Pre-built data connectors for sales performance tools

The moment someone realises they have a problem is when they finish a two-month SPM implementation and discover their CRM data is still being manually copy-pasted into spreadsheets every evening because the native sync only runs once a day — or not at all. They've already paid for the SPM software, they've already paid for the CRM, and yet a human is bridging them with a clipboard.

This gap persists for a structural reason: SPM vendors make money selling seats and modules, not connectors. Building and maintaining integrations is expensive and unglamorous, and the vendor's incentive is to keep you inside their ecosystem rather than making it easy to pull data from 12 other systems. The integration story in sales materials always sounds better than the reality users report: 'lack of real time integration with source systems' and 'integration with other ETLs was an issue' appear across multiple vendors, which means this isn't a single product's failure — it's a category-wide deprioritisation.

What makes this painful in practice: users are running JavaScript-based API connections they describe as 'ancient', manually adjusting data pipelines whenever an upstream schema changes, and doing end-of-day data entry to fill gaps the sync missed. The work recurs constantly — every schema change upstream, every new data source, every new hire who needs a field mapped differently.

This is a business rather than a feature because the SPM vendor has no incentive to fix it well, the RevOps or sales ops person doing the manual work is not the economic buyer of the SPM tool, and the problem recurs every time a new source system is added, a CRM field is renamed, or a new sales team is onboarded. The cost of not fixing it is a person-hours tax that compounds monthly.

What to build

Build a connector library specifically for the top 8 SPM tools that pulls live data from Salesforce, HubSpot, and common ETL sources on a configurable schedule, with a no-code field mapping UI that survives upstream schema changes without requiring a developer to intervene.

Where to start

Start with a single connector: HubSpot to Anaplan, because HubSpot users explicitly call out not having a native integration and Anaplan users cite ETL integration failures — this is a named, searchable, recurring pain with a defined buyer.

The hard part

Each SPM vendor's API is different, poorly documented, and sometimes rate-limited in ways that make real-time sync impractical — you'll have to negotiate undocumented constraints on a per-vendor basis before you can promise anything to customers.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per active connector, with a one-time setup fee for custom field mapping; pricing scales by data volume or number of source systems connected.