10 Little Fixes to Big Challenges Associated With Migrating to HubSpot

In the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, businesses are constantly searching for tools and platforms that help them streamline their operations, enhance customer interactions and ultimately drive growth.

HubSpot has emerged as a powerhouse in the realm of marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM). With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive suite of features, migrating your marketing automation and CRM to HubSpot can be a game-changer for your business.

However, most companies are already on one platform or using some combination of tools, and moving from this situation to HubSpot can be tricky.

Having helped over 350 companies move to HubSpot over the past 20 years, here are the 10 secrets we’ve uncovered to ensure a smooth and successful transition to HubSpot.

Secret 1 – Thoroughly Evaluate Your Current System

This might seem like a waste of time. Why evaluate the system you’re moving off of before moving to HubSpot?

However, you’ve been on this system for some time, and it satisfies at least some of your current needs – needs that will need to be replicated in HubSpot. Knowing what your current system is doing for you is critical.

In addition, this assessment will provide valuable insights into what specific features you need from HubSpot to enhance your marketing efforts.

Secret 2 – Set Clear Goals and Objectives

What do you hope to achieve by migrating to HubSpot? Whether it’s improved lead generation, a more robust customer segmentation or improved data analysis, setting clear and achievable goals will guide your transition process. Having defined objectives will also help you measure the success of your migration.

If you choose to use a partner to help with the migration (and we recommend this), having clear goals and objectives that you can share with potential partners is going to level set everyone’s understanding of the project.

These goals and objectives might include timelines, budgets, specific use cases that are must-haves and the available resources on your side to get the migration completed within the desired timeline and budget.

Secret 3 – Data Migration Strategy

Almost everyone underestimates what’s involved with moving data from one system to the new system. Moving the data isn’t often an issue, but moving clean, accurate and complete data is the goal. Often, the existing database is far from clean, accurate and complete.

HubSpot provides migration tools that can aid in transferring contacts, deals and other essential information. However, make sure to double-check the accuracy of migrated data to prevent any disruptions in your marketing campaigns.

This is a great time to undergo a data cleanup project, which might also include supplementing the current data with third-party data and initiating a new segmentation effort to parse the data into specific segments that enhance your marketing capabilities and improve the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Secret 4 – Customize HubSpot to Fit Your Needs

One of HubSpot’s strengths is its flexibility. Take advantage of the platform’s customization options to tailor it to your business’ unique requirements. Configure pipelines, lead scoring and automations to align with your existing processes.

This means understanding exactly what customization you need and want. Needs and wants are often different. You might need your pipelines customized out of the gate, while lead scoring can wait for a few months.

Sequencing the customization is smart and allows the migration team to focus on what’s needed to get the new platform up and running. After everyone is comfortable using the new set of tools, you can turn to additions that the team wants.

Secret 5 – Map Out Your Customer Journey

We’ve mentioned this over and over again. Understanding your customer journey is vital in crafting targeted and effective marketing strategies.

Once you start talking about technology, knowing your prospects’ buyer journeys inside and out is going to help you use HubSpot’s tools to map out each customer’s interactions with your brand, from account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns that target prospects in the Pre-Awareness Stage all the way through to offers that get prospects in the Evaluation Stage to reach out and schedule time with sales reps.

By coming to the migration project with a mapped-out buyer journey, you’ll have the insight that enables you to tailor your marketing and sales efforts for maximum impact.

Secret 6 – Integrate Seamlessly

We see few migrations and system architectures without at least one or two existing integrations that also have to be migrated.

HubSpot offers integrations with a wide array of other tools and platforms, such as CRMs, e-commerce platforms and analytics tools. These integrations can enhance the capabilities of your marketing automation and CRM processes. Make sure the integrations are set up correctly to enable a smooth flow of data and information.

Also, be sure these integrations are identified up front, reviewed and understood in detail so they can be redesigned as part of the migration project. These integrations should be thoroughly tested in a QA process that ensures the migration is working as designed. Get this process signed off before people start using HubSpot post-migration.

Secret 7 – Automate as Much as Possible, Within Reason

It’s no secret that HubSpot allows you to automate many repetitive tasks in marketing, sales and customer service.

The secret here is to document all your current automation, create use cases for all the desired automation and ensure that everyone understands exactly how the automation is going to work and how they fit into the process.

For example, when leads convert and sales reps are notified, automation emails might be triggered. Sales reps need to know that, and they need to follow up accordingly.

Consider today’s prospects too. Automating too much or not spending the time to personalize the automation may end up turning prospects off because they’re not getting the personal touch they want.

Secret 8 – Use Reporting and Analytics

Effective marketing relies on data-driven insights. HubSpot provides robust reporting and analytics features that can help you measure the success of your campaigns, track key performance indicators (KPIs) and identify areas for improvement.

Document any current reporting capabilities, dashboards or outputs so they too can be migrated over to HubSpot. As with many of the guidance in this article, these conversations often uncover additional requirements for the new system that the current system isn’t providing.

Just make sure you document these new requests and that when the migration is complete there’s time and budget to add the new reports or dashboards.

Secret 9 – Monitor, Iterate and Innovate

Migration isn’t the final step; it’s the beginning of a new phase of growth. Continuously monitor your marketing efforts on HubSpot, gather feedback from your team and iterate your strategies based on the insights you gain.

Stay updated with HubSpot’s new features and updates to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest tools for marketing success.

Better yet, consider adding a revenue operations role to the team whose sole responsibility is to keep HubSpot updated, keep it running correctly and make ongoing upgrades, updates or optimizations to improve its performance.

This role is also responsible for documenting how you’re using HubSpot, how it was configured during the migration and any changes or upgrades. This is critical, as people in this role are constantly moving. You’ll want to make sure if you do lose your key RevOps person, your new hire can step in and be just as effective.

Secret 10 – Don’t Do It Yourself

HubSpot sales reps might tell you migrating is easy. They might talk about wizards, knowledge bases, Academy classes, videos and even their own support teams.

But in our experience, there are no easy migrations.

Unless you have no timeline, no budget, no expectations and a very understanding CEO, we highly recommend you work with a respected, experienced and adequately resourced HubSpot Solutions Partner to handle the migration.

If everything is straightforward, it might only take a couple of weeks. If issues pop up, they will have seen them before and know how to navigate the challenges to keep your migration on track and on budget.

It’s likely that whatever they charge you is going to be less than what it would cost for you to do it on your own.

Don’t take a shortcut here. Work with an experienced partner team to make this quick and easy on you. The goal is not to start a migration project, it’s to finish one successfully and have everyone tell you how easy it was, how easy it is to use HubSpot and how smart you were to recommend the move.