Derive Technologies moved from Microsoft Dynamics to HubSpot CRM in five months
The Customer
Derive Technologies ran its sales on Microsoft Dynamics, with Microsoft Teams connected to it. In May 2024 they began moving their CRM to HubSpot and to bring their sales team, including a team of SDRs, and their marketing team onto Sales Hub Professional and Marketing Hub Professional. Lynton handled the data migration and the onboarding together.
The Challenge
A CRM move has two jobs. The records have to arrive complete and correctly mapped, and the people who use them have to keep selling while it happens.
The two systems store data differently. Each object and field in the old CRM needed a home on the new platform, including custom objects with no standard counterpart. Records would keep changing in the old system during the move, so any record that changed after the first copy had to follow it across.
Their Teams integration had to carry over too, with each user’s Teams account connected to the new platform.
The Solution
We started with an audit of the old CRM’s data: which objects had a counterpart on the new platform, how many records each held, the fields and properties on each, whether those fields were compatible with the platform’s property types, and account defaults such as currencies and date formats. From the audit we built the field and object map, reviewed it with Derive, and validated the set-up with them before the historical sync. Derive signed off the custom object mapping separately.
We configured HubSpot’s Data Sync migration tool against that map, added filters so only the agreed records came across, and ran the historical sync on July 16, 2024. Objects and property values the tool doesn’t carry were exported from the old CRM, cleaned and imported by hand. Clean-up workflows, custom property groups and record layouts tidied the data as it landed. Derive approved the clean-up plan, and we QA’d the workflows before turning them on.
For Teams, we wrote a migration strategy. Derive exported a Teams mapping with accounts and connected each user’s Teams account to the platform, and we reconciled the two.
The old CRM stayed in use after the first pass. A delta migration on September 27 brought across every record that had changed since July, and we QA’d it through early October. Derive ran its own acceptance testing on the migrated data, and we worked through their feedback.
Alongside the migration we ran the Sales Hub onboarding: a goals and process discovery session, six sales process working sessions including one with the SDR team, a sales process workbook, a users and permissions workbook with a walkthrough video, the sales pipeline, reports and dashboards, and documentation covering lead management, prospecting, pipelines and automations. We reviewed an Apollo demo and gave a recommendation on prospecting. For marketing, we ran working sessions on settings and objects, segmentation and data import.
Training came in September: a HubSpot 101 session, a Sales Tools session and a Q&A. We supported acceptance testing after that and held the offboarding call in early October.
What They Got
Derive’s sales and marketing teams now work from one CRM, with their Dynamics history in it and the records that changed during the move carried across. Their Teams accounts are connected to the new platform. Their reps have a documented sales process, a pipeline built around it, dashboards to report on it, and training on the tools they use every day.
Wrapping Up
Our standard on a CRM migration is to audit before mapping, map before moving, and move in two passes, so the team keeps selling until the day of cutover and every record changed in between follows. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.