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Syncline
saas
marketing
airtable, hubspot, slack, gmail

Trial signups reach the CRM in four minutes

Trial signups landed in an Airtable base the growth team owned, and someone copied them into HubSpot once a day at around five in the afternoon. By the time a rep called the next morning, the person had already opened two competitor trials and stopped answering the phone.

The problem

Trial signups landed in an Airtable base the growth team owned, and someone copied them into HubSpot once a day at around five in the afternoon. By the time a rep called the next morning, the person had already opened two competitor trials and stopped answering the phone.

What they built

Syncline reads the signup table every three minutes, creates or updates the HubSpot contact by email address, and posts the lead into the sales channel with the plan they picked and the company size they typed. A short first email goes out from the assigned rep address before anyone has opened the CRM.

The flow, step by step

<ol class="sy-steps"><li><b>airtable</b> A new row lands in the Signups table and enters the Qualified view, which filters out free mail domains and anyone who left the company field blank.</li><li><b>hubspot</b> Syncline matches on email and either updates the existing contact or creates one, writing plan, company size, signup source and the UTM campaign into custom properties.</li><li><b>slack</b> A message posts to the sales channel with the company name, the plan, the seat count and a link straight to the HubSpot record, so the first rep to see it can claim the lead.</li><li><b>gmail</b> A templated email sends from the owning rep address with the trial guide and a booking link, using the first name split out of the full name in step two.</li></ol>

What changed

<div class="sy-table-wrap"><table><thead><tr><th>Metric</th><th>Before</th><th>After</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Time from signup to CRM record</td><td>up to 26 hours</td><td>4 minutes</td></tr><tr><td>Trials contacted on day one</td><td>31 percent</td><td>88 percent</td></tr><tr><td>Manual data entry per week</td><td>6 hours</td><td>none</td></tr></tbody></table></div><blockquote><p>The flow took an afternoon to build and it removed the worst job on my team. Nobody has retyped a signup since March, and the reps stopped asking me whether the list was current.</p><footer>Priya Raghavan, Head of Growth at Latchkey Analytics</footer></blockquote>
<p>Latchkey Analytics sells a reporting tool to mid-size finance teams. Trials come from three places: the pricing page, a partner referral link and the occasional conference badge scan, and all three write into one Airtable base because that is where the growth team already worked. The CRM was a separate world owned by sales, and the bridge between them was a person with a spreadsheet and a habit.</p><p>The habit was reliable at the wrong speed. Signups collected all day and moved across at the end of it, so a person who signed up at nine in the morning was called at ten the next day. For a product with a fourteen day trial that is a full day of the evaluation spent alone, and the team could see it in the numbers: leads contacted on day one converted at nearly three times the rate of the rest.</p><p>The flow they built is four steps and no code. An Airtable view does the qualifying, which matters more than it sounds. Because the filter lives in Airtable, the growth team can change what counts as qualified without opening Syncline at all, and everyone can see the current rule in a place they already have open. When they widened the rule to include free mail domains from companies over fifty seats, the flow inherited the change on its next run.</p><p>The HubSpot step is the one that stopped a long-running argument about duplicate contacts. Mapping the email property means Syncline looks for a match before it writes, so a person who signs up twice with the same address updates one record instead of creating a second. The run history names the contact ID that was touched, which turned a monthly reconciliation meeting into a link somebody pastes into chat.</p><p>Two things they would do differently. The Slack message started as a raw field dump and nobody read it, so they rewrote it as a sentence with the three values a rep actually needs. And the first version of the email went out instantly, which felt automated; a fifteen minute delay on the flow made it read like a person had seen the signup and replied.</p>

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