At New Breed, I think you can tell that we live and breathe in HubSpot. I’d estimate my team and I do more than 50 HubSpot projects each quarter, and we’ve seen several reasons for our clients to enlist our support with the configuration of their HubSpot, anything from acquiring new businesses (and hence, new tech) to needing to scale their workflows and processes for future growth. The list is endless, but no matter what your challenge, we’re here to help.
What is a HubSpot configuration?
So first, let’s get into what, exactly, does a ‘HubSpot configuration’ mean? Our RevOps team delivers a variety of HubSpot configurations to meet what our clients need most, whether that’s an implementation, a migration, or an optimization. Sometimes it's a combination of all three based on our clients' needs and their business goals.
- Implementation: We help create, develop, and build new processes for any of your teams/departments from start to finish.
- Migration: We will move your data, automation, reports, and assets from the software you’re removing into your HubSpot instance while ensuring there’s no decline in the necessary day-to-day activities.
- Optimization: We audit various assets to make recommendations on how to improve them for best practices to help reduce clutter, tech debt, and confusion inside of your HubSpot portal.
Oftentimes, we’ll see our clients come to us with an overly complex tech stack that needs a little (or a lot!) of love, and that’s where consolidating your technology comes into play. I often see this at high-growth companies, maybe after a business merger or acquisition, where there are multiple instances of HubSpot platforms, or if there’s a new team structure leading to the need for new technological investments.
This also might be a need if your team is being introduced to new sales and marketing processes and you’re redefining things like your attribution models or slimming down steps within your sales process.
These different processes help to create a powerful CRM that, most importantly, works for you and your teams.
When it comes to platform consolidation, a common combination of both migrating and optimizing your HubSpot ecosystem, we’re here to support you. Before getting started, there are several considerations that my team and I go through with you to make sure we’re helping you unlock meaningful growth within your tech stack.
The end result that we’re striving for is the same: One universal source of truth for your sales and marketing operations to help you and your team make smarter, data-driven decisions to help fuel revenue.
Pro Tip: The more your team understands these six considerations, the faster the work will be on our side, saving you time (and money!). I encourage you to think about these factors before you engage with a partner like us, but if you need more support, we can help you with these beginning pieces during our assessments.
The Top 6 Must-Know Factors Pre-HubSpot Platform Consolidation
1. Does the platform consolidation meet, or influence, business goals?
Before you decide to consolidate two or more HubSpot platforms into one, you first need to think about the desired end result. Your consolidation project should always be in the best interest of your business, and align with those end goals, which only you can determine.
You'll also want to understand how to treat leads as they come through the funnel. All of this will help you figure out exactly how your HubSpot portal will support and eventually accomplish these goals.
Consider:
- What are your business goals?
- What are your goals in executing your marketing with HubSpot?
- Are you looking to consolidate tech stack costs?
- Have you considered what software is right for your goals?
- How can you decrease tech stack fatigue and increase usage of your existing tech?
2. How long will your consolidation project take?
While HubSpot platforms have similarities, each business has different needs and goals, so it's highly unlikely that you'd ever see two portals configured the exact same way. For example, one business might need different field names and properties based on how they use naming conventions within their buying journey.
Other portals may have different stage names for their selling processes based on the steps their buyers take. It’s all very individualized to the business, and that’s what makes it complex (but for us, fun!).
With complexities, you shouldn’t expect this type of project to take just a couple of weeks. We can give you a better estimate depending on how much data cleanup needs to happen during the migration, how many assets are being moved, and what new processes may be being created that weren’t in your old portal.
While each project is different, you can safely say that a HubSpot platform consolidation project can take about four to six months.
3. Who will be leading and supporting the consolidation?
For a HubSpot consolidation project to be done correctly, it’s critically important to have a dedicated team that understands your goals and has the right resources readily available to move the project along.
That’s why finding a partner like New Breed can help you get these projects done outside of a person’s typical daily responsibilities and guarantees the attention to detail this type of project needs.
Here’s where I would define your two ‘key players’ for this project, if you decided you needed to bring in outside support like what New Breed can provide: Your HubSpot/CRM administrator and your decision makers (which can be more than one person, as I’ll explain).
Your decision makers are likely your CRO or the highest marketing and sales leader(s) in your business. While our team can get through audits and solutions to provide you with our recommendations, in order to move forward, the decision maker must sign off, and be ‘in the room,’ so to speak, as a project is moving along.
That doesn’t mean your decision maker should be at every meeting (and they never should need to get that far into the weeds!), but understanding who is responsible for the ultimate decision can help plan a project timeline more accurately.
So ultimately, your ‘project team’ could look like:
Your (likely outsourced) Project Lead: This would be someone who is a key person on the New Breed RevOps team acting as your core project manager to ensure we’re planning a proper project timeline with all the necessary steps to complete your project on time, and on budget.
The ‘doers’: This is where my team would step in as supplemental resources to tackle all the necessary workstreams appointed by our project lead.
Your HubSpot/CRM administrator: The person who knows the current state of your CRM or HubSpot platform. What needs to stay, what can be changed, and what’s important. This person might not have this official title, so think about the people who know your HubSpot portal very well!
Your testing ‘committee’: These are your end users (likely your sales or marketing team managers, or a few sales development representatives, revenue operations specialists, etc.) that will be using these new processes and workflows once the platforms are consolidated. They’re there to weigh in on how to workshop the new processes, understand the end goal, and articulate what’s most important for all parties.
Decision Makers: These people are incredibly important to identify early on in the process. They are pivotal to ensure we stay on track with the project timeline and that we have one (or two) point people to go to when we need decisions made.
In addition, if you have a CRM integrated with your HubSpot platforms, you'll need to assemble a team led by your CRM administrator to consolidate on his or her end. Both your HubSpot and CRM teams will work closely together to ensure your sales process is executed properly. It's a dual effort and success relies on collaboration and communication.
4. What third-party applications are integrated with HubSpot and/or within your CRM? ,
Integrations are a necessary part of Hubspot migration and consolidation. Consider what integrations each of the portals is using and if there's a need for more custom work. The right partner can help you determine what integrations are most critical to ‘launch’ your new portal, and if there are integrations that can wait, depending on the time, budget, and resources necessary.
Our in-depth knowledge of HubSpot as an Elite Solutions Partner also works to provide extra eyes to spot any duplicates of your current integrations that may be rolled into regular HubSpot product updates!
To support with this step, we suggest having a list of your current software to understand how much integration work may be needed.
HubSpot offers several different software integrations to make your marketing more slick. For example, if either portal is deploying the following, you'll need to combine and condense:
5. Do you understand the processes and workflows set up?
Creating one unified HubSpot platform is similar to a wormhole, we know, but it’s one in which you must keep digging. This is a great opportunity to understand how your workflows operate and find ways to refine and hone their underlying strategies. To help with this, you’ll want to document everything, from set up to use, including
- Properties
- Active lists
- Workflows
- Forms, including embedded forms
- Automated emails
- Lead scoring and routing
- Lead nurture campaigns
- Landing pages and thank you pages
On top of just the regular audit of your forms and emails, this can help us understand what needs to be migrated (and give an accurate scope of work). But it’s also a great time to consider what's working and what's not.
Ask yourself … Are those emails actually getting opens and clicks? Are those forms getting conversions? Is your lead scoring actually giving your sales team qualified marketed leads? If not, it's time to change those things up in the migration!
Don't bring over things that aren't working, it's time to start fresh!
6. Are you open to considering progress over perfection?
A HubSpot consolidation can be a daunting task, but finding a partner to support you can make it easier to get to the finish line, and achieve the revenue goals your business has set.
In the tech world, we have what’s called a 'Minimum Viable Product' (MVP), which, according to Atlassian is the simplest version of a product that you need to build to sell it to a market. The same concept can be applied to your HubSpot portal.
Think about what you need for your own MVP to go to market with the new, consolidated Hubspot portal, and then build out plans for future needs.
For example, you may have completely different lead-scoring criteria or contact properties in both portals. So while you want to identify what solution to choose, you also don’t want that decision to delay your progress.
Understanding what your biggest priorities are (field mapping, for example, over lead scoring) can help you identify what to spend the most time on.
Your HubSpot platform consolidation is a big step in the right direction toward achieving your revenue goals, but from my experience, it’s the first step of many. That’s why we look to work with our clients beyond the consolidation project to discuss ongoing strategies to get into the minute details of their entire system, way beyond launch.
Ready to Consolidate Your HubSpot Platforms?
The tools you have in front of you to make the most of your HubSpot portal continue to get more exciting, and as an Elite Solutions Partner, I’m proud that the team at New Breed is in the front row of all of these advancements. So if you’re ready to consolidate your HubSpot portals, we are here to help you, every step of the way.
