If you have just completed a CRM integration then first well done! No doubt your head's a bit frazzled and you're still basking in the kudos from the sales and marketing teams about how you have improved their lives with automations and processes! But what next?
To ensure that you continue momentum with your integration and get even more hi-fives from the team, you need to audit your account to see what to do next and what needs snagged too.
So before we go through why audits are important and how to identify friction points for snagging, we need to look at the differences between “migration” and “integration.”
The differences between “migration” and “integration.”
A migration is the process of moving from the use of one operating environment to another operating environment. HubSpot has a lot of tools which are focused on both marketing and sales alignment, so we are seeing many people migrating from Salesforce or inbuilt CRM systems to HubSpot Enterprise CRM. If you are migrating a CRM, you’ll want to avoid losing past CRM data as this is gold for the company. This migrated data enables teams to report on effective sales strategies, avoid unnecessary effort, improve sales velocity and will reduce disruption.
An integration is the process of connecting one operating environment to another to enhance the functionality of one or both environments (according to PCMag). No software does everything by itself, and integrations allow clients to build complete solutions to business problems. For example, HubSpot integrates with Vidyard, which allows HubSpot clients to use video content in their HubSpot marketing campaigns and analyse engagement metrics—all in one place. If you’re hired to implement a client’s CRM and sales tools, you may be asked to integrate several systems to address the client’s needs. In some cases, you may need to both migrate and integrate several systems, depending on their software stack.
Take all necessary steps to preserve their data. Even after you’ve technically finished migrating and/or integrating separate systems, you’ll need to thoroughly audit your work and collect feedback from the client.
Why is auditing so important?
For any who are lucky to own a house and have done it up, you will know that it’s never fully finished after the first fix and there will always a few snags and things that need fixing up. For your CRM, this is the same process and auditing exposes any potential roadblocks to your success.
You’ve recently migrated a client from Salesforce to HubSpot successfully. However, when you audit your migration, you discover that a few crucial properties were configured incorrectly. Without these properties, the client would have been unable to automate operational activities effectively. By correcting this lapse early, you save your client months of unnecessary manual effort.
The second fact is that through auditing, you will better grasp the strategic needs of the CRM. Recently we have integrated HubSpot with several other tools and an internal bespoke CRM. During this, we found that we could improve all areas of the company by having a seamless crossover using segmented deal pipelines and automations. We devised a better long-term business solution for the client by ensuring we audited and consulted the team throughout. Auditing and continual communication increases the likelihood of a successful implementation, which in turn strengthens your position.
How to audit migrations and integrations in three steps
Below, we are going to take a look at some auditing best practices.
We can split the audit into three ordered steps:
1. Check for missing data - Double-check objects, records, associations, and properties to ensure that no data was missed during the migration or integration.
2. User needs analysis - Analyse key reports and lists from the client’s previous CRM to make sure they can be recreated in HubSpot and speak to the users.
3. Delta migration - Perform a “delta migration” to transfer any newly modified data that may have been left out of the initial migration or integration.
This isn’t a perfect number of steps to an integration audit, but any good audit should include at least these actions. Skipping one of these steps could create unnecessary work for you down the line. Taking steps out of order may also multiply your workload. For example, if you start by trying to build reports (step 2), you may find that critical data was not migrated, and you’ll have to go back to step 1. If you skip straight to step 3, you may find that you have to go back and correct for missing data twice.
Map the use cases
Both you and the end user should be able to visualise how they intend to use their HubSpot account. But let’s be real, this is difficult, as some of the people in the organisation won’t know what a CRM is or what it can do for them. As the lead implementor, you need to spend time going through their problems and then on a normal, human level, discussing with them how the CRM can be used to their benefit.
To do this, use guided questioning to let them tell you indirectly how to set up the CRM and automations. Here are some questions you could ask them:
By asking these questions, you’ll learn more about what to recreate and/or improve for them in HubSpot. For best results, you should communicate a clear timeline to the client for each of the three steps of the audit. Only go back to the client when you have a clear outline of what you can do, what this will improve, the required steps and the training that you will provide to remove friction. By giving a clear outline and direction of steps and then an outline of consistent training in service going forward, you can limit disruption to them.
The client should be updated on the status of the audit regularly, perhaps in a weekly meeting. Since you cannot complete any step without the client’s feedback, set enough time aside to let the client review your work, ask questions, and suggest changes. Build a strong working relationship with key stakeholders on the client’s team, and make sure you meet with them regularly.F
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Step 1: How to Check for Missing Data
Once phase 1 of your integration is complete, you want to make sure all the building blocks of their CRM have been successfully transferred.
If they are missing key records, objects, properties, or associations, it may be more difficult to transfer these in the future. While you should do your due diligence and check for errors in the migrated and/or integrated data, you should also have your client’s team inspect their account themselves.
They are more likely to catch missing companies, individuals, and properties because they probably use this data in their daily work. Customers who are unengaged during the migration or integration are more likely to be unhappy with the implementation, so it’s up to you to make sure they are actively involved.
Ensure you are scheduling enough time to explain how HubSpot’s objects, records, and properties work, as this will help clients better assess their needs.
In some cases, a user may not be familiar enough with HubSpot yet to perform an audit themselves, so you need to positively help them.
Once you have the CRM up to the stage of first adoption and you have trained the staff on some of the basic processes, you need to back off a little and let the user begin to problem solve, using the system in their own way and coming up with new processes.
For example, in a recent implementation we had a well aligned process in place using HubSpot's sales tools, but what we found was that the sales teams were overwhelmed with the solutions. We stepped back and implemented some more basic solutions and provided training on the different aspects of the tool, namely snippets, that would provide automation and time savings whilst still giving them control. What happened next was that within a week, and with a few questions bouncing back, they had fully implemented a new process using snippets but integrating them with the HubSpot file manager to create a host of processes that, whilst where not what we had planned, had improved their experience and adoption of multiple parts of the platform.
In no particular order, you and the users should independently or jointly evaluate the following elements:
Allow at least a week or two for this first step. If the client seems reluctant to take part in the audit, explain to them why you can’t do this without their input. In all cases, remind them that you’re trying to solve for their success and shield them from downstream pain.
How to assess, recreate, and improve customer reports
Modern organisations are drowning in data. It’s collected everywhere, from global business operations down to the individual’s mobile device. But without context or purpose, data is like sand in the Sahara - plentiful but lifeless. Reports are vital to company success and if your client is storing data in the CRM, they probably need to report on it in some way. In some cases, clients may already know what reports they want to build. In other cases, you may need to make appropriate recommendations for their success. Here are some questions you can ask to determine your client’s reporting needs:
Depending on their answers to these questions, you may need to allocate additional time for building their reporting dashboards.
For example, if the client has not reported on Marketing/Sales in any meaningful way before, you may want to send them some best practice resources to review. If the client relied on reports in their previous CRM, you can use the questions above to learn more about what kind of data they need to visualise. Dig deep into their reporting preferences, and enhance their reporting based on your past experience with other clients.
In some cases, reports involving custom objects cannot be recreated within HubSpot but ensure that you try your best to bend HubSpot into a format you need. In those cases, you could potentially create custom events using the Timeline API, or create data cards in the CRM sidebar using CRM Extensions.
If something isn’t doable, be transparent. Do your best to find a creative solution using HubSpot’s API and inbuilt tools.
Let’s say you’re helping a client recreate a simple deal revenue report, and you see an opportunity to transfer a lot of complex Excel reports into HubSpot with Sales Hub’s ability to report across multiple datasets. By engineering these cross-object reports, you’ll dramatically improve your client’s insight into key metrics. Before delving into your client’s reporting, you should set a clear time frame and cadence for conversations. Allot around two weeks for this task, but feel free to adjust based on your client’s needs. Also, it’s a good idea to clearly document everything the client needs from you for reporting. Share this document with them to avoid any late surprises.
How and why you should perform a delta migration
Performing a delta migration is the last step in the auditing process. A delta migration is a small-scale migration, performed at the end of a migration audit, to transfer any newly modified data that may have been left out of the initial migration.
For example, your migration may have included everything up to 12/01/2019, but let’s say the client continued working in the old CRM system until 12/30/2019 (until the HubSpot account was set up). This gap, or delta, of 29 days’ worth of data could adversely impact the client’s reporting and implementation in HubSpot.
By doing a small delta migration to bring over the remaining data, you will save your client a lot of extra work, and ensure a smoother implementation right from the start. If you choose not to do this, or if the client opts to do this independently, it could introduce sizeable delays into your timeline. Ideally, you should include the delta migration in your initial proposal to your client.
Without clarifying these factors, you risk having to perform more than one delta migration, which would cost all parties additional time and money. After performing the delta migration, be sure to repeat step #1, and check for any missing data once again. Have your users audit their own data again too, one final time. Once both parties are satisfied with the delta migration, you’re all ready to begin.
In conclusion
You should always check your work - that goes as standard - but when doing a full change of a CRM, this is of extra importance. Changing CRM is a difficult time for any organisation, and in a lot of ways, it’s like moving your kids to a different school. For the kids, it’s a hugely disruptive process, they will not like it, you’ll have some temper tantrums and arguments but in the long run, you know it’s going to improve their lives. The importance of auditing and snagging of a CRM is incredibly important, but doing it well and effectively will help to improve the successfulness of your project.