OpenWorks moved sales and marketing from Dynamics CRM and Act-On to HubSpot

The Customer

OpenWorks is a commercial cleaning and facility services franchise. Its sales team ran in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and its marketing team ran in Act-On. Sales covered three distinct workstreams: customer sales, franchise and subcontractor, each with its own process and reporting.

The Challenge

OpenWorks wanted sales and marketing on one platform, HubSpot, and it wanted its history to come with it. Its contacts, accounts, opportunities, campaigns, emails and workflows lived across the two old systems.

Their data also had a shape HubSpot doesn’t have out of the box. OpenWorks tracks the buildings it services as records in their own right, and those had to survive the move. A separate Ramco system would later need to match records in the new CRM, so the migration had to leave a hook for it.

Three sales teams meant three sets of pipelines, dashboards and training, all landing inside four months.

The Solution

We ran a full Sales Hub and Marketing Hub implementation with the migration inside it. Cutover from Dynamics CRM to HubSpot happened on April 25, 2022.

For the Act-On side, we moved 4 forms, 36 lists, 28 marketing workflows and 72 emails into the platform, and moved the marketing file library from Dropbox with its folder structure intact. We re-created 81 open Dynamics campaigns as HubSpot campaigns with their contacts associated.

For the CRM side, we built a custom data migration engine. It moved six streams of Dynamics data: leads and contacts to contacts, accounts to companies, opportunities to deal pipelines, engagements, and buildings to a custom “Building” object with the associations between them. The engine ran repeatedly in the weeks before cutover, so the new CRM stayed current while the sales teams kept working in the old one, with two re-syncs after cutover to catch anything that changed late. The migration plan also called for a unique-code property on the records so a future HubSpot to Ramco integration could match them. The Ramco integration itself was consulting support in this engagement. We also mapped the lead flow and ran two Q&A sessions with the client’s PowerBI team.

In Sales Hub we configured the pipelines, a lead assignment pipeline, sales workflows, playbooks and calculated fields, and two sample sequences. Each of the three sales teams got its own reporting workshop and dashboard. In Marketing Hub we ran a lead scoring workshop, built two sample workflows (a drip nurture and a lifecycle upgrade), documented attribution reporting and built the marketing dashboard. Users, roles and teams came from a permissioning strategy, and process alignment meetings replaced the old Dynamics processes with HubSpot ones.

Training was a mix of pre-recorded and live sessions: HubSpot objects, prospecting, a sales flow session for each of the three workstreams, and marketing sessions on lead magnets, segmentation, social and ads, and templates. An expansion added six more workflows and three further meetings.

What They Got

OpenWorks’ three sales teams and its marketing team now work in one system. The contacts, companies, deals, buildings and open campaigns from Dynamics are there, along with the forms, lists, workflows and emails from Act-On. Each sales team has a dashboard built around its own workstream, and marketing has attribution reporting and its own dashboard.

The custom Building object means the buildings OpenWorks services are first-class records in the CRM.

Wrapping Up

Our standard on a CRM migration is to keep the history, keep the associations between records, and run the migration engine until the day of cutover so nobody loses a week of work. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.