We're thrilled to announce that Salted Stone has achieved the HubSpot Data Migration Accreditation! The CRM migration project that made it possible was complex, and required some serious strategizing.
As part of our ongoing efforts to achieve all HubSpot accreditations, Salted Stone has made another stride: we’ve earned the HubSpot Data Migration Accreditation.
This is our third one (we also have the Onboarding and CRM Implementation accreditations) and we don't plan to stop there! We'll continue to work toward our goal of achieving all six HubSpot accreditations, plus any new ones created, to fuel our clients' success with powerful HubSpot tools.
Here’s a closer look at the CRM migration project that enabled us to achieve this milestone:
The challenge
Salted Stone was tasked with migrating a financial services company’s CRM to HubSpot. The client's existing CRM system was failing to meet their needs, especially in terms of recording data, managing conversations, and moving through the sales process.
We aimed to transfer as much legacy data as possible, while also creating a new data structure that could maximize the benefits of HubSpot’s features. However, the project was far from straightforward. Key challenges included:
- Years’ worth of non-standardized data entry by the client's team, leading to irregularities and complicating the task of migration.
- No straightforward method for data export from the client’s old CRM, requiring us to process an Azure SQL database file with minimal context.
“Data migration is always interesting (for data nerds anyway), because you’re working across different platforms and datasets,” says Kady White, Marketing Technology Strategist at Salted Stone. “While the concept of moving data from point A to point B seems pretty simple, there’s a lot of nuance in how data is exported, formatted, mapped, and imported. You don’t really know if you’re working with a clean and organized dataset until you get in there, which can present unique challenges throughout the process.”
The solution
To ensure a smooth migration process, we opted to do most of our data processing in Excel, leveraging additional tools to eliminate duplicates and join multiple tables easily. All in all, our team mapped data from over 120 tables to HubSpot's contacts, companies, and deal objects to prepare the data for import.
For our initial import, we imported more data than needed — a different approach than we usually take — to give the client’s team the chance to see how various data points and activities would look in HubSpot and decide on what to keep.
Once those decisions were made, we executed a delta migration, transferring all data that had changed during the training period. The process was iterative, and we continually refined it based on the client’s needs, even bringing in additional data when requested.
“The CRM data migration work we did for our client was complex, but highly satisfying,” says Alden Dale, Director of Sales & Marketing Operations Architecture. “Migrating off of an old legacy system with years and years of valuable data had its challenges, especially around some unusual data structure used in the old CRM. But ultimately, we were able to clean their data and structure it in a way that aligned both with HubSpot and with the new way our client was approaching their sales and marketing efforts.”
Kady White says her biggest takeaway from the project was the importance of strategy. “Don’t skimp on the strategic legwork in the early stages of a migration,” she says. “Have the conversations early to understand not only the ‘what’ and 'how' of the migration, but also why your data needs to perform a certain way.”
In the end, we provided a solution that greatly improved upon our client’s old system. Their data is now cleaner, less cluttered, and more accessible, allowing them to fully realize the advantages of HubSpot.
