Challenge: Making Commission Data Visible Where Sales Teams Work
For QuotaPath’s customers, commissions are essential to driving pipeline velocity. But for the many teams running HubSpot as their primary CRM, commission data was previously stranded in a separate system. That separation created real friction.
“Customers would have to switch back and forth between tabs,” says QuotaPath Software Engineer Richard Lam. “Any extra click or interaction creates more friction that customers have to overcome. This makes using both apps just a little harder.”
Apart from the disjointed user experience, the data gap caused technical issues. They were dealing with:
- A lack of visibility, which prevented reps from seeing earnings tied to in-progress deals inside HubSpot
- Missed prioritization signals due to a lack of commission insights, so sales teams didn't have a clear way to focus on high-value opportunities
- Inefficient workflows, where managers had no ability to review, approve, or flag commissions without leaving the CRM entirely
The result was slower sales cycles, lower transparency, and a significant lift for the operation teams to maintain data in two disconnected systems.
The visibility gap was problematic for managers, too. While sales reps struggled to prioritize opportunities, managers faced hurdles in overseeing performance and ensuring accuracy.
“If a manager wanted to flag earnings or approve commissions, they’d have to leave HubSpot entirely to take those actions in QuotaPath,” Richard says.
QuotaPath needed a way to swiftly deliver commission data into HubSpot to meet sales teams where they spent most of their time. From an engineering standpoint, delivering commission data into HubSpot was the obvious solution, but it came with a heavy workload. Custom builds meant handling schema alignment, permissions, and ongoing maintenance, which would be costly and complex. Instead of going down that path, the team looked for a more practical option within the HubSpot ecosystem.
Solution: A Developer Experience Built for Speed and Clarity
QuotaPath found what they wanted in the HubSpot Developer Platform and its suite of tools, including customer objects, CRM cards, and app objects. Getting started was faster than expected, due to the simplicity of the new developer experience.
“The time from when we first put app objects on the roadmap to the time we had objects written up was one day,” Richard says. “It was so fast and so easy.”
Fast-tracking a three-part integration process
The team built their solution over three complementary phases.
- Phase one: establishing a data foundation. The engineering team built a core integration to sync data from HubSpot into QuotaPath. This integration provided the foundation for making commission data more accessible.
- Phase two: adding visibility inside HubSpot. Using HubSpot app cards, users could see commission data directly in the CRM for the first time. Sales reps gained real-time visibility into current earnings on closed deals and forecasted commissions on active opportunities. Managers could also approve, override, or flag earnings, all without leaving HubSpot.
- Phase three: converting commissions like native app objects. Increasing visibility wasn't enough. Customers still couldn't use the data in HubSpot reports, workflows, or automations as a true native object. Creating and maintaining custom objects for each company would have been error-prone and complex, requiring schema alignment, permissions, and constant maintenance. App objects solved this problem by allowing QuotaPath to define commissions as objects inside HubSpot. That shift meant customers could build reports, create workflows, and run calculations with commission data just as if it had been a native field in the CRM.
An intuitive and straightforward build
These changes essentially removed friction for customers. Commission data appeared inside HubSpot without extra clicks or context switching.
“It’s so seamless that I don’t even notice it,” Richard says. “It feels like this is how it should have been all along.”
The file-based configuration system plays a big part in the improved experience. It enabled the team to run CircleCI jobs, CI/CD pipelines, and validation processes that were impossible when managing configurations solely through the UI.
Even migrations, which are often some of the hardest parts of platform work, became much simpler.
“The schema and file structures were laid out in a very intuitive way,” Richard says. “I could just migrate by hand without even using the CLI, which is a testament to how much easier it is with the new Developer Platform.”
Documentation also made a noticeable impact. Instead of engineers spending cycles figuring out unclear behavior, they found that HubSpot’s developer documentation provided the detail they needed to keep momentum.
“The HubSpot documentation is one of the sole reasons we’ve had a seamless experience,” Richard says. “If it weren’t as well documented, we would definitely have run into some trouble.”
Results: Development Velocity That Drives Business Growth
QuotaPath’s HubSpot integration has been transformational for both development velocity and the customer experience.
“Before the HubSpot Developer Platform, launching something like this would have taken months,” Richard says. “Authentications, automations, validations, and keeping things consistent in different environments would have been impossible.”
The new platform compressed months-long development cycles into days. Idea-to-implementation now runs at least 5x faster, giving the team more bandwidth to experiment and deliver improvements without getting bogged down in overhead.
The benefits aren’t limited to QuotaPath’s engineering team. Thousands of QuotaPath users work more efficiently because they no longer have the task switching cost of moving between platforms. The improvements have enriched the customer experience while keeping teams focused on tasks within their CRM. By making real-time insights accessible within HubSpot, QuotaPath has also improved forecasting and aligned sales teams’ incentives with company revenue, improving motivation to close more deals.
Setting the foundation for future innovation
The current build is not the finish line. By stabilizing their integration and removing friction from workflows, QuotaPath has freed up engineering capacity to think about what comes next. AI is one clear area of opportunity.
“Having AI integrated into our system would probably make it even faster,” Richard says. “Unified configurations and a smaller, efficient file system makes it a lot easier — there’s a bunch more we can do here.” With commission data now flowing natively through HubSpot, the team can leverage AI to provide real-time recommendations for sales reps, predict which deals are most likely to close based on commission incentive alignment, and automatically optimize commission structures for motivation.
For now, they continue to experience pipeline and revenue growth, and projects like app cards and app objects have delivered consistent wins.
“App cards and app objects have been our more successful projects because of ease of development,” Richard says. “We hit every milestone on schedule, and it has had a massive business impact.”
HubSpot’s developer tools are designed to enable seamless integration between third-party applications and HubSpot’s CRM ecosystem. HubSpot provides developers with a comprehensive suite of tools and APIs that simplify the integration process while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance. To learn more about building on HubSpot:
- Try the new HubSpot Developer Platform
- Learn more about the Developer Platform
- Visit the HubSpot App Marketplace
- Visit the HubSpot Developer Portal
- Join the HubSpot Developer Community
- Explore the HubSpot Developer Documentation
- Check out sample code on GitHub