Hopsteiner linked Dynamics NAV to HubSpot for products, contracts, shipments and invoices

The Customer

Hopsteiner grows, processes and supplies hops to brewers. The company runs its business in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Business Central), which holds its customers, pricing, contracts, shipments and invoices. In late 2021 its sales and marketing teams began adopting HubSpot, and Lynton handled the onboarding.

Hops are sold on contract. A quote to a brewer names the crop year, the variety, the packaging, the payment terms and the shipping terms, and the buyer signs it. Any CRM put in front of the sales team had to produce that document and stay in step with the ERP.

The Challenge

The ERP was the system of record, and it needed to stay that way. For the CRM to be useful to sales, customers, products, contracts, shipments and invoices had to arrive on their own and stay current.

Three things made that harder than a standard contact sync. The quote had to read like the contract Hopsteiner already used, with signature fields and without any payment collection. The product library ran to roughly 20,000 rows, so the sync had to carry only what changed. And the objects that mattered to sales went well beyond contacts and companies, into contracts, shipment notices and invoices.

The Solution

We delivered the work in phases, starting with the portal and finishing with the ERP connection.

The onboarding came first. We built blog listing and blog post templates through wireframe, design and development, two email templates of up to six modules each, in a light and a dark version, and the global styles, header and footer that hold them together.

Then we built the quote template from the client’s own contract document. It carries a custom product property for crop year and a deal property for payment terms. Packaging moved from the deal to the product, so it reads from the line item. The shipping terms display under the name the client uses, the comments-to-buyer section sits near the top, the address is right-aligned, and the e-signature fields are there with no payment step.

The integration itself was scoped in 2021 and 2022, when we set up the Business Central connection and environment and ran the field mapping and sync logic sessions. The build ran as a sprint project in early 2023. The client approved the sync logic, the field mappings and the roadmap before development started, and the custom properties were built as a change order.

Seven sync maps carry the data. Customers flow both ways between the ERP and CRM companies. Pricing feeds the product catalog. Contracts flow both ways with deals. A signed quote deal becomes a contract deal. Shipment notifications create shipment records, invoices create accounting invoices, and MSOs create deals.

The product library got its own design. Hopsteiner built a view in NAV with the SKU, price, name, description, crop year and variety, plus a last-changed timestamp on every row. The view is compared against the master pricing table, so only rows that changed are sent, and the sync targets a run every five minutes.

We wrote the testing scenarios, ran one round of user acceptance testing in the sandbox and a second in production, moved the integration to production in May 2023, ran the historical sync and monitored it, then handed it to support.

The last phase put the CRM to work. We drafted standard operating procedures and a manager review process, changed the ticket and other pipelines, added an automation that assigns unowned contacts, and built a workflow that tasks the sales rep when a new customer is missing the posting group or payment terms the ERP needs. We de-duplicated companies using the ERP number as the master record, documented the Outlook extension, ran power user training and provided monthly strategy and support into early 2024.

What They Got

Sales reps now quote from the CRM using the real product catalog, real prices and the contract terms a brewer expects, and the buyer signs the quote in place. Once signed, the quote becomes a contract deal without anyone re-entering it.

A company record in the CRM shows the shipments and invoices that belong to it, pulled from the ERP. A price or product change made in NAV reaches the catalog on the next sync. When a rep creates a customer without the data the ERP requires, the rep gets a task to complete it.

The team also has written procedures, a trained group of power users and a company list with one record per ERP customer.

Wrapping Up

Our standard on an ERP integration is that the ERP stays the system of record, every map is approved by the client before it is built, and nothing goes to production until it has passed acceptance testing in both a sandbox and the live portal. Hopsteiner got that, in phases, along with a quote template that looks like the contract their buyers already know. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.