West Music connected Dynamics NAV to HubSpot for two brands and its sales team
The Customer
West Music sells, rents and repairs musical instruments, serving individual players and schools through stores, road reps and a national education sales team. It runs a second brand, Flute Authority, as its own company inside the same ERP.
Both companies kept their customers, transactions, product items, rental loan cards and service invoices in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Sales and marketing were moving onto HubSpot at the same time, with Sales Hub onboarding running alongside this project.
The Challenge
The project was written down as nine user stories before any development started, each with the client’s own acceptance criteria, and those stories drove the whole build.
Staff were entering customers twice, once in the ERP and once in the CRM. Salespeople assigned in NAV were invisible in the CRM. Call center comments on customer records could only be read inside the ERP. Marketing wanted to use what people had bought, rented or had repaired to segment customers for cross-sell offers, rental lifecycle messages and service reminders, and sales wanted transactions to flow back onto the deals they had created so reporting closed the loop.
Two brands made every one of those stories double. A company might be a customer of West Music, of Flute Authority, or both, and the CRM had to keep the two customer numbers straight. The ERP data also needed work before any history could move. About 17,000 customer cards shared an email address with another card, which the client cleaned up before the historical sync.
The Solution
We built the integration map by map against the user stories, one set for each NAV company.
Customers sync both ways. A customer created in NAV becomes a company and contact in the CRM, and a company created in the CRM with a customer number writes back to NAV. Each company holds separate West Music and Flute Authority customer numbers. Parent and child relationships, such as a school district and its buildings, come across one way from NAV, and names stored in capitals arrive in proper case.
Owners sync both ways for customers and one way for deals, so the salesperson on the ERP record owns the CRM record. NAV customer comments land as notes on the company timeline, which put the service history in front of sales inside the CRM.
Items and resources from both companies sync to the product library. Four transaction types sync to deals with line items: posted sales invoices, point-of-sale transactions, service invoices and loan cards for instrument rentals. Each deal associates to its sell-to and bill-to companies, creates the contact from the customer email where one is missing, and takes the salesperson as owner. A map for invoice notes to deal notes was added mid-project for both companies.
Testing ran in a sandbox in two phases: customers and companies first, then the transactional maps. We then built the production connections for both NAV companies, imported the maps, added the workflows and fields the production portal was missing, and stamped the existing companies with their NAV customer numbers so the first live sync matched the records already there. Production maps went live on September 9, 2022, followed by a final round of production testing.
The historical sync came last, after the client’s duplicate email cleanup was done. Its criteria took in NAV records created since July 1, 2019, and we turned it on in November 2022 and monitored it into December.
In parallel, our onboarding team designed six deal pipelines with the client, covering regional in-store, road rep and repair sales, national education sales, national bids and Flute Authority, implemented the Flute Authority pipeline’s automation and custom properties, set out a sequence and playbook strategy, advised on permissions and custom views, and ran training sessions, starting with the client’s super users.
What They Got
A customer entered once, in either system, now exists in both. Salespeople see their own accounts in the CRM with the ERP’s ownership intact, and the call center’s comments sit on the company record where sales can read them.
Purchases, point-of-sale transactions, repair invoices and instrument rentals going back to mid-2019 land in the CRM as deals, with their line items and their salesperson. Marketing can build lists from what a customer bought or rented, and when, and sales can report on ERP transactions from inside the CRM.
Wrapping Up
Our standard on an ERP integration is to write the acceptance criteria with the client first, test in a sandbox before production, and backfill history only after the source data is clean. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.