CRM Consolidation: Connecting HubSpot and Pipedrive for a Unified Sales Pipeline

The Challenge

Two CRM systems. Two teams. Zero communication between them.

My client, a SaaS company with 80+ employees, had their marketing team running everything through HubSpot and their sales team living entirely in Pipedrive. Neither side wanted to switch. And honestly? Both platforms were the right tool for their respective teams.

But the data gap between them was brutal. A revenue operations coordinator spent about three hours every day copying leads from HubSpot into Pipedrive, updating deal stages in both places, and trying to reconcile records that had drifted out of sync. Duplicates kept piling up. Deal values didn’t match between systems. Notes that a sales rep added in Pipedrive never made it to HubSpot, so marketing was flying blind.

Sales reps were calling leads who’d already unsubscribed from email campaigns. Marketing was crediting revenue to the wrong campaigns. And leadership couldn’t get a single reliable view of the pipeline. By their own estimate, the company was burning 15 hours per week on CRM-related manual work and fixing mistakes that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

The Solution

I built a bidirectional, real-time integration between HubSpot and Pipedrive with n8n handling the orchestration and PostgreSQL serving as a reconciliation layer.

Three rules guided the architecture:

1. Bidirectional sync — a change in either CRM shows up in the other within seconds
2. Conflict resolution — when the same record gets updated in both systems at once, a clear ruleset decides which version wins
3. Full audit trail — every sync event gets logged to PostgreSQL so the team can see exactly what changed, when, and why

Instead of forcing a migration to one platform, I kept both teams in their preferred tools and made the data layer invisible. Update a contact in Pipedrive, and the same contact updates in HubSpot. The team never has to think about it.

The Implementation

Four n8n workflows power the integration:

Workflow 1: HubSpot → Pipedrive (Contact Sync). Fires when a contact is created or updated in HubSpot. It maps HubSpot properties to Pipedrive person fields, deduplicates by email address, and creates or updates the matching Pipedrive record. Custom fields like lead source and lifecycle stage go through a translation layer because the two platforms structure that data differently.

Workflow 2: Pipedrive → HubSpot (Deal Sync). Triggers on deal stage changes in Pipedrive. Updates the matching HubSpot deal with current stage, expected close date, and deal value. When a deal goes to “Won,” it also flips the HubSpot lifecycle stage and pings the marketing team on Slack.

Workflow 3: Conflict Resolution. Polls the PostgreSQL database every 60 seconds looking for records that were modified in both systems during the same sync window. Pipedrive wins for deal-related fields (stage, value, close date). HubSpot wins for marketing fields (lead source, attribution, email subscription status).

Workflow 4: Error Handling. Catches failures from the other three workflows, logs everything to PostgreSQL, and sends a daily digest to the RevOps team. If something critical breaks — API rate limit, auth error — it fires a Slack alert immediately.

The whole thing took three weeks from kickoff to production, including a full week of parallel testing where both the manual process and the automated one ran side by side to validate accuracy.

The Results

Within the first month, every metric the team cared about improved:

• 15 hours per week freed up — the RevOps coordinator moved to strategic projects, and sales reps stopped wasting time on manual CRM updates
• Zero data discrepancies — six months in, not a single mismatch has been flagged between the two systems
• Sub-10-second sync — compared to the old 24-48 hour manual update cycle
• Marketing finally trusts their attribution data — campaigns actually map to closed-won deals now because the data flows cleanly from HubSpot through Pipedrive
• One pipeline dashboard — leadership uses a single view from the PostgreSQL reconciliation database instead of squinting at two separate reports

The client told me the integration paid for itself in the first month on labor savings alone. The stuff that’s harder to put a dollar figure on — fewer missed follow-ups, forecasts you can actually trust, CRM data that people believe — keeps adding up.