Heartland Dental moved a million-plus Dynamics leads into HubSpot with a custom sync

The Customer

Heartland Dental is a dental support organization. Its lead and contact data lived in Microsoft Dynamics, and the company was moving its marketing onto HubSpot.

Heartland planned to retire the Lead object in Dynamics. That meant the leads it held there, more than a million of them, needed a path into HubSpot as contacts, and the reports and dashboards built on them needed to carry across.

The Challenge

A million-plus leads is more than a one-off import can handle safely. Heartland needed the move to happen in a controlled way, with the sync logic tested against real cases before anything touched production.

Not every record had an email address. HubSpot normally keys contacts on email, so the sync had to work for records that would otherwise be dropped.

The reporting Heartland relied on in Dynamics depended on fields that had to exist, and be populated, in the new platform before anyone could rebuild a dashboard.

The Solution

We built a custom integration between Dynamics and HubSpot covering contacts, engagements and deals. A set of field maps carries the data across. Two of them handle the lead transition: one maps Dynamics leads to HubSpot contacts, and one maps lead activity to engagements, each built in two parts.

At Heartland’s request we restructured the sync logic and mappings so contacts sync without an email address. We also restructured the Lead object and created the new fields Heartland needed to support retiring leads in Dynamics.

We installed Lynton Logger for sync monitoring, so every record that moved could be traced and any failure seen.

Heartland tested the integration in a sandbox across several UAT rounds. We ran reporting and dashboard discovery sessions to confirm the fields their reports needed, removed mapped fields they decided against, and then moved the integration from sandbox to production in November 2021.

After go-live we ran the one-time load of Dynamics leads into HubSpot contacts, then a historical sync with parameters Heartland approved, monitored through to completion in February 2022. The integration was then handed to our support team.

What They Got

Heartland can retire its Dynamics Lead object with its leads living on as contacts in their CRM, including the ones with no email address. Contacts, engagements and deals stay in step between the two systems, and the fields their reports depend on are in place. If a record fails to sync, the log shows which one and why.

Wrapping Up

Our standard for a migration of this size is a tested sync in a sandbox first, a historical load with parameters the client approves, and monitoring on every record, so nothing moves that cannot be traced. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.