AAFMAA connected two Dynamics 365 business units to a single HubSpot portal

The Customer

AAFMAA, the American Armed Forces Mutual Aid Association, provides life insurance, wealth management and mortgage services to military families. Each of those three business units ran its own Microsoft Dynamics 365 install, with its own database and its own customizations. A change made in one had no effect on the others.

AAFMAA wanted to run from a single HubSpot portal. The three brands share one website address, so a separate portal per brand was off the table.

The Challenge

AAFMAA needed one HubSpot portal fed by more than one Dynamics system, with each business unit’s contacts, leads and opportunities kept apart from the others’ once they arrived. Buying more portals was out, so the separation had to be designed into the integration and into how the portal itself was set up.

The scope was set at two business units, Wealth Management and Life Insurance. Life Insurance brought a data problem of its own. Its database holds thousands of spouses who share an email address with the member, and the main life database is itself synced with AAFMAA’s insurance system of record.

The Solution

We began with a kickoff and a series of discovery calls around a technical scoping document, then worked through field mapping and sync logic reviews with the client before development started. The question of how one portal would partition several brands was worked through in that phase, alongside the client’s HubSpot brand domains setup, and we answered their questions on how unsubscribes and subscription types behave under it.

For Wealth Management we built the sync in four maps: HubSpot contacts to Dynamics leads and contacts, Dynamics leads to HubSpot contacts, Dynamics contacts to HubSpot contacts, and Dynamics opportunities to HubSpot deals with their associations, plus ownership syncing so a deal’s owner matches the opportunity’s. Deals flow one way, from Dynamics into HubSpot. The client decided during discovery that HubSpot deals would not write back to Dynamics opportunities. Wealth Management went through a round of user acceptance testing with the client’s team, and we addressed the feedback from it.

Life Insurance used the same contact and opportunity maps and added a HubSpot custom object, Family Member, synced from Dynamics contacts, so family members have records of their own in the portal. We reviewed the family object logic with the client’s team, and after a requirements review in early 2022 we revised the contact and Family Member sync, updated the Role and IsMember field mappings, and added a Customer Relationship to contact map. The Life Insurance integration moved from sandbox to production on March 30, 2022.

We cleaned up the developer documentation and walked Lynton’s support team through the back end at handoff.

What They Got

The Life Insurance integration was moved to production in March 2022. Its contacts and opportunities arrive in the HubSpot portal from their own Dynamics system, partitioned by brand, with family members as records of their own and deals flowing one way, from Dynamics. The Wealth Management integration was built and tested with the client’s team on the same design, so a second unit’s contacts, leads and deals can flow into the same portal without a second portal to pay for.

Wrapping Up

The standard here was to design the integration around how the client’s data was actually partitioned, and to settle that design in discovery before building. A multi-brand organization with several CRM systems can run one HubSpot portal when the integration carries the partitions with it.

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