HubSpot + Trello + Gmail via Zapier 

Introduction

A well-designed Trello board solves the visibility problem. It doesn't solve the initiation problem.

Even with a fully structured onboarding system in place, someone still had to manually create the card, notify the agent, and kick off the process every time a new customer came through. In a low-volume environment, that's manageable. As the business scales, it becomes the bottleneck, and the first place the customer experience starts to break down.

I built this automation to close that gap entirely.

The Problem

HubSpot's native Trello integration has a significant limitation: it supports marketing and sales pipelines only. It cannot trigger actions in support onboarding workflows. This meant that every time a deal moved to "Closed/Won" in HubSpot, the handoff to the onboarding team was entirely manual. Someone had to notice the deal had closed, remember to create the Trello card, and send the agent a notification with the right context.

The consequences of that manual dependency were predictable:

• Delays between deal closure and onboarding kickoff, sometimes measured in days

• Agents receiving incomplete context or no notification at all

• Customers left waiting with no communication after signing. The worst possible first impression

• No accountability for who was supposed to action the handoff

The Solution

I used Zapier to build a multi-step automation that bridged the gap HubSpot's native integration couldn't cross.

The trigger: A deal stage changes to "Closed/Won Onboarding Ready" in HubSpot.

What happens automatically from that moment:

1. Zapier creates a new card in Trello under the Preparation stage of the onboarding board. Onboarding begins instantly, before any human has taken action

2. The card is pre-populated with the customer's name, deal package, assigned owner, and contact details pulled directly from HubSpot, no manual data entry required

3. A checklist is automatically created on the card with all mandatory preparation tasks

4. An email notification is sent via Gmail to the support agent and deal owner with onboarding instructions and next steps with context already included

The entire handoff, from closed deal to active onboarding card to notified agent, happens in seconds.

What This Demonstrates

This project required understanding not just what tools can do, but what they can't and designing around those limitations rather than accepting them. Identifying that HubSpot's native integration couldn't serve the onboarding use case, researching the Zapier solution, and building a multi-step workflow that connected three separate platforms is the kind of problem-solving that separates an operations specialist from someone who simply knows how to use software.

The result is an onboarding system that runs without anyone having to remember to run it.