The Challenge
When Digital Marketing Strategist Ben Henneberger of Gerard Daniel discovered Lake One Digital, he was frustrated with the usability and integration issues he was having with his current CRM.
Gerard Daniel, a company that provides mesh, separation, and filtration solutions to a variety of critical industries, had been successfully using HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Professional for their marketing software and didn’t like that the CRM they were using didn’t integrate with it.
This lack of integration was essentially keeping their sales and marketing efforts disconnected from each other, as well as lowering the efficiency and speed with which they could communicate with new leads.
Yet while Henneberger was eager to move to a CRM that did integrate well — specifically HubSpot CRM — he was also nervous about transferring the company’s large amount of client data without the risk of losing any or corrupting it.
Gerard Daniel had more than 17,000 individual contacts, roughly 7,000 company contacts, and a plethora of open and closed deals inside their current CRM, as well as more than 1 million records in their internal database.
Despite Henneberger’s digital marketing experience and knowledge of CRM platforms, he said he knew migrating to a new CRM quickly and accurately would be better performed by experts.
“The data transfer between two CRMs is never easy to do,” Henneberger said. “We needed to make sure that we didn’t lose data, and that we had data congruence between the new CRM and our marketing software. We also needed to have the ability to create reports, as well as have the same reports that we were using in the old CRM be available immediately.
“It was a daunting task because we had a lot of data to move and a short time to move it in, and we’d also created a mess of it trying to get the other CRM to work. I knew I needed help to get the transfer done well.”
Gerard Daniel’s HubSpot rep recommended they contact Lake One Digital, so Henneberger reached out to set up a call and said he was immediately impressed.
““Lake One was amazing,” Henneberger said. “They got right back to me and asked how they could help. When we got on the call, I told them the issues I was having and I could tell by the questions they asked that they were experts. They even began to talk about some of the problems I was experiencing before I could get them out of my mouth because they understood the process so thoroughly.”
Ben Henneberger Digital Marketing Strategist, Gerard Daniel
“We also had thousands of contacts in HubSpot and none of them were organized so that we could market to them in a thoughtful way.”
While PURIS had been working with another CRM partner, Achterhoff felt that a fresh start with a new company would help them meet their goals more quickly and effectively.
The Solutions
When Lake One began the data migration to HubSpot, they were up against some challenges. Not only did they need to have the migration completed within three weeks before Gerard Daniel’s contract with the other CRM expired, but they also had to conduct the migration in real time so that the Gerard Daniel sales team could start working on their open deals in HubSpot immediately.
Henneberger said that despite the pressure, the Lake One team rolled up their sleeves and did whatever needed to be done for a successful transfer — which in a few cases required some ingenuity.For example, it became clear that there was no easy way to download exports from the CRM, so the Lake One team got creative and ran reports to gather the data first, then exported those.
This worked well to get most of Gerard Daniel’s deal, contact, and company data transferred over, but it still left all of their notes inside their old CRM. To troubleshoot this, the Lake One team exported the data via an API call.
Then, they used an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) software — to construct a workflow that took the data from the CRM, associated it to the correct records in HubSpot, and then exported it over.
