Industries · Manufacturing and industrial
Ask a sales director at a manufacturer what next quarter looks like and you’ll get two answers. One comes from the ERP: last year’s orders by account and product, accurate to the cent and no help with what happens next. The other comes from the sales team: a spreadsheet of open quotes and a list of accounts someone means to call. Neither tells you which customers have quietly stopped reordering, which quotes went cold two weeks ago, or what your distributors sold on your behalf last month.
What changed in your accounts this week
90
manufacturing and industrial clients
57
clients on bespoke implementations
18
clients with ERP integration projects
26
clients on ongoing support with us today
Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and an Anthropic partner. We’ve worked with 90 manufacturing and industrial companies: makers of industrial components, machinery, building products, packaging, scientific instruments, electronics and HVAC equipment, plus the distributors and service networks that sell and support them. Clients include Datwyler, Dynaset and Pirtek, part of Franchise Brands. Across every sector, we’ve delivered 2,000+ projects for 800+ customers from Dublin, London, Rotterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Boston and New York.
The biggest mistake
Manufacturers make one of two mistakes, and they’re mirror images. The first is running sales out of the ERP. It holds every order and price list, so it feels like the obvious place to manage customers. But it records what happened after the purchase order arrived. It has no idea which engineer specified your product, which quote is sitting with procurement, or that a key account’s maintenance manager left in March.
The second comes after buying a CRM: rebuilding the ERP inside it. A year later there are two versions of every price, and finance trusts neither.
We take a firm position. HubSpot should be the revenue nerve center, where accounts, buying contacts, quotes, distributor activity, order history and market signals meet. The ERP stays the system of record for products, prices, orders, stock and invoices. We draw the line in design, then connect the two.
| Area | The two common mistakes | How we set it up |
|---|---|---|
| Where sales lives | ERP order screens, inboxes and an Excel quote tracker | HubSpot, with order history pulled from the ERP |
| Products and prices | Copied into the CRM by hand, two versions of every price | Synced one way from the ERP |
| Stock levels | Synced every five minutes, read by nobody | Availability only where it changes a quote |
| The forecast | Last year's orders | Open quotes, reorder patterns and distributor deals |
Structure
Build it around accounts and the buying group inside each one. Industrial purchases rarely come from one person. An engineer specifies, procurement negotiates, a plant or maintenance manager reorders, and finance approves anything large. A CRM designed around one “decision maker” misses most of that.
So we design around accounts, sites and parent groups; the buying group, tagged by role; products and price books that mirror the ERP; quotes and opportunities for new business, projects and expansion; order and revenue history by account and product line; distributors, dealers and agents as their own records; and the installed base where it drives replacement and service revenue.
Example: for a multi-brand welding technology group, we built one HubSpot portal with teams and permissions per brand, properties that show cross-sell potential between brands, separate pipelines and group dashboards. For a scientific instruments maker, we set up multiple price books so reps quote the right price for each market without touching a spreadsheet.
Repeat replenishment orders stay out of the pipeline, so they don't swamp it.
Quoting
Because nobody can see them. In most manufacturers we meet, quotes are built in a spreadsheet or the ERP, emailed as a PDF and tracked in someone’s head. The pipeline shows deals at “proposal sent” for months, and nobody knows which ones are alive. That makes the forecast fiction, and it hides the most valuable work a sales team does: following up. Industrial buyers ask for three quotes and pick the supplier who chases sensibly and answers technical questions fastest.
We make the quote the center of the sales process:
For a marine and ocean technology instruments maker, we built a custom CPQ in HubSpot connected to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, then moved the integration into production on AWS. For a fire testing equipment manufacturer, we designed complex CPQ alongside an integration with its EFACS E/8 ERP. For a commercial cleaning products company, we implemented QuoteHappily, so the lead-to-quote process runs inside HubSpot and orders flow to Sage for fulfillment. For an EMC test equipment business, we reworked products, line items and quoting so commission tracking matched what was sold.
It depends on what you sell. Here’s how we decide.
If your quote depends on a bill of materials, the ERP should do the math. HubSpot should know the quote exists, what it’s worth, and whose turn it is to act.
Existing customers
By spotting the accounts that buy less than they should, before a competitor does. Most of a manufacturer’s revenue comes from customers it already has, and most manufacturers manage them by waiting for the next order.
The signals sit in the ERP. A customer who ordered consumables every six weeks hasn’t ordered in eleven. An account that buys pumps from you buys the seals from somebody else. A site that used to order spares has gone quiet, which often means the equipment has been replaced. Nobody sees these patterns because nobody looks at order data through a sales lens. We bring order history into HubSpot at account and product-line level and build automation on top of it.
For a commercial cleaning products supplier, we built consumables cross-sell automation tied to the equipment customers buy. For an HVAC refrigerant distributor, we segmented customers by account type and location and set up dormant-account reactivation fed by its accounting system. Revenue that already belongs to you is the cheapest revenue you’ll ever win back.
What a rep sees in HubSpot
Distributors and dealers
Treat them as a sales channel with its own pipeline, targets and accountability. A company record tagged “partner” tells you nothing about what the channel sells. Most manufacturers see a distributor’s orders in the ERP and know almost nothing about the end customers, the deals in progress, or which partners are growing and which are coasting. We design channel management in from the start:
Agree channel conflict rules before go-live. A CRM that settles those disputes the wrong way loses the partners and the sales team in one move.
One CRM
From a paid proof of concept to a platform shared across countries.
Adoption
Remove the typing, and give them something on their phone they’d want before a site visit. Many sales engineers came up through the technical side and see CRM updates as admin that takes time from customers. Adoption plans that depend on reps logging every call fail in this sector. We design for as little manual entry as possible:
A rep opens HubSpot in the car park before walking into a customer’s plant. Do they learn something useful in thirty seconds? If yes, they’ll use it. If no, mandates won’t help.
System boundaries
HubSpot should handle winning and growing customers. Your ERP should handle making, shipping and invoicing what they buy.
HubSpot sees everything here.
| Job | System of record | What HubSpot sees |
|---|---|---|
| Product master and price lists | ERP | Products reps quote, list prices, customer-specific price lists |
| Sales orders | ERP | Value, status and product lines, linked to the account and the quote that created it |
| Stock and lead times | ERP or MRP | Availability only where it changes a quote |
| Production planning | ERP or MRP | Nothing, unless a customer milestone depends on it |
| Invoices, payments and credit | ERP | Invoiced revenue, overdue balance, credit hold status |
| Service and installed base | Field service system or Service Hub | Assets, service history summary, open issues |
The rule behind that table: data comes into HubSpot only if it drives an action or a decision. A credit hold stops a rep pushing an order the business won’t ship. A reorder gap tells a rep to call. Ten thousand stock movements a day tell nobody anything, so they stay in the ERP. Your revenue leaders decide what data comes into the CRM and why, and your IT team owns how the integration runs. Both need a seat in design.
Integrations
Start with the ERP, then legacy CRM and MRP data, then e-commerce, then telephony, field service and market data. Anything HubSpot can’t see, it can’t act on, and neither can your agents. The ERP integration makes or breaks a manufacturing CRM, and it’s the one most often scoped badly. See our integration approach.
ERP
For Datwyler, the industrial components group, we’ve worked across several engagements, from HubSpot onboarding to Marketing Hub Enterprise, and most recently an integration between HubSpot and SAP C4C that syncs sales activities and deal revenue, alongside contact and company data migration.
ERP
For Dynaset, the hydraulics manufacturer, we built a custom bi-directional integration between HubSpot and Oracle NetSuite on AWS middleware. It moves customers, products, deals, orders and financial data, so sales sees the commercial picture and finance sees the pipeline.
ERP
We built a one-way integration to Sage 200 for a precision tooling maker, connected Business Central for a connector manufacturer’s US entity, synced products and accounts with SysPro, integrated IBM iSeries for a textiles maker and connected Dynamics NAV for a doors manufacturer. Where a native connector fits, as it did for a testing equipment maker on Business Central, we use it.
Then
We’ve moved manufacturers off Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, ACT!, Goldmine, Copper and Pipedrive, and out of spreadsheets. For an industrial labeling company, we migrated customer data out of its EFI Shuttleworth MRP. We clean data before it moves, because moving dirty data only moves the problem.
Then
More industrial buyers order online, and that data belongs next to the account. We’ve worked with Magento for a furniture components manufacturer, Shopify lead routing for a cleaning products supplier, and JTL and Shopware 6 for a German building profiles manufacturer.
Then
For a commercial laundry equipment business, we added Protean for field service and Barbour ABI for construction project leads. For a test equipment rental business, we matched products against EZRentOut. For an industrial automation company, we consolidated Salesforce, Excel and Freshdesk into HubSpot alongside NetSuite.
A Zapier connection pushes won deals into the ERP as sales orders. It works in testing. Then a rep adds a twelfth line item, or a product code changes in the ERP, and the zap fails without telling anyone. The order never reaches production, and three weeks later the customer calls to ask where the delivery is.
No ERP order sync belongs on Zapier. For business-critical connections we build on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, with error handling, retries, monitoring and alerts that reach a person before the customer does. And we scope around decisions: most manufacturers need a nightly order summary, live prices on quote and an instant order on close. Real-time stock in the CRM is usually vanity.
Go-to-market data
Track the signals that predict orders. Most of them come from your own ERP and your existing customers. Our GTM Engineering team builds outreach, enrichment and AI agents on top of them.
01
The account past its normal order interval, and the customer who hasn’t ordered in a year. These are the cheapest wins you’ll find.
02
Which accounts buy one product family from you and the rest from competitors. That’s your cross-sell list.
03
Equipment near end of life or out of warranty drives replacement and service revenue. Know what’s installed where, and you know who to call next year.
04
Quotes opened, forwarded, expiring or won. With lost reasons, this shows where you lose on price, lead time or spec.
05
An engineer who specified your product moves company: a warm introduction. A key buyer leaves a customer: an account at risk. We route the follow-up to the owner.
06
New plants, production lines, construction projects, funding and acquisitions, brought in through enrichment, Barbour ABI and Claude-based research agents.
07
Orders, registered deals and engagement by partner, so channel managers spend their time where it pays.
08
Shows and spec-in conversations with engineers start most new business. We tie them to the quotes and orders that follow.
Countries, entities and brands
Design for it from day one. Manufacturers often sell across several countries, through several legal entities, in several languages and currencies, with different ERPs in different regions. A CRM configured for head office and stretched later falls apart.
We design teams, permissions, pipelines, currencies and reporting so each region works its own way while leadership sees the whole business. For a German connector manufacturer, we rolled out HubSpot across the US and DACH with separate sales teams and pipelines, and connected Business Central for the US entity. For an interior design and manufacturing group, we migrated marketing from Salesforce Marketing Cloud across six business units and integrated a bespoke SQL Server system holding contacts and transactions. We deliver projects in German and English for DACH manufacturers.
AI with Claude
They follow up quotes, spot reorder risk, triage enquiries and prepare reps, provided the context underneath them is sound. Through our Anthropic partnership, we build Claude automations that reach context HubSpot can’t see, in the ERP, quote history, service records, spec sheets and email threads, and bring it into the CRM in a structured form:
Put any of these on a CRM full of duplicate accounts and missing order history and they’ll give your team bad answers with total confidence. We build the context layer first for that reason.
Groups and PE-backed roll-ups
Private equity buys industrial businesses in clusters: distributors, component makers, service networks. Every acquisition brings another CRM, another ERP and another sales team convinced its way is right.
We help groups build one CRM across the portfolio, with a repeatable playbook for bringing each acquired business into it. Shared definitions, a shared data model and consolidated reporting let leadership see revenue, customer overlap and cross-sell across the group, while each business keeps the ERP it runs on until there’s a reason to change.
1,200 users
The largest HubSpot implementation in EMEA.
Some manufacturers come to us for a CRM when the real problem is in the ERP. Customer accounts are duplicated three times, product codes don’t match the website, and nobody agrees which price list is current. Connect HubSpot to that and you’ll spread the mess into a second system.
When that’s the case, we say so. Sometimes the right first project is a few weeks cleaning customer and product data and agreeing who owns it. Sometimes a manufacturer with three reps and customers who reorder through EDI needs a focused Sales Hub setup through LaunchRight, not an enterprise rollout with custom middleware. We’d rather sell you the smaller project that works than the bigger one that doesn’t.
Who works on your project
Every Periti project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops with your sales, operations and finance leaders, and make the hard calls. Consultants handle configuration, migration and testing.
When a project needs integration with your ERP, MRP or e-commerce platform, we assign dedicated engineers rather than stretching consultants into developer roles. Our directors, with up to 30 years of CRM consulting experience, review the work and hold every project to the same standard.
How a project runs
01
Map how revenue comes in through direct sales, distributors, repeat orders, e-commerce and service. Design the account and buying-group model, quoting, ERP boundaries, integrations, channel rules and where AI fits.
02
Configure in sprints and demo regularly, so sales leaders and reps see progress early and can correct course while changes are cheap.
03
Bring in the data that serves a purpose, connect your ERP and other systems, and test against real quotes, orders and customers.
04
Train sales, inside sales, marketing, service and channel managers by role, on site where it helps, using your own accounts and products.
05
Agree a roadmap so the system keeps pace as you add product lines, regions, distributors and acquisitions.
Where to start
Most companies
Most of our manufacturing engagements start here. You leave with a design that sales, operations, finance and IT agree on, whoever builds it.
Fast start
Our industry-specific HubSpot onboarding package. A low-risk way to go live quickly on a proven setup when you don’t need complex integration on day one.
Ongoing
Ongoing support from a team that knows your portal. 26 of our manufacturing and industrial clients are on it today.
Ongoing
An experienced Periti operator runs your revenue operations as part of your team, without a full-time hire.
Growth
Outreach, enrichment and AI agents built on your customer and order context, for manufacturers ready to win new accounts at scale.
Companies we work with
Industrial machinery, automation and equipment makers are our largest group, followed by component and tooling manufacturers, building products companies and test and measurement instrument makers.
We also work with construction and engineering firms, medical device manufacturers and logistics businesses, many of which share the same ERP and quoting challenges.
Questions
Yes, for accounts, buying groups, quoting, distributor management and marketing. Keep products, orders, stock and invoices in your ERP. The manufacturers that get the most from HubSpot connect the two, so reps see order history and credit status next to every account and quote.
Yes. We've connected HubSpot to SAP C4C, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics NAV, Sage 200, SysPro, IBM iSeries and others. For anything that moves orders, prices or financial data, we build on Azure or AWS middleware with monitoring and error handling.
For simple setups, sometimes. We've used the native Business Central connector where requirements were straightforward. Once you need customer-specific pricing, multiple entities or custom objects, native connectors fall short and a custom integration pays for itself.
If you sell catalog or configurable products, usually yes, with products and prices synced from the ERP and won quotes creating orders automatically. If your quotes depend on bill-of-materials costing, cost in the ERP and track the quote and its follow-up in HubSpot.
Rarely. Real-time stock in the CRM is usually vanity. Most manufacturers need availability at the moment of quoting and order status after close, and that's what we sync.
Model them as partners with territory, tier and product lines, use deal registration for partner-sourced opportunities, and combine their ERP orders with HubSpot activity in one dashboard. Agree channel conflict rules before go-live.
Bring order history from the ERP into HubSpot at account and product-line level. Then automate reorder gap alerts, dormant account reactivation and cross-sell views, so reps call the accounts that are slipping before a competitor does.
Remove data entry. Automatic email, call and messaging logging, ERP data that appears on its own, and a mobile account view that's useful before a site visit do more for adoption than any amount of training.
No. We review what each object and field will do in HubSpot and bring across what's useful, cleaned and restructured. We've moved manufacturers off Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, ACT!, Goldmine and others.
Yes, with the right design of teams, permissions, pipelines and currencies. We've rolled out HubSpot across the US and DACH for a German manufacturer, connected to Business Central, and across six business units for a design and manufacturing group.
The most useful ones follow up quotes, flag reorder risk, triage RFQs and prepare reps for account visits. They depend on clean account, quote and order data in the CRM, so we build that first.
Yes. We build a shared data model and an acquisition playbook, then bring each business in while it keeps its own ERP. Our largest rollout, for Franchise Brands, brought 1,200 users across multiple brands and countries into one HubSpot environment.
With a Design and Strategy project. We map how revenue comes in, draw the line between HubSpot and the ERP, and design quoting, integrations and reporting before anything is built. Manufacturers that want a faster start can use LaunchRight, our industry-specific onboarding package.
You might be connecting HubSpot to SAP, NetSuite or Business Central, getting quotes out of spreadsheets, replacing a legacy CRM, bringing distributors into view or consolidating acquired businesses onto one platform. Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you how we’d get you there, including the parts you might not want to hear.