Migrating your business from one CRM platform to the next is more than adjusting to a new user interface. We know there are intricacies and issues you might come across when making the leap from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM. We want to help you make the shift with all the knowledge we can provide, giving you insight into common issues encountered and how to work through them efficiently.
In this article, we explore four areas of concern when migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot and how to avoid any roadblocks.
1. Ensuring your data is useful and useable after the data migration
Preparing your data for migration is a crucial first step. Clean your data by removing duplicates, confirming active contacts, and removing items not used. View migrating to a new CRM like you would when moving houses: you don't pack up the rubbish and bring it with you.
You also want to spend some time mapping the data between objects and properties. Data mapping is a complex initiative, but necessary for successful migration and sustainable use of your new platform.
The data mapping necessary for your migration from Salesforce to HubSpot requires tracing each object and property in Salesforce to each object and property in HubSpot. Though this appears to be a one to one transfer and should be straight forward, custom objects and custom properties make this a bit more challenging. Transferring data records requires alignment between objects, such as Salesforce Accounts translate to HubSpot Companies, but Salesforce Leads translate to HubSpot Contacts. You need to do the same with properties and identify which custom properties need to be created before your migration. Knowing the appropriate alignment of each object and property between platforms helps keep the migration of data records accurate and error-free.
2. Recreating Your Process in the new CRM
Every company has a sales process unique to them. While they will roughly follow the traditional marketing and sales funnel or flywheel, the unique aspects will vary. The most significant aspect of recreating your process is defining the interactions between your marketing and sales teams. How your marketing team qualify leads and how those leads are communicated to your sales team will play a huge part in defining and recreating the process that works in HubSpot.
Knowing and defining how your team prospects new clients, follow up with existing clients, and the reports needed for these interactions to work is vital. HubSpot gives your team the opportunity to record notes, or even use tools like playbooks to record the data collected on a contact or company. This information is available to all steps along the way to make prospecting through sales run smoother.
Even when your Salesforce process worked, don't forget to take the opportunity to audit the process and make improvements. The best time to change the process and adopt the custom properties and integrations is before beginning onboarding onto HubSpot.
3. Getting Your Team Bought-In
No matter the change, without buy-in from your team, it's bound to fail. The key to achieving buy-in from your marketing, sales and customer service teams, is a combination of education and empowerment. Educate your teams to fully understand the new platform and processes, as well as the reason behind the migration. Knowing what the software does and why it will make improvements will create the purpose they need to stay diligent in making the necessary changes. Empowering the team can be built around choosing champions to take part in a pilot group and then become champions to help distribute to the rest of the company. Empowering can also be built around the opportunity for champions to mould the way HubSpot is going to be used. Empower your team to define the marketing, sales and service processes, the integrations, and the improvements to build into HubSpot.
It only takes one person's rebellion to change to put a significant kink in a plan. Though not everyone can have the opportunity to influences the change in a significant way, you can ensure everyone gets the education they need to feel motivated by the migration. As the Salesforce migration to HubSpot proceeds beyond the pilot group, make sure every team is educated as to why the changes are being made, what the benefits are, and how the implementation will make a difference to their lives.
The last part of ensuring buy-in across your organisation is providing the tools to make the change to HubSpot CRM a success. This includes training for proper use of the new interface, tools, customisations and even integrations to provide full functionality.
4. Integrations
There's a high probability that you have been using integrations to expand the functionality of your CRM platform. HubSpot works the same way, integrating into other commonly used platforms to bring their functions into a single user interface. Without these integrations, the data you collect on your prospects and customers through various tools will remain scattered across multiple platforms. Your interactions with prospects and customers will be adversely affected if your customer-facing teams never have the full view of all interactions between your company and your prospects or customers.
When planning your CRM migration, plan your integrations as well. As you progress through piloting HubSpot, you can use the opportunity to test the integrations and make changes before carrying out the roll out to the entire company. HubSpot uses an app marketplace to display applications and tools available for integration via an out-of-the-box solution. If what you need isn't already available in the App marketplace, custom integrations would be your next port of call, as HubSpot allows for open API development.
But, as there are currently over five hundred currently available HubSpot CRM Integrations, we know you'll find it easy to connect the tools that help you achieve your business goals. Read about the top 5 integrations that we recommend using.
We know there are challenges when migrating between CRM platforms, but we also know the handoff from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM is going to be worth it. Our team is here to help make the transition easier, smoother, and provide insight into making sure you know your options for customisations and integrations available for all your needs.
While hiccoughs may happen along the way, planning your data migration, customisation and integrations ahead of execution are three significant elements to ensure success.
