Kriete Truck Centers HubSpot Migration and Integration

Project type

Website

Industry

Logistics & Transportation

Location

United States

Services provided

Strategy

Development

Kriete Truck Centers is a commercial vehicle dealership serving customers across the United States. They specialise in selling new and used trucks, trailers, and commercial equipment, alongside parts and service operations. With sales representatives constantly on the move across America, visiting truck yards, photographing inventory, and working directly with fleet operators and owner-operators, their business moves fast.

For a dealership of this scale, the website isn't just marketing collateral. It's the digital showroom where potential buyers browse hundreds of available trucks, where fleet managers compare specifications, and where the sales team shares listings in real-time. When a representative photographs a new vehicle in the field and uploads it to their system, customers expect to see it online immediately.

Why this migration mattered

Kriete's existing website lived on a different platform, separate from their HubSpot marketing and forms infrastructure. This fragmentation created operational friction - managing multiple systems, maintaining duplicate data, and struggling to keep website inventory synchronised with their sophisticated dealer management system.

They needed to consolidate onto HubSpot, bringing together content, inventory, and lead generation into a unified platform.

The challenge

Kriete Trucks came to us already using HubSpot for marketing, but their website lived on a different platform. They wanted to consolidate everything onto HubSpot - bringing together their content, inventory, and lead generation into one unified system.

For most businesses, a website migration means moving pages and updating templates. For Kriete, the website is their inventory - a living, breathing catalogue of hundreds of trucks that changes constantly throughout the day.

Kriete uses two connected systems to manage their vehicle inventory. Their dealer management system (Procede DMS) handles the business side - sales, transactions, customer records. This feeds into cDemo, a product information management system designed specifically for vehicle dealerships.

cDemo is where the magic happens for their sales team. Representatives photograph trucks in the field, upload specifications from their phones, and update availability status in real-time. It's the single source of truth for what's in stock and what's available.

Their existing website pulled inventory from cDemo automatically. Migrating to HubSpot meant rebuilding that entire connection from scratch - and it had to work just as seamlessly, because the sales team couldn't afford delays between listing a vehicle and seeing it appear online.

Setting strategic foundations

One of our first critical decisions shaped everything that followed. For managing 1,000+ inventory items, we had two options: HubDB tables or HubSpot's Products object.

HubDB seemed like the simpler path initially - it's what many agencies use for inventory systems. But we recognised its limitations:

Hard cap of 1,000 rows (Kriete was already at that threshold)
No native commerce integration
Limited scalability for future e-commerce plans
Weaker CRM integration

We chose the Products object instead. This meant more complex integration work upfront, but delivered:

Unlimited scale for inventory growth
Native commerce readiness for future online parts sales
Rich CRM integration connecting inventory to deals and contacts
Flexible data structure supporting complex specifications and multiple images

This decision future-proofed the entire implementation.

Integrating cDemo with HubSpot

The critical piece was making Kriete's inventory system (cDemo) talk to HubSpot automatically. Sales reps needed to photograph a truck, upload it to cDemo, and have it appear on the website - without anyone manually recreating that listing.

We built an integration that:

Adds new vehicles in cDemo automatically as products in HubSpot
Syncs updates to specifications, pricing, or photos to HubSpot
Removes sold or archived vehicles from the website

For the sales team, it's completely invisible. They work in cDemo like they always have, and the website takes care of itself.

Migrating the website

With the inventory integration built and tested, we could migrate Kriete's front-end website to HubSpot Content Hub.

We developed a flexible system of reusable templates supported by custom modules. This maintained Kriete's existing design while dramatically improving how the site could be managed going forward.

The flexible approach means Kriete's team can now build new pages without needing a developer, while maintaining complete design consistency across the site.

Dynamic product page generation

When a new vehicle syncs from cDemo into HubSpot's Products object, a webpage is automatically created for it. HubSpot generates a unique URL for each product so the moment a new truck appears in the CRM, the live page is generated.

This is the power of CRM-powered pages: hundreds of product pages exist without anyone manually building them. Each page pulls its data directly from the product record in HubSpot CRM.

We built a single template that styles these automatically generated pages consistently, handling specifications, gallerys, pricing, and contact forms.

So, when Kriete's team adds inventory to cDemo, pages appear automatically. When trucks sell and are removed, the pages disappear. The website stays perfectly synchronised with actual inventory without any manual page management.

Dynamic print views

In the commercial vehicle industry, sales happen in person - at truck yards, customer sites, and industry events. Sales representatives needed a way to provide professional marketing materials on the spot, without relying on pre-printed brochures that quickly become outdated as inventory changes.

Using CSS media queries, we created print views that turn product pages into professional sales sheets. Representatives can pull up any truck listing on their phone or laptop, click print, and instantly generate a high-quality marketing leaflet.

Each sheet includes:

Primary vehicle image
Key specifications in an organized layout
QR code linking back to the online listing
Clean formatting optimised for paper

"The print functionality has actually become one of the most valued features. Sales representatives can generate up-to-date marketing materials for any vehicle instantly, which has fundamentally changed how they operate in the field."

Calum Joyce, Developer

Enhanced search with Swiftype

To handle searching through hundreds of inventory items effectively, we replaced HubSpot's default search functionality with Swiftype:

Faster, more relevant search results
Better UI with proper pagination
On-the-fly results display (no separate results page needed)
More reliable indexing and caching

The difference in user experience is immediately noticeable when searching through extensive inventory.

CallRail integration

Lead attribution is critical for Kriete's sales team - they need to know which vehicles and marketing efforts are driving phone inquiries.

We integrated CallRail's dynamic phone number tracking throughout the site. Each sales representative has multiple tracking numbers that automatically display based on the product being viewed and the visitor's source. When someone calls about a specific truck, CallRail captures that data and attributes it to the right product and marketing channel.

This gives Kriete granular insights into which inventory generates the most interest and which marketing campaigns drive actual sales conversations, enabling data-driven decisions about pricing, promotion, and inventory management.

The impact

The Kriete Trucks migration delivered a unified platform where content, inventory, and lead generation work seamlessly together, transforming how the business operates day-to-day.

Business outcomes:

Faster time to market: New inventory appears online automatically after added to cDemo, eliminating delays that previously cost sales opportunities
Reduced operational overhead: Sales team no longer manages website content, they focus entirely on selling while the website updates itself automatically
Improved sales enablement: Representatives can generate professional, up-to-date marketing materials instantly in the field, accelerating the sales cycle
Scalable for growth: Infrastructure supports unlimited inventory expansion without performance degradation or additional manual work
Foundation for revenue expansion: Positioned to launch online parts sales and customer portals, opening new revenue streams

By understanding both HubSpot's capabilities and Kriete's operational reality, we delivered a system that eliminated manual processes while improving performance. The sales team focuses on selling trucks, the website takes care of itself, and Kriete has a foundation ready for wherever their business grows next.

Kriete Truck Centers

Why this migration mattered

The challenge