Lynton built Crossbeam's customer-facing CRM integrations on Tray.io for three years

The Customer

Crossbeam is a partner ecosystem platform. Companies connect their CRMs to it, and Crossbeam shows them which accounts they share with their partners. Those shared accounts are called overlaps, and they are the data a partner manager wants inside the tools the sales team already uses.

Crossbeam had chosen Tray.io’s embedded framework to ship those integrations to its own customers. Its engineers wrote the requirements and reviewed the builds. In March 2022 they engaged Lynton as the outside team to design, build and maintain the integrations themselves.

The Challenge

Crossbeam’s customers run their sales and marketing in different systems. Each one wanted Crossbeam data pushed into the system it already used, with a setup screen a partner manager could complete from inside Crossbeam.

The first scope was small. It added leads from a Crossbeam account object to a Marketo campaign. From there the list grew to six more systems, and every one of them had its own limits on record counts, API quotas, payload sizes and authentication.

The work also had to fit Crossbeam’s own engineering process. Their engineers wrote the specs, tested against production accounts and reported what they found. Lynton had to work as an extension of that engineering team, inside its reviews.

The Solution

Over three years we built and maintained integrations on Tray.io for eight destinations: Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce overlaps, Salesforce attribution, Gong, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Clari.

Marketo. A configuration wizard with two dropdowns, filled from the customer’s own Marketo reports and programs by a custom JavaScript installer. Crossbeam completed acceptance testing in May 2022 and launched the app later that year.

HubSpot. The customer maps a Crossbeam organization and report to a HubSpot list. The integration keeps a dynamic contact list in step with the company domains in that report, and imports overlaps into a custom object in bulk, with company associations. The first version deleted and rebuilt the overlap data on every run. With Crossbeam’s agreement we moved it to a delta design. The integration keeps its state in MongoDB, works out what changed since the last run and sends only the differences. Later we moved the list handling onto HubSpot’s current v3 endpoints and added support for Crossbeam’s integration profile IDs while keeping older configurations working through the transition.

Salesforce. The overlaps push queries Crossbeam, builds CSV files and bulk-upserts them into a packaged custom object in the customer’s Salesforce org. It checks the customer’s API quota before every run and skips the run if usage is already above a configurable threshold, so the integration does not eat into the allowance a sales team depends on. It validates the instance URL, checks permissions and fields before writing, and saves its cursor as it goes so a long run can resume. We also maintained and instrumented the separate attribution push.

Gong. The integration pulls call transcripts on a schedule, scans them for the partner names the customer selected and for partner attendees, and posts a partner-mention activity back to Crossbeam. We moved it to Gong’s OAuth flow in January 2024, and split the script into smaller steps so large transcript sets stayed inside Tray’s payload limits.

BigQuery, Dynamics and Clari. The BigQuery integration authenticates with a service account and pushes partner account data into the customer’s datasets and tables. The Dynamics integration creates a Crossbeam Overlap entity on install and maps records to accounts, leads and opportunities. The Clari integration runs on a schedule and syncs partner names and overlaps to Clari accounts and opportunities through its ingest API.

Status tracking. We built a shared workflow that sends status and error messages from every integration to Crossbeam’s own database over a Kafka webhook, so Crossbeam support can see what each customer’s integration did without opening Tray.

We also wrote the customer-facing troubleshooting guides for the Marketo and HubSpot products, and developer documentation with recorded walkthroughs for Salesforce.

What They Got

Crossbeam’s customers can install an integration from inside Crossbeam, choose a report and a destination, and have their shared accounts appear in the system they chose on a schedule. Sales teams using Gong get a record in Crossbeam every time a partner comes up on a call.

Crossbeam’s own engineers kept the product decisions and the review. They did that without staffing the integration work themselves. The engagement renewed in March 2024, and after the Gong rebuild Crossbeam reported that the new version was, for the most part, working better in its production accounts.

Wrapping Up

The standard on this job was to build integrations that respect the limits of the systems they write into, and to work inside the client’s own review process for as long as the client wanted the work done. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.