About beta.gouv.fr
beta.gouv.fr is the French government's digital startup incubator, operating under the Direction Interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM). It builds and scales public digital services through autonomous product teams embedded across ministries. This engagement was carried out with one of its flagship products: the Plateforme de l'inclusion, which operates 10 distinct B2B products serving the French employment and professional inclusion ecosystem - connecting local authorities (conseils départementaux, collectivités), private sector employers, and IAE actors (insertion par l'activité économique). With a BizDev team of around 20 people split into 3 squads, this was one of the most structurally complex CRM projects Novlini has delivered.
The Challenge
In October 2025, the Plateforme de l'inclusion BizDev team underwent a full reorganisation. The previous structure was replaced by a unified BizDev organisation split into 3 squads, each targeting a specific audience type. Two distinct problems needed solving in parallel.
CRM setup: 70% of the team had no shared CRM process. Data was scattered across Excel files, Brevo, and a partially configured Attio workspace. The team needed a unified Attio workspace with a clean data model - but given the sensitivity of the data and internal constraints, the data migration and import would be handled entirely by the client team. Novlini's role on this part was advisory: design the data model, support the configuration, and be available for questions.
Product data in the CRM: Beyond the sales process, the team needed product usage data - user status and structure activity across the 10 products - surfaced directly in Attio. This data lived in Metabase. There was no connection between the product analytics layer and the CRM.
Our Approach
Novlini split the 6-day engagement across two tracks.
Track 1 - Attio CRM Setup (3 days, advisory)
We worked alongside the internal team to design the data model and configure Attio. Key decisions on the object structure: Organisations as the central object (with type attributes to distinguish conseils départementaux, collectivités, private employers, IAE structures, and other institutional actors), Contacts linked to organisations, Opportunités as a dedicated object to handle the variety of partnership and convention types, Départements as a separate object reflecting the territorial logic of the team's work, and Actions de déploiement to track webinars, calls, and other commercial actions by type.
Pipelines configured for each squad's motion, with stages aligned to how each team actually moves from first contact to signed convention or active partnership. The internal team managed data cleaning, import, and migration directly - Novlini provided templates, field mapping guidance, and was available throughout for configuration questions.
Track 2 - Metabase to Attio Sync via N8N (3 days, full build)
This was the core technical deliverable. We built a CDP-style synchronisation layer on N8N connecting Metabase product data to Attio records.
4 workflows built in total:
2 Attio to N8N sync workflows, one of which handles People records on the client's data infrastructure side.
2 Metabase to Attio sync workflows via N8N:
User status sync: the active/inactive status of a user in the product is pushed down to the corresponding People record in Attio, with automatic name enrichment (first name + last name appended if the user exists in the product database).
Structure status sync: product usage status for each structure is pushed to the corresponding Company record in Attio, plus a dedicated "Product Status" custom object is created and linked, tracking activity per structure per product.
The most complex part was handling 250,000+ user records in N8N - a tool not designed for that volume. Custom JavaScript functions were built inside N8N workflows to process data at scale. Two technical constraints had to be worked around: the volume consumes significant N8N credits, and N8N's execution model required the heaviest processing to be offloaded to SQL. A query aggregates product usage by structure x product combination, identifies the dominant email domain for each pair (to match the structure in Attio), and excludes ISP email addresses from the domain search without excluding those users from the product status calculation. This query was handed off to the internal data team for maintenance.
Technology Stack
Attio - unified CRM, data model, pipelines (source of truth)
Metabase - product analytics and usage data (source)
N8N - automation layer connecting Metabase to Attio
SQL - aggregation logic for structure x product usage, maintained by the client data team
The Results
The Plateforme de l'inclusion went from a fragmented setup with no shared CRM process and no product data visibility in the CRM, to a unified Attio workspace with live product usage data surfaced on every relevant record.
Unified data model live - 5 core objects covering all 10 products and 3 squad targets
3 squad pipelines configured - collectivités, private sector, and IAE
Product usage visible in Attio - user status and structure activity synced automatically from Metabase
4 N8N workflows in production - covering both directions of the Metabase-Attio sync
Data sovereignty preserved - sensitive data handled entirely by the internal team throughout
Why It Matters
Most CRM projects for public sector organisations stop at the data model. The Plateforme de l'inclusion went further: connecting product usage data to the CRM so that the BizDev team can see, on every company and contact record, which products a structure is actively using and which users are engaged. For a platform running 10 products across tens of thousands of structures, this is the difference between a contacts database and an operational GTM system.