Ever tried connecting your LinkedIn outreach to HubSpot? As it turns out, this critical workflow for sales professionals has some serious friction points - especially if you're operating on a startup budget like I am.

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The LinkedIn Connection Challenge

I've just started dogfooding HubSpot to validate my service offering, and my first observation is clear: the HubSpot-LinkedIn connection is severely lacking.

Since building connections is the make-or-break skill I need to develop for year-end success, my game plan is straightforward - reach out to my RevOps network on LinkedIn to answer two crucial questions:

1. Can I provide value by customizing the HubSpot UI for clients?
2. What significant problems exist that I haven't discovered yet?

The Real-World SME Experience

My meta goal here is simple but powerful: experience HubSpot exactly as a resource-constrained small business would. This perspective is invaluable.

Reaching out to strangers (potential future friends?) on LinkedIn isn't actually that difficult once you accept it's partially a numbers game. I'm putting serious effort into personalizing messages and keeping them concise.

The Data Transfer Headache

Here's where things get frustrating - transferring contact data from LinkedIn to HubSpot is unnecessarily cumbersome. The official options are:

1. Sales Navigator integration: $1,000/year
2. HubLead: $420/year

Both are completely outside my startup budget. So what did I do? Built my own solution.

The DIY Integration Solution

I created a quick-and-dirty Chrome extension using AI and n8n to pull the essential elements directly into HubSpot:

1. LinkedIn URL
2. Job title
3. Name
4. Profile picture
5. Company name

Problem solved! But then I discovered another limitation - there's no programmatic way to upload profile pictures to HubSpot. Seriously?

So I extended my tool to handle this too. One click and the LinkedIn photo is set as the contact's HubSpot profile picture. Much better.

Next Steps in the Sales Journey

Now I'm ready to start asking the important questions and building meaningful connections. The technology obstacles are handled, allowing me to focus on relationship building.