So for some reason, you feel it’s time to migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM. That’s a huge step—congratulations!
Now migrating your CRM isn’t as easy as switching user interfaces or moving data from one database to another. This kind of shift comes with its fair share of intricacies and issues.
In this blogpost, we take a deep dive into the challenges you’re likely to experience when shifting from Sales to HubSpot. We’ll also highlight a few migration tools to make your impending switch a lasting success. Read along!
Common Issues With Migrating From Salesforce to HubSpot CRM
1. Reviewing Your Processes
Because the HubSpot CRM is on a different ecosystem, your team will need to review their processes to fit best how HubSpot runs.
This is one of the most crucial issues to solve to make sure you and your team are reaping the full benefits of HubSpot.
Speaking about processes in HubSpot, the most crucial aspect here is determining what your marketing-to-sales handoff looks like.
This might include a focus on what qualifies a lead as a Sales Qualified Lead, how you’re communicating to the sales team about this new lead, and how is sales team ultimately reporting back to the marketing team.
The last bit is very important for the marketing team to understand whether the prospects they’re passing over are genuinely qualified.
Another crucial aspect to think about is how best to manage new deals, contacts, and companies.
It’s worth noting that HubSpot’s structural orientation is entirely different from that of Salesforce. So it will be necessary first to understand how this CRM works and determine how your team will handle management.
To start enjoying the benefits of HubSpot straight off the bat, it would help to determine how your team will utilize HubSpot before, during, and after an outbound call (aka prospecting call). Even if you have decided on nothing else, this will at least get your team using the CRM swiftly.
HubSpot even goes the extra mile to ensure that your team has smoother prospecting calls, all thanks to tools such as playbooks and meeting notes.
Playbooks are perfect for documenting and sharing the exact script or steps for a prospecting call. On the other hand, meeting notes make it easy for you to record your notes about the prospect call in the CRM. This makes it easy for the rest of the team to view.
2. Ensuring Your Data Is Useable and Useful After the Migration
Another issue you’ll encounter when migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot is ensuring that your data is free of clutter, duplicates, and inconsistencies. After all, migrating to a new CRM is just like moving to a different house—you don’t pack up the rubbish and bring it with you.
This includes cleaning your data by eliminating recurrent entities, removing items not used, and confirming active contacts. You also want to take some time to map the data between the objects and properties. While data mapping is a complex undertaking, it’s necessary for successful migration and long-term use of your new CRM ecosystem.
In this context, data mapping requires that you trace each property and object in Salesforce to each project and object in HubSpot. Though this seems like a one-to-one transfer and should be straightforward, custom properties and custom objects in HubSpot make this a bit of an uphill task.
Migrating data records requires proper alignment between objects. For example, Salesforce Leads translate to HubSpot Contacts while Salesforce Accounts translate to HubSpot Company.
Do the same with properties and determine which custom properties you need to create before the actual migration. Knowing the proper alignment of each property and object between CRM ecosystems helps keep the transfer of data records error-free and accurate.
3. Replacing the Tools Your Team Uses
One of the most nagging problems you’ll run into when migrating to HubSpot is finding the right tools for your team to adopt.
First off, you need to find substitutes for the tools your team is using in Salesforce. For instance, email integration.
Your team will still need to email clients and prospects from Outlook and Gmail and have everything recorded in the CRM when they move to HubSpot.
While HubSpot provides many kinds of integrations, it’s crucial to understand the width of native tools you and your team have available to replace what you were previously using in Salesforce.
In HubSpot, for instance, you can create new sales email templates that your team can make the most of when emailing a prospective client. These are ideal in making sure the sales team is including the correct touchpoints in the emails that they pitch all the time.
You can also utilize HubSpot activities as a substitute for the tasks tool in Salesforce. This feature allows your team to be notified to perform any task, add notes to a contract record, record a meeting, and all sorts of sales activity that needs recording.
4. Getting Your Teams Trained & Empowered
No matter the change, it’s bound to hit a snag without a well-trained and focused team. The key to a successful HubSpot switch is ensuring that your sales, marketing, and customer service teams are all working in sync—and that is only possible through training and empowerment.
Educate your teams to fully comprehend the new processes and ecosystem and the reason fueling the migration. Knowing what HubSpot does and why it will improve will create a sense of purpose to stay the course.
The good news is, HubSpot provides a lot of information and training resources to ensure your team can learn the ropes as fast as possible. For instance, HubSpot offers a slew of certifications and courses for HubSpot CRM and marketing and sales in general.
On top of that, HubSpot has countless project templates to provide a list of things you need to do to ensure that you’re doing the right things on the platform.
Last but certainly not least, you can hire one of HubSpot trainers to help your team get up and running quickly.
Making the Switch to HubSpot: What Migration Tools Do You Need?
We’ve already covered the four common issues synonymous with Salesforce to HubSpot migration. Now, to help you chose the right tools for the job and reduce chances of data loss, we present two data migration tools that make switching CRM platforms a walk in the park.
- Talend Open Studio
Talend Open Studio is awash with productivity-enhancing features that let you effortlessly design and execute data migration projects.
Its standout features include an inbuilt graphical development ecosystem with extensive drag-and-drop capabilities, a unified repository that allows for the efficient reuse of components across projects, and robust job management and modeling tools.
- Pentaho Data Integration
Arguably the most popular open-source migration tool available, Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) is as easy to use as it is functional. This is because every process is created with a graphical feature where you can specify what you’d like to do without writing a single line of code.
This tool also supports a vast array of output and input formats, including datasheets, text files, and free database engines. Add to that the many secondary functions (such as data cleansing, integrating apps, extensive loading of data to databases, etc.) in its arsenal, and you have a migration tool that doesn’t miss a bit.
Don’t Take Any Chances With Your Salesforce-HubSpot Migration.
We know there are bottlenecks when migrating between CRM ecosystems, but we also know the switch from Salesforce to HubSpot is going to be worth it.
The team at Ndevr is here to make the switch quicker and fuss-free, as well as provide nuggets to ensure you know your options for integrations, migration tools, and customizations for all your needs. Get in touch with us today, and let us be part of your success story!
