s full forklift product catalogue updated from their in-house systems on a nightly basis. Due to the nature of HubSpot solely focusing on marketing-related features, the ability to house vast product-related information was limited. A solution was required that would allow product data to be stored and used within HubSpot without limiting any of its core marketing features.

A "HubSpot Connector" was developed that would act as a bridge between Mitsubishi's product database and Hubspot. Product data would be read and transformed into a streamlined format suitable for HubSpot. Once the transformation process was completed, HubSpot API was used to pass the data into HubSpot's data store (HubDB).

Due to the vast amount of data and a limited number of Hubspot API calls, the "HubSpot Connector" kept track of usage to determine when the next batch of data could be sent. Advanced error handling and notifications were put in place to ensure product updates were successful.