How consultants scale HubSpot reporting with Tableau

Being a consultant can be a bit like managing an unruly classroom. There you are, with tens of datasets and client portals, each with its own distinct goals, outcomes, and unique idiosyncrasies or patterns. Your task? Understand each one, and help them get where they want to go.

A single HubSpot instance is manageable with the platform’s native dashboards, but the second you graduate beyond that, there’s a bottleneck waiting for you. To help your clients best, you need cross-channel attribution, pipeline forecasting, and multi-tenant reporting; essentially, you need all of your data clearly separated by client yet deeply interconnected within each client’s ecosystem.

That’s the issue, always has been. Extraction. Writing custom code against HubSpot’s API or trying to merge messy, disparate CSV exports in Tableau creates a brittle infrastructure that shatters the moment an API endpoint changes.

This is why we constructed a robust, automated pipeline for consultants to make the best of. Learn how specialised consultants and agencies are using a dedicated HubSpot Tableau connector like SYNCHUB to streamline their data and scale what they can do for their clients.

What are the limitations of native HubSpot reporting?

Most operational consultants we work with hit the same wall within HubSpot’s native data reporting environment, and that wall exists for three reasons:

1. There is no multi-portal aggregation, so you don’t have a way to view data across multiple independent portals as a single, unified view. If you manage franchise models, portfolio companies, or multiple client accounts, you are forced to build every report from scratch, over and over again.
2. You have to manage API rate-limiting and endless timeouts, even if you’ve engineered your connect to HubSpot’s API perfectly. Sluggish dashboards and failed data refreshes are frustrating, yes, but they can also present a real issue when dealing with large volumes of contacts, historical engagements, and custom objects.
3. Your data becomes a black box, which, for an operational consultant, is far from ideal. Complex relational BI modelling was not the core purpose when HubSpot designed its data structures, so merging other external data into the native dashboard is simply not possible.

A tool like Tableau, which creates custom data dashboards to help you navigate all this data, is therefore invaluable. But to get your HubSpot data into the Tableau system reliably, it helps to use a HubSpot Tableau connector that can extract data from its native silo and load it into a query-ready environment. Enter, SYNCHUB.

How SYNCHUB can make you a better consultant

Instead of forcing Tableau to directly query HubSpot’s rate-limited API directly, SYNCHUB instead continuously extracts all of your background data and stores it in a secure, fully-managed relational database. If you choose to host your own cloud warehouse, you can store your data there instead.

The point is to make it infinitely easier for operational consultants to manage multiple client accounts without cross-over of data. Each client account you connect to SYNCHUB is automatically synced into the same database, but stored under its own schema, separate from other client data. This means you can interpret the data as a whole while keeping the individual data points separate, as required in your role.

A HubSpot Tableau integration like this lets you query and aggregate metrics across your entire portfolio using standard SQL, or directly query the data itself using natural language. Updates scale automatically, and you are never left in the dark because data updates in real-time.

What can the custom dashboards look like?

Your consultation practice is your own, so the way you build and interpret data for your clients is inherently creative. With a HubSpot Tableau integration empowered by SYNCHUB, you can deploy pre-defined templates from within Tableau that instantly connect to the SQL tables in SYNCHUB.

In short, the templates are yours to build as creatively as you like, but you don’t have to build them from scratch over and over. Flexibility without the time-consuming grunt work.

Let’s not forget your agency's view. Consider building a macro-level command centre for your firm’s management team in Tableau to monitor your internal deal cycles, sales velocity, and pipeline health. Not only that, but expand that capability to your entire client roster so you can spot underperforming pipelines before they even have a chance to type an email to you about the drop-off.

An empowered HubSpot Tableau connector lets you configure dashboards like this and query data naturally in mere minutes, not days. With fully automated historical data backfill and native, automated schema creation, managing a full client book becomes a pleasure rather than a pain.