Unlock Online Revenue: HubSpot Payments, Zaybra, and Your Business
Ever feel like you’re leaving money on the table because your payment system just isn't talking to your CRM? You're not alone! Many businesses struggle with disconnected payment processes, making it tough to get a full picture of their revenue and customer journey. But what if you could streamline everything, collecting payments, managing subscriptions, and automating follow-ups, all within HubSpot?
We recently sat down with Connor Jeffers from Aptitude 8, an expert in all things HubSpot and payments. He’s here to demystify HubSpot Payments and introduce you to Zaybra, a powerful HubSpot integration. Get ready to learn the good, the bad, the ugly, and the absolute best ways to generate currency from the interwebs!
What Exactly Is HubSpot Payments?
Let's start at the beginning. What the heck is HubSpot Payments? Connor puts it simply: it’s bringing commerce into the HubSpot CRM. Think of it as HubSpot’s way of making it incredibly easy for businesses to collect money from humans online, whether that's directly from their website or driven by their sales teams.
Why should you even consider HubSpot Payments over other options? If you’re a business, you're collecting money. If you’re using HubSpot, you’re probably struggling because your current payment system isn't communicating with your core CRM. HubSpot Payments solves that. Imagine having all that payment data right within your sales, marketing, and service tools! If you’re not using HubSpot yet, it makes getting started with online payments super easy, without having to piece together a bunch of different systems.
A Real-World Success Story
Connor shared a brilliant example from his own agency. They offer basic HubSpot onboardings, and often, humans want a little more time after the initial engagement. Historically, this meant a whole new sales process, commissions, and a lot of friction. They thought, "What if we just set up a landing page with a few package options?"
They built this page using HubSpot Payments. Now, a human can go to the page, click a button, enter their credit card, hit submit, and immediately book more time with the onboarding team. They went from a problem to a live solution in three days! This is where HubSpot Payments shines: it just works with everything else in HubSpot. You can set up a landing page, integrate a meeting booking link, capture payment methods, and tie it all into your workflows.
Navigating Historical Hurdles with HubSpot Payments
While HubSpot Payments is amazing, it's essential to understand its limitations. Connor highlighted two main historical hurdles:
- No "Bring Your Own Stripe Account": HubSpot Payments uses Stripe as its backend processor. The catch? You can't connect your existing Stripe account. If you're new to online payments, it's fantastic. But if you already have an established Stripe account with existing infrastructure, you're looking at a separate system.
- Limited Sophistication for Complex Needs: If your business requires more sophisticated payment functionalities like complex tax calculations, provisioning, or deep integration with your own SaaS application, HubSpot Payments might fall short. It's designed for straightforward payment capture within the UI.
Is HubSpot Payments the Right Fit for You?
Connor neatly packages up who HubSpot Payments is for and who it isn't:
- Good Fit: Smaller businesses that want to start capturing payments online, or want to bring a portion of their payment collection or booking flow onto the internet easily and seamlessly. It’s perfect for those who need a quick, user-friendly solution that integrates with their existing HubSpot infrastructure.
- Bad Fit: Companies with more complex payment or subscription workflows. If you need to manage intricate recurring billing, advanced tax rules, or deep integrations beyond a simple "sell something, get paid" transaction, you'll likely hit a wall.
Introducing Zaybra: The Stripe-HubSpot Powerhouse
This is where Zaybra steps in! For those businesses that HubSpot Payments doesn't quite cover, Zaybra offers a robust solution. Zaybra is a product built by Aptitude 8's product arm, The Labs. It's a Stripe-HubSpot connector that brings all the functionality of Stripe directly into HubSpot.
Zaybra does four key things:
- Sync: Everything in Stripe syncs over to HubSpot.
- Manage: You can edit all your Stripe data, including creating, canceling, and provisioning subscriptions, all from within HubSpot.
- Automate: Use HubSpot workflows to trigger actions based on data coming from Stripe.
- Report: Because all your data is synced, you can report on your Stripe data combined with your CRM infrastructure.
If you're an existing Stripe customer and an existing HubSpot customer, you absolutely need to check out Zaybra. It gives you the best parts of HubSpot Payments but with all the power of Stripe itself.
Zaybra vs. HubSpot Payments: Key Differentiators
Connor emphasizes that Zaybra is designed to solve two specific problems that HubSpot Payments doesn't address:
- Bring Your Own Stripe Account: If you already have a Stripe account with existing infrastructure, Zaybra is your answer. You connect Zaybra, and it backfills all your existing Stripe data into HubSpot.
- Enhanced Functionality: If you're a SaaS company needing to power entitlements based on products, or an e-commerce business requiring advanced tax and localization, Zaybra leverages all the powerful features Stripe offers, and makes them accessible directly within HubSpot. Think of all the advanced capabilities Stripe boasts – Zaybra brings those to your HubSpot portal.
Unmissable Features of Zaybra
Connor gets super nerdy and excited about Zaybra’s features, and for good reason!
- Rebuilt Stripe Data Model in HubSpot: Zaybra takes the entire Stripe data model – customer records, subscription records, transactions, and more – and rebuilds it inside HubSpot. If you're a HubSpot Enterprise customer, it even creates custom Zaybra subscription and transaction objects. This means you can do all your reporting within HubSpot on your actual Stripe data, tracking true MRR, upgrades, downgrades, churns, and cancellations, just as if you were looking at a raw Stripe data feed.
- Powerful Automation: Because all that data lives in HubSpot, you can power incredible automations. Imagine a workflow that detects when a subscription is nearing its renewal date and the credit card is expired. HubSpot can automatically email that human, embed a link for them to update their payment method, and handle it all with a simple "if this, then that" workflow.
- Customer Portals with CMS Hub: This is a game-changer! With all that data in HubSpot, you can create a customer portal on CMS Hub. Humans can log in and see all their active subscriptions, recent charges, transactions, and even the total value of their account. You can build all of this on top of Zaybra, using standard HubSpot functionality, after syncing your Stripe account in a mere 30 seconds.
Who Is Zaybra the Perfect Fit For?
Connor has a clear vision for who benefits most from Zaybra:
- Any SaaS Business: If you're a SaaS business, you should probably be using Stripe anyway because of its extensibility. Payments are a core function of what you do, and if you’re using Stripe, Zaybra is essential for bringing all that critical subscription data back into your HubSpot account.
- HubSpot Explorers with Stripe: If you're not yet a HubSpot customer but use Stripe, consider Zaybra plus HubSpot. Connor argues that this combination will give you functionalities that you'd struggle to find on any other CRM platform. It solves that huge pain point of uniting your payments data with your CRM data, regardless of your organization's scale.
The bottom line? Whether you're a small business just starting with online payments or a growing SaaS company with complex subscription needs, there's a HubSpot-powered solution to help you collect money more efficiently and intelligently. It’s all about connecting your payments to your CRM to get that unified view of your humans and your revenue!
