...of automating the manual

The team managing the campaigns solely uses Asana to monitor deal stages and create tasks. However, all information about products, deals, and challenges was stored in HubSpot with no direct link to Asana. This disconnection made data transition thorny, time-consuming, and prone to errors.

Here are the four main problems our client's team faced:

• Sales reps had to manually create each task and subtask, copying all relevant information from HubSpot.
• Sales reps struggled to identify which products belonged to which challenges.
• Any changes made to Asana tasks were invisible in HubSpot, causing reporting inconsistency.
• The progress of a deal in HubSpot was not visible in Asana, which required sales reps to report any changes to the campaign team. Failing that, more discrepancies occurred.

Creating HubSpot-Asana link

To solve the sales team's issues, we integrated HubSpot with Asana, using Tray.io IPaaS, an API integration platform, as a bridge. This facilitated two-way data flow between HubSpot deals and custom "product" objects, and Asana tasks and sub-tasks.

Now, when a deal in HubSpot reaches a specific stage, separate tasks are automatically created in Asana for each challenge, with subtasks for each additional product. All modification updates are immediately synchronized between HubSpot and Asana to keep data consistent.

1. New Asana tasks
with sub-tasks

This process begins when a deal in HubSpot reaches  80% of the pipeline stage, triggering a workflow that sends a webhook (an HTTP data transfer request) to Tray.io.

The goal is to create an Asana task for each challenge associated with the deal and subtasks for each additional product relevant to the challenge.

Mapping challenge data: Tray.io maps the challenge data to values that Asana can understand. This includes formatting dates to Asana formats and splitting and mapping multi-select string values from HubSpot to corresponding IDs.

Creating the task: After data mapping, a task is created in Asana via the "Create task" endpoint, and the task ID is updated in HubSpot.

Matching products with challenges: The process continues by using the "List CRM Object Associations" endpoint to get the ID of a deal associated with the challenge, and IDs of all associated “products”.

Creating sub-tasks: Each product is checked for a match with the challenge based on type, matching start/end/live dates, and common elements in multi-select properties. Then, sub-tasks are created in Asana for products that meet the criteria. The types of matching products are compiled into a list, which updates the multi-select field on the main task to reflect all associated product types.

3. Asana updates

This workflow springs into action whenever a property synced with Asana is modified in HubSpot or when the associated deal progresses to the “closed won” stage. It sends a webhook Tray.io with details about the modified product.

Mapping and formatting data: The modified product goes through the same process as outlined in the first automation.

Updating the task status: The "Asana ID" property of the task or sub-task in HubSpot is used to update the matching item in Asana.

Checking the deal stage: If the deal is at the “closed won” stage, the “add task to project” endpoint in Asana moves the task to a different project, signaling the team that the campaign is ready for action.