HubSpot Payments and Zaybra HubSpot Integration: Cost, Historical Hurdles, Revenue Ideas, and More

Hey, Hub Helper community, it's your boy, George b.thomas from georgebthomas.com and I am here to give you an interview that we did recently with Connor Jeffers from Aptitude 8. Listen, have you ever been curious about HubSpot payments? Have you ever run into hurdles trying to use HubSpot payments and need to learn about something called Zebra? That's right, we're going to cover HubSpot payments and Zebra. The good, the bad, the ugly, the best fit, the costs, all the things that you need to know to guess what generate currency from the interwebs. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get in to the good stuff. So, Connor, quick question. Starting at the very beginning, build a foundation for the viewers. What the heck is HubSpot Payments?

So HubSpot Payments is bringing commerce into the HubSpot CRM. So if you that that's sort of the simplest statement, um, the best way to think about it is HubSpot Payments is designed to make it as easy as possible for businesses to collect money from customers online, whether that's on their, on their website or driven by their sales folks, but to make it as easy as possible for folks to collect payments from some of their customers.

So the question that one might quickly ask themselves is why if you're using HubSpot or if you're a HubSpot user, should you be thinking about even using HubSpot payments versus something else that might be out there?

If you're a business, you probably collect money from, from a customer of some kind. If you use HubSpot, you probably struggle because the system that you're using to collect that money is probably not talking to HubSpot, which is your, your core system that you're running, hopefully a big portion of your business on. And it would be awesome if whenever you collected a payment or whenever you managed to interact with the customer, you had that data right within your sales and your marketing and your service tools. Or if you're not using HubSpot, makes it really, really easy for you to get started collecting money online without having to go and sort of figure out all the different moving parts to make that make that happen.

Very cool. So one of the things that I like to do on these interviews is talk about like a success moment because obviously you own an agency, you've got a team, you're helping people Crush it with HubSpot. Do we have a success story of where HubSpot payments really paid off for one of your clients?

Actually, I have client examples I'll give you one that's really easy that we did for us, I think really paints the picture of how cool Payments is. So we do basic onboardings for customers. They're basically capped at a number of hours, a number of weeks. We help you get up and running and start using HubSpot for the first time. One of the things that often happens at the end of those engagements is people say, hey, this has been great. Can I spend a little bit more time with you? And so historically, we'd be like, oh, we'll go talk to our sales team. Well, I don't really have, like, a whole project. It's not a huge amount of money. Like, I just want another, like, five hours, 10 hours, whatever it may be. Uh, and this was coming up all the time. So our onboarding team had raised their hand and said, hey, is there any way that we could sell these? And we were like, well, if we sell them, then we have to pay commissions on them. And it's this whole sales process. And we're like, well, what if we just set you guys up a landing page with, like, a couple of different package options on it, and whenever you guys finish an onboarding, you can just send someone the link to this page and they're like, oh, that's awesome. So we set this up on HubSpot payments. A user can go to this page, click a button, enter in a credit card, hit submit, book time with our onboarding team, and start immediately driving that. And we went from like, this is a problem we have and we'd love to be able to solve for it to, like, we have a solution that was live, people were using it, people were booking on it within three days from deciding to do it. And I think that that's really where HubSpot Payments is awesome is it all just works with everything that's in HubSpot. And so you can set up a landing page and you can set up a meeting booking link. You can start capturing payment methods and integrate that into your workflow.

I love that story. And Connor, I love in that story, you're like, this is a hurdle we had. This is a problem, and here's how we fixed it. So here's the thing. There's a lot of problems. There's a lot of hurdles out there. But you, as an expert in the field, what are some historical hurdles that you've seen HubSpot users face when first trying to implement HubSpot payments? And listen, viewers, we're getting somewhere. Because while HubSpot payments are amazing, there's going to be a second half of this conversation that we're going to talk about Zebra, but we're sticking with HubSpot payments right now for a second, what are some hurdles that you historically saw with this feature or benefit to HubSpot?

The two big ones that we run into, right. So HubSpot Payments uses Stripe. So that's sort of the backend processor. The limitation and problem you're going to run into is you can't bring your own Stripe account. So if you're a net new, if you've never really captured payments online, you don't have an existing sort of payments infrastructure, or maybe you're doing something else like an ERP or invoicing or whatever else. HubSpot payments is awesome because you set it up, you can start collecting. But the limitation comes in if you have a preexisting Stripe account. So we see lots of customers, whether they're E commerce or they're SaaS businesses, they already have a Stripe account, they're already processing money on it. And what they want is to be able to have their existing Stripe account connect to HubSpot Payments. And that's not how HubSpot Payments works. It's totally separate. It's not bring your own Stripe account. And then the other issue that sort of expands on that, that's more if you started using payments and you're now sort of like growing out of it, is if you want to be able to do more sophisticated and complex things with your backend payments infrastructure, whether it be, you know, tax or provisioning or connecting it to your own SaaS application or wherever it may be, you're not going to be able to have that functionality because HubSpot payments is sort of like in the UI. Capture a payment, collect the data, do it all together.

And I love that you went in that direction. It's almost like you're reading my mind, I swear, for this interview, because what I want to do before we transition into Zebra is if you had to bundle this kind of beginning conversation up about HubSpot payments into a nice little neat package package in your mind, who's a good fit and who's a bad fit for HubSpot payments.

So I think good fit for HubSpot payments is smaller business wants to start capturing payments online or wants to bring a portion of their payment collection or booking flow onto the Internet and do that easily and seamlessly and do it, do it really quickly. And I think HubSpot payments is perfect for those folks because it's easy to Use it works already with all of their existing HubSpot infrastructure and it lets them bring a user experience to their customers really quickly that without HubSpot payments would be really difficult and challenging. And then I put sort of the inverse of that into people the HubSpot payments isn't for, which is companies who have more complex payments, subscriptions, types of workflows that they need to manage beyond I want to sell something to somebody and they are going to pay me for it, and that is sort of the end of that transaction.

And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is a great place to transition into Zebra. Right, because there is those folks where you're going to hit that friction point. And so, Connor, let's just jump into the deep end of the pool and answer for the viewers, what the heck is Zebra?

So Zebra. Zebra is a product that we built. So. So I'm, I'm from Aptitude 8, but we have a product arm of our business called Eight Labs, where we build applications on the HubSpot platform. And Zebra is a Stripe HubSpot connector that basically brings all of the functionality that you might find in stripe into HubSpot. And it really does four things. So one is it does sync. So everything that exists inside of Stripe Syncs over to HubSpot. It does manage. So you can edit all of your Stripe data, provision, create, cancel whatever else of your existing subscription data from HubSpot. It does automation. So any workflow actions you can do in HubSpot, you can trigger off of data that may be coming out of Stripe and then report. So because you have all of your data syncing back and forth, you can report on all of your stripe data combined with all of your CRM infrastructure. So if you're an existing Stripe customer and you're an existing HubSpot customer, you should check Sabre out. If you're an existing HubSpot customer and you want to do really complicated stuff with payments and you're finding HubSpot payments is insufficient, you should take a look at Stripe. Take a look at Zebra. You get all the best parts of HubSpot payments, but with all the power of. Of Stripe itself.

Yeah, and you may have answered this next question, but I'm still going to ask it because I feel like there might be a second or third angle that you can go at because you literally listed like here. Like, if you want to this. Which by the way, viewers, if you were like, yes, yes. Yeah, well, then you're in the right place watching the right thing. Connor, what makes zabra different than HubSpot payments. When you hear that, where does your mind go, really?

Zebra is designed to solve two problems. So one is bring your own Stripe account. So if you already have a Stripe account, you already have infrastructure, you already have payments running through Stripe. You connect Zebra, we backfill all of your data that already exists inside of your Stripe account. So if you already have one and you think, wow, Hubs up payments sounds awesome, how do I connect it to my existing Stripe account? You don't use Zebra and you sort of get both. Additionally, if you're somebody who wants to have more functionality than payments itself, so you're a SaaS company and you need to power entitlements off of different products people are paying for, or your E Commerce or subscriptions, you need to power tax and localization. Any of the cool stuff go to, go to Stripes homepage. All the stuff that Stripe says, here's why you should buy Stripe are great reasons for, for you to use Zebra because you get all of that and it all works directly inside of HubSpot when the tools that you sort of use and love every day.

Viewers, I hope you heard that it all works inside of HubSpot. That is why immediately when I heard this, I'm like, we have to do an interview, Connor, we have to do an interview. So you listed off a few of the features a couple questions ago. I don't know if you listed all of them, but I'm going to ask this question in a way that enables you to go a little deeper on one or several of the features. And that are, what are some of the cool features that you would just not want anybody to miss about Zebra that like, what is it bringing to the table where you just get super nerdy excited?

My favorite piece, right? Especially, I don't know, I hope that if you're watching this, you're a little bit of a HubSpot nerd, but is if you're a HubSpot nerd, essentially what we do is we take the entirety of the Stripe data model, right? So in Stripe, you have a customer record, you have a subscription record, you have transactions, you have all these different things happening. And we rebuild that whole data model inside of HubSpot. If you're a HubSpot Enterprise customer, we actually create a custom Zebra subscription object. We create transaction objects. And because you have those records right inside of HubSpot, you can do all of your reporting inside of HubSpot on your actual stripe data and true MRR with upgrades and downgrades and churns and cancellations the same as if you were just reporting on a straight Stripe data feed. And I think what's even cooler than that is you can use all of that data to then power automation. So you can do things like when a subscription is nearing its renewal date and the credit card expiration is in the past, like start emailing that person to capture a new payment method and direct embed a link for them to do that. And all of that's just like a HubSpot workflow. If this then that type of statement and going even a step further, you can really take sort of some of what we get excited about with CMS Hub and our web ops team is because all of that Data exists in HubSpot. If you wanted to create a customer portal on CMS Hub and have a user log in and show them, here are all of your active subscriptions, here are all of your recent charges and transactions, here's like the total value of your account. You can do all of that on HubSpot using HubSpot functionality after syncing your Stripe account in 30 seconds. And like now you can build all this stuff on top of that at its core. And so for us, we're big HubSpot nerds and the reason we wanted it is to really enable us to do all that cool stuff.

I don't know about you viewers, but I imagine there's a few out there that your mind's like, like mind blown. Holy crap. We can do that in HubSpot. Like, where do I call? Let me get my wallet. But before they get their wallet, before they call, let's have this question in this interview. Because it is about adding value, it's about educating who in your mind is a good fit for Zebra.

So I would say big one for us is any type of SaaS one. I'd recommend you use Stripe if you're a SaaS business because you can extend so much of your, your back payments functionality into your application, into the rest of everything else. There's a reason that Stripe sort of is this. I think it's the highest valued private company in the US at least as of this recording. And so there's a reason they kill it and it's because they really build the payments infrastructure for the Internet. And so if you're a SaaS company, payments are a huge function of what you do at your core, your subscription business. And as a result, if you're using Stripe and you your SaaS business, you should use Zebra because you're going to bring all of that back into your HubSpot account. The second one that I would say is if you're not a HubSpot customer and you're sort of exploring HubSpot itself and you actually do use Stripe, you should check out Zebra Plus HubSpot because my argument would be that Zebra Plus HubSpot is going to give you things that on any other CRM platform you might be working with, you're really going to be struggling to solve for. And that's the biggest reason that we built it, is we had so many customers that really fall into that group of I need to unite my payments data with my CRM data and I can't. And it's hugely painful for organizations at every scale.

I love that so much because in my core I love helping people with those like, points of life where they're struggling. And two, you started to kind of paint this like, we're really focused on the success of these folks in the future and we're looking at ways that we can do that. So what is an amazing case study or use case that you can share pertaining to Zayn Abraham?

I don't have a direct name that I can give you, but I can tell you the scenario, right? So the scenario that we run into is we have customers who, this is typical B2B SaaS. They do lots of product led growth motions. So, so PLG type stuff and customers come in and they create free trials. And the issue is, is that customers are going through the product led journey. They've created a trial, maybe they're getting prompted with some upgrades and they also want to power their sales led journey. And so the problem is, is salespeople are working this deal and then the customer upgrades and then the salesperson doesn't know that that happened. They're still pestering the customer, trying to get them to move forward or they do know it happened. But now the sales ops team is trying to be like, well, does that count? How do we count that? Do we move this deal to closed one? And everyone's really frustrated. And so this customer, by using Zebra anytime that free trial accounts created, we're actually sinking a subscription record back into HubSpot. The sales rep is creating a deal, they're working off of that deal and managing it against that subscription record. And in the event that that subscription upgrades, we can automatically go and mark that deal quote closed one. That company can do commission reporting all entirely out of this. And then they can also make sure that their sales and marketing communication isn't bumping into each other because that customer is going through this product led growth motion at the same time as they might be trying to power a sales led growth motion. And so for us, the thing that's awesome is not only does that result in their internal sort of our customer, right, our user has a better experience, but their customer and their user has a better experience because they can choose which channels they want to engage with and the systems sort of don't get in the way of that customer having the best possible journey.

So good. So good. I love that story. And Connor, one of the things I like to do when I'm creating content is kind of walk a mile in their moccasins, right? Think about where the viewers are, what they're thinking about. We've listed a lot of amazing nerdy things that are like, oh my gosh, this could unlock this, this, this. In my business it has to cost a bazillion dollars, which isn't the case. So let's cover that question. What the heck, what's the investment for Zebra if they were going to start to implement it today?

The baseline is Zebra. The cheapest plan that we have is 200 bucks that gets you sync and then two users that can edit stuff inside a HubSpot. So similar to the HubSpot pricing model, anyone who can view stuff is free. So you sync all your Stripe data, anyone can look at it, and then we tear up based off of the amount of MRR you're processing inside of Stripe and then however many users you need to access and edit. But, but my honest sort of feedback to anybody is if you're, if you already are using Stripe, if you're already using HubSpot, the base tier of Zebra will unlock all of that automation, all of that functionality, and then you're really only paying for additional users at I think 20 bucks a month. We'll see if my product team yells at me because I got the number wrong, but I'm Pretty sure it's 20, 20 bucks a month for users to be able to edit and access that data. So your sales users, your service users, people that need to edit data inside of HubSpot for us. Super, super inexpensive. Especially if you're already managing Stripe and HubSpot and you're sort of a growing business. We sort of look at this as a plugin and an add on. We're not trying to sort of further extend your overall software footprint, which is usually already pretty large.

Yeah, viewers, if you think about the benefits that you're going to get, the features, functionality that we've talked about it might be a bargain at twice the price, to be honest with you. Moving forward though, in a minute I'm going to give you the ability, if people have question, if they want to connect, where do you want to send them? But before that, I always like to ask for some words of wisdom. So Connor, what are some words of wisdom pertaining to HubSpot payments, Zabra and collecting revenue? Like, what would you leave with the community?

I honestly would tell anybody it doesn't matter how complex your business is or what you're doing. And this is going to be geared a little bit to that payment side. But every business collects money and every business should collect money on the Internet. You would be shocked at what you could be making additional revenue from. Throw a credit card checkout in front of, but book a call with one of our senior leadership folks to help solve one of your problems. Do some basic checkout things online. Bring some of that payment experience that it is a certainty. I mean, Tesla's got a gift shop, right? Like, it is a certainty that there is some revenue that exists that you could be capturing by making it easy for people to buy stuff from you online. And the sooner you do that, the sooner you're going to lock additional revenue streams and the tools you use to do it is up to you. But we've talked about some cool ones today.

Yeah, I love this. Great value, amazing interview. So Connor, if people have watched this and now they're like, I need help, I want to connect with Connor. I'll probably buy mistake dinner because of all the things that he's enabled in my company from revenue. Like, where do you want to send folks?

Yeah, for sure. Hit me up on LinkedIn. It's Connor Jefferson. On LinkedIn. I post stuff somewhat frequently. I wouldn't call myself a full content creator by any means, but I put some stuff out there every now and again. Or Zabra.com, which is Z A Y B R A and that has all the information on Zabra itself. Or Aptitude8.com which is our services business. Feel free to hit me on any of those channels and I would be more than happy to chat with you.

Well, there you go. Mad value around HubSpot Payments and Zebra. Which one's right for you? Make sure you let us know either on the socials or in my inbox. But remember, as you move forward into this wonderful world of Hublandia, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you in the next video.