CharacterStrong is a fast-paced ed tech company that provides research-based Pre-K through 12th-grade character development curricula and professional learning services that positively impact students’ lives by supporting schools with ongoing implementation.

The company’s sales and marketing operations were living in separate, complex systems with a large amount of historical data. This unwieldy combination of legacy tools couldn’t easily communicate with each other, making it difficult to build automation at scale within their CRM and to ensure that both teams were empowered with the data they needed to operate effectively and efficiently. 

CharacterStrong engaged Salted Stone to help onboard their stakeholders and provide hands-on training as well as data migration to set them up for success going into their busy sales season in 2023. 

The Challenge

In part because of their robust marketing strategy spanning various products and channels, ranging from conferences to curriculum sample downloads, the CharacterStrong team’s legacy systems made efficiently managing leads a challenge. It was a classic case of great work deprecating into a blocker over time due to tech debt. 

Leads from marketing activities would be pulled into legacy marketing systems that were difficult for sales to interact with efficiently, and constantly moving data into their separate sales software was cumbersome. There were a lot of quality leads—but nobody was looking at them. 

On top of that, their sales tool did not pull in data from their marketing system and were being managed with lots of pipelines and data scattered across systems. In addition to the legacy marketing CRM and sales management system, additional tools were necessary to complete the tech stack and tell the full story from lead origination to customer success. With every tool added to keep the whole thing running, the tech debt grew as usability dropped.

The legacy marketing tool was operating with a complex system that leveraged thousands of tags to organize and segment records with a database of over 200,000 contacts. 

Salted Stone’s Solutions Approach 

In order to achieve CharacterStrong’s goals, Salted Stone began a data migration process while running hands-on training simultaneously. This allowed our teams to collaborate on data governance best practices and set the client up for success. 

We kicked off with a series of discovery workshops, learning about the company’s goals, target audience, service offering, and how their existing tech stack fit into their operations. Our process ensured we prioritized a foundation of sustainable data cleanliness as part of the new system. 

Alden Dale, Salted Stone’s Director of Solutions, built on everything we learned to architect a plan for data migration that addressed the complexity and scale of the legacy systems. During this process, we also identified opportunities for improvement in data governance and data cleanliness that we could also address during the migration to HubSpot.

Salted Stone’s process resulted in an actionable migration workbook that encompassed contact objects from several legacy platforms, properties, deal pipelines, and legacy tags. Lists, and product line items.   

Once CharacterStrong approved the workbook approach, we began the data migration process.

Ease of use was a core driver of CharacterStrong’s decision to migrate their marketing and sales operations into HubSpot. It offers the ability to customize object properties to meet the organization’s needs, and the streamlining of sales and marketing data, all in a seamless, no-code environment optimized for marketers and sales professionals. 

We migrated over 150,000 contact records and provided a framework for pulling in historical data to HubSpot to meet the company’s needs while providing hands-on, collaborative training for the CharacterStrong team to get familiar with HubSpot’s environment. 

But we weren’t done yet - before completing the migration Salted Stone used its meticulous QA process to ensure proper data formatting and object association in HubSpot.

The Results 

Four months after discovery, CharacterStrong’s HubSpot was running smoothly, enabling the team to start building their new, integrated sales and marketing processes with all their data intact! 

Here’s what Salted Stone successfully achieved:

• Migrated a large amount of legacy data from multiple external platforms ahead of CharacterStrong’s busy sales season 
• Collaborated with CharacterStrong to build a foundational understanding of HubSpot tools and best practices - maximizing the adoption of the HubSpot platform within their team
• Provided multiple hands-on marketing and sales-focused training workshops
• Developed a lead scoring model to kickoff CharacterStrong’s sales enablement efforts
• Post-migration support for ongoing training resources

Kady White, Salted Stone’s Marketing Technology Strategist who drove the project, believes the team's approach to sales and marketing alignment sets them up for success long term.

“CharacterStrong made our jobs easy as they were so internally aligned with their sales and marketing stakeholders all being involved in the process from start to finish. Being able to consolidate their disparate tech stack into a single HubSpot instance and highlighting how powerful their legacy data can be when it works comprehensively is a great way to set them up for long-term success. ”

— Kady White, Marketing Technology Strategist at Salted Stone

CharacterStrong has since gone on to tackle their busy sales season working with PreK-12 education professionals in the coming school year. 

The project results are a testament to Salted Stone’s agility and proven HubSpot onboarding and migration processes. We look forward to seeing CharacterStrong’s success continue to skyrocket!

Ready to use HubSpot to its full potential? Contact us.