Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. My name is Aad. I'm the strategy director here at SignalFlow. We're leading HubSpot partner agency. We're experts in building and implementing HubSpot for scaling mid-market organisations but also for enterprise and corporate organisations as well. We work with organisations to create tailored growth plans and help them implement it with our expertise. We can help to build APIs to onboard on the platform, and then we really focus on the training to make sure we're handing over something that is usable for the client. Now, of course, the CRM is really important for every implementation and the strategy that goes along with that because it's going to set the stage for how you onboard and customise the rest of the platform across your business. However, to effectively use your CRM, it actually goes beyond the system itself, and you need to start to look at the different ecosystem of platforms you're using, because, over time, as your tech stack grows, you're going to see more complexity because the different systems won't be able to speak to each other as effectively. This creates different data silos, which means that you can never really trust where your data is coming from, and you can't actually use it effectively. So, to address this, many businesses, they create point-to-point API integrations. This does work at the start whenever you're connecting two different systems together. However, as you start to add more and more integrations into the mix, the flow of data between your systems becomes more and more complex, and this creates fragilities across that data. So, rather than your data being easy to follow from point A to point B, it becomes really hard to understand where it's coming from, where it's going, and what its use is. Instead of looking like a straight grid planet, it starts to look more like a spider's web with different data connected across different ecosystems. This decentralisation of data can cause significant challenges because, when it comes to analysing data, creating reports, and making informed business decisions, you're never really sure if the data is trustworthy, if it's recent, or if it's actually aligned with the rest of your business. So, what people do to solve this is that they start to build data warehouses, and this has become an integral part of many businesses, and a key piece of the puzzle to address the challenge of decentralised data. The rise of big data and the increasing need for data analysis means that businesses require centralised data storage that can handle a large volume of data across multiple systems. But, again, there are many challenges in implementing an effective data warehousing strategy. First of all, you need to ensure that you've picked the correct platform, you need to understand the complexity of the integration process, and ensure that the data quality and accuracy is present, and you need to manage the ongoing maintenance of the system. The data schema and your warehousing strategy quickly become a fundamental part of the overall health and success of your business. Just like a solid CRM strategy lays the foundation for your customer management, a solid warehousing and data strategy lays the foundations for the rest of your business. Now, this is where two key concepts come in. ETL, extract, transform, and load, and reverse ETL, which is just RETL. These are processes used to integrate data from multiple sources into a centralised data warehouse, ETL. This is a process of extracting the data into the warehouse, where it can be transformed and made to fit across multiple systems. The next process, reverse ETL, is then taking that data and pushing it back into the various systems so that they can all speak together correctly using the essential data. This does away with the spider web approach, and it massively simplifies the movement of data between your systems, because now you have a central repository and a view of all of your key data, which ultimately creates cleaner, more actionable data insights that you can then run across multiple systems, including HubSpot. Now, HubSpot does include integration capabilities out of the box that support ETL and reverse ETL, and this can push it into popular warehouses such as Snowflake. For that, you can use a pre-built Snowflake connector which can be found in the app marketplace. Beyond that, though, if you're looking to integrate with other systems for your data warehouses, or even use different storage methods like S3, Athena, Google Data, Cloud Studios, or others, there are a lot of tools that can integrate and be used for data warehousing. You will need to use operations hub in order to push that data across effectively. Now, we've successfully used, and we would highly recommend using Fivetran and high-touch platforms to allow businesses to push data out of other systems and pull them back into the warehouse. The reason for this is they allow for real-time synchronisation, but also it's the ease of use and also the power of the systems. They're built on good structures, they've got very little downtime, and they're very easy to use. So, to give you some examples, a business may want to extract data from their billing platform and transform it into a specific format, and then load that into HubSpot's CRM system as a line item or an invoice. HubSpot could be used to extract this data from web forms or other customer contact areas like ad interactions. It could then be transformed and pushed back into your warehouse via the Snowflake connector, and this would ensure that all of your contact and key data stays up-to-date and aligned in real-time. You would also be able to use HubSpot's workflows and functionality to facilitate ETL and reverse ETL processes using the powerful features like data cleaning and formatting through the built-in automation tools with operations hub. And you would be able to use the platform's custom objects functionality to be able to create custom references for different tables, which again gives more context to the data that you're trying to store. So, just to look at a real-world example of how a business utilised HubSpot's ETL or reverse ETL capabilities, Smeg UK, a leading appliance manufacturer, one of our clients, was looking for a way to integrate HubSpot's CRM with their marginless database. Smeg UK wanted to ensure that they had a way to pull in all of their purchase data to give them a contextual view of their customers, but also help them in order to create better marketing campaigns and drive revenue. We used High Touch to align the different systems and seamlessly pass the information from their overall warehouse into HubSpot. This allowed them to use those capabilities to figure out, to create genres, to create different segments of different products that people have purchased, and really drive that contextual messaging, but through their marketing, at the same time as getting all of the product and revenue information back into HubSpot to allow them to build an overall picture of their ROI and effectively what marketing was doing to help drive forward the rest of the business. So, that's pretty much it, guys, as we've tried to cover off ETL or reverse ETL, and just to speak a little bit about HubSpot in general, but I would say, if you want any more information on it, feel free to contact Six and Flow, or else, you know, have a look on Google for these things. They're very well-known, really powerful platforms, and yeah, they're good at what they do.