Black Knight moved marketing from Act-On to HubSpot and synced it two ways with Dynamics

The Customer

Black Knight engaged Lynton in October 2021. Their marketing team ran on Act-On, and their sales team lived in Microsoft Dynamics 365 online. Act-On already fed Dynamics, so the two systems shared a set of field mappings that the business depended on. One audience, their MLS group, had its own set of email templates.

The Challenge

Black Knight wanted to move marketing automation onto HubSpot Marketing Hub without breaking the flow of leads into the CRM their sales team used every day. That meant three strands of work at once. The marketing assets and data had to come out of Act-On. The team had to learn HubSpot. And HubSpot had to connect to Dynamics in both directions, carrying the same mappings Act-On had used, so nothing sales relied on changed underneath them.

The Solution

We built the Dynamics integration in phases. Phase one mapped HubSpot contacts to Dynamics leads and synced Dynamics marketing lists to HubSpot lists. Phase two brought Dynamics data back into HubSpot across four objects: accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities. The field mappings were copied from the existing Act-On setup and confirmed by the Black Knight team, so sales saw the same fields they always had.

The integration ran through a sandbox round of user acceptance testing, with the failed cases fixed and retested, and went into production on January 28, 2022. We then confirmed the parameters for the historical sync, shared the schedule with the client, ran the sync and monitored it for errors.

The Act-On migration ran alongside. Phase one moved forms, contacts and lists, custom properties, automated campaigns, landing pages and the non-MLS email templates, with the MLS templates following. Phase two moved the remaining emails, files and email activity, with a partner team taking part of the second round of emails. Lists were recreated in HubSpot with a chosen subset of the custom properties, plus new division, group and product columns so the team could segment the way they wanted to.

Onboarding sessions ran from October 2021 into January 2022: technical setup and settings, HubSpot objects, segmenting contacts, building a lead magnet, the design manager, email training, and automation and optimization. We cleaned up the developer documentation for the support handoff and stayed on for integration support afterward.

What They Got

Black Knight’s marketing team now works in HubSpot with the forms, lists, campaigns, landing pages and email templates they had in Act-On, including the MLS group’s own templates. A new contact in HubSpot becomes a lead in Dynamics, and accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities in Dynamics flow back into HubSpot, so marketing and sales read the same records. Dynamics marketing lists are available as HubSpot lists for segmentation.

The migration, the onboarding and the production integration landed within four months of kickoff.

Wrapping Up

The standard on this job was to carry the client’s existing field mappings into the new integration unchanged, confirm them with the client, and test in a sandbox before anything touched production. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.