Primrose Schools kept FranConnect in step with HubSpot as three sales teams moved over
The Customer
Primrose Schools is an early education franchisor. Its franchise development team recruits and qualifies new school owners, its real estate team finds and secures sites, and its acquisitions team handles existing schools changing hands.
When we started, those teams were preparing to run their day-to-day work in HubSpot. FranConnect remained the system of record for franchise leads, owners, franchise disclosure documents and the Confidential Evaluation Form (CEF) that applicants complete. Prospect documents lived in SharePoint.
The Challenge
Primrose wanted the sales tools of a modern CRM without giving up the franchise system that held its leads, owners and disclosure records. Both systems had to stay correct at the same time. An owner created in FranConnect had to appear in the CRM, and a change made by a salesperson in the CRM had to flow back.
The teams also needed a home for sensitive files. Each new franchise or real estate deal needed its own SharePoint folders, created automatically, and the deal record needed to know where those folders were.
Applicants and brokers needed a place to hand over documents and complete the CEF. That meant a login-gated portal, built on the platform the teams were already adopting.
Three teams with three different processes had to learn the new system together.
The Solution
We built a two-way sync between FranConnect and HubSpot, an automated SharePoint workflow, a gated prospect portal, and an onboarding program for all three teams.
The sync. FranConnect owner records and CRM contacts sync in both directions, so a new owner or an edited field shows up on the other side. We added an Application custom object in the CRM that syncs two ways with FranConnect leads, and each application is associated to the applicant’s contact record. A School object is populated from FranConnect franchisee records. When a salesperson takes ownership of an application in the CRM, the FranConnect lead owner changes to match, and the reverse holds too.
The detail work mattered. We built paging for the FranConnect API to handle large record sets. We converted eight application fields plus the owner state and country fields to dropdowns, with the option lists taken from FranConnect, so the same value means the same thing in both systems. Where two FranConnect owners shared one email address, the client flags the record and the sync creates the contact with a blank email, so two people stay two records. CEF data entered in the CRM posts to FranConnect. The sync and the social media lead workflows went live in January 2023, and the historical sync of existing records completed in April 2023 after user acceptance testing.
SharePoint automation. Built on Tray, a webhook fires when a deal is created in either the franchise sales or real estate pipeline. Tray creates a restricted folder for personal information and a real estate folder in SharePoint. A scheduled workflow pages through CRM deals and writes each folder’s location back onto the deal. Four further webhooks handle file uploads from the portal, the list of files on a deal, and application posting. The integration moved to production in late April and early May 2023.
The prospect portal. On HubSpot CMS membership pages, we designed and built four screens: a login panel, a sensitive file upload, a real estate files view (one version for the applicant, one for the broker), and the CEF as a multi-step form tied to the Application custom object. A field spreadsheet defined every field’s label, type, options, validation and conditional logic before the form fields were built. Every screen passed design review, code review and cross-browser review. The portal went to production in May 2023.
Onboarding and training. Marketing onboarding covered segmentation, forms, nurture email, campaigns, reports and dashboards, with production workflows including original-UTM capture and hidden source fields on forms. Sales onboarding for Franchise Sales, Real Estate and Acquisitions ran from a stakeholder deck through process planning, pipelines and properties built in a sandbox then moved to production, users and permissions, and change management documentation. We recorded a “Why HubSpot for Primrose” video and end-user videos, and ran live sessions for Franchise Sales, Real Estate and the real estate portal in April 2023.
What They Got
Primrose’s three sales teams now work in one CRM while FranConnect stays the system of record. Owners and applications sync in both directions with the same owner on both sides, schools come across from FranConnect, and a CEF completed in the CRM posts back to FranConnect. Each new deal gets its SharePoint folders on creation, and the deal record links to them. Applicants and brokers log in to one portal to upload files, view real estate documents and complete the CEF, and the result lands on the application record. The marketing team has workflows that capture the original UTM values on new leads.
No usage or time-saving figures were recorded for this engagement, so we make no claims about them.
Wrapping Up
Our standard on an integration like this is that both systems stay right. We wrote acceptance criteria for the syncs before building them, ran user acceptance testing before switching them on, and turned the edge cases, such as shared email addresses, into rules the client controls. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.