Our client, The Place 4 Self Storage, operates self-storage facilities across the South East, with sites in Petersfield, Alton and Swindon. Day to day operations, agreements, billing and move-ins and move-outs, run through Storman, a specialist facility management platform built for the self-storage sector. Marketing runs through HubSpot.
The two platforms did not talk to each other. Storman held all the real customer activity, every agreement, every payment, every move-in, but none of it flowed automatically into HubSpot. The marketing team was effectively working with half the picture.
A lead generated through marketing might go on to become a paying customer, but attributing revenue to marketing with confidence, or measuring return on marketing spend, was difficult. Also, information on customers who had come in through other channels was available in Storman, but accessing it was a lengthy manual process. This made it harder for the marketing team to identify and pursue upsell and cross-sell opportunities across the existing customer base.
Every day a complete and current picture of what is happening on the ground now flows straight into HubSpot, without anyone lifting a finger. Marketing can finally see the full journey a customer takes, from first enquiry through to signed agreement and beyond, something that was simply invisible before. We built this as a one-way, daily sync that pulls the full agreement and customer record from Storman, maps it into HubSpot’s Deals and Contacts, and enriches it with a set of calculated values along the way, so the data arriving is not just present, but genuinely useful.
As the business grows and adds new sites, the system grows with it, with no extra rebuild work needed each time. Storman treats every site as its own separate sub-instance rather than one flat dataset, so we built the integration to work through each facility individually, pulling agreements and leads site by site rather than assuming a single source. That means the client can expand with confidence, knowing the data behind their marketing keeps pace automatically.
Incomplete records are a common problem, and one that normally means marketing teams either work with unreliable data or spend hours cleaning it by hand. Some of Storman’s customer records held a full address, others just a postcode. Rather than accept that gap, we built fallback logic using a free UK postcode lookup service to fill in missing city, region and country details wherever possible, so geographic segmentation in HubSpot works properly, and campaigns can be targeted with confidence rather than guesswork.
Out of the box, HubSpot assumes a customer relationship only ever moves forward, but self-storage customers churn and come back, sometimes more than once, and the system needed to reflect that reality rather than fight it.
HubSpot’s lifecycle stages cannot move a contact backwards once they are marked Customer, so we added a separate custom status field that moves freely between Active and Churned based on live agreement data, sitting alongside the permanent lifecycle record. The result is a system that tells the truth about who is an active customer today, not just who has ever been one.
The integration does not just move information across, it turns raw records into decisions marketing can act on. For every agreement, it works out how long it has been active and multiplies that by the monthly rent to produce a lifetime value figure, aggregated across everything a customer holds, giving a clear read on who the most valuable customers are. It forecasts revenue for active agreements and translates raw dates of birth into age bracket segments automatically, so campaigns can be targeted by life stage without anyone doing the maths by hand.
Storman and HubSpot now function as one connected stack rather than two separate systems bridged by manual effort. The integration processes every agreement across all three sites in around two hours a day, entirely automated, covering everything from pulling records and calculating lifetime value to checking active or churned status and writing the results into HubSpot.
Doing the same job by hand, across the full customer base, would take considerably longer and carry real risk of error, the kind of repetitive, detail heavy work where mistakes creep in over time. It would not scale either. Maintaining that process manually, month after month, only gets harder as the business adds sites, easily turning into a full-time job in its own right.
For The Place’s team, the difference shows up in how they understand their own customers. Site managers now have accurate, at-a-glance reporting on who their customers are and where they come from, insight that previously meant manually working through Storman customer records one by one. That understanding shapes how each location markets itself, from the channels it leans on to the tone it uses, built from an in-person strategy session with us.
Because the integration runs independently in the background with no ongoing input required, HubSpot now stays current on its own, every single day, indefinitely. That gives the marketing team a genuine, reliable view of the customer base for the first time, the foundation for accurate reporting, life stage segmented campaigns and upsell and cross-sell activity that simply was not possible before.
"Storman has always been solid for the day to day, agreements, billing, all of it. What we did not have was an easy way to bring that into HubSpot for marketing. Now we get accurate, at-a-glance reporting on who our customers are and where they come from, across Petersfield, Alton and Swindon, without anyone having to pull it together manually. It has fed directly into how we are thinking about marketing at each site. Innovation Visual clearly took the time to understand how self storage actually works, which showed in what they built."
The Place 4 Self Storage