StoryBrand consolidated Keap, Pipedrive and Zendesk into one HubSpot portal

The Customer

StoryBrand teaches a marketing framework and certifies the Guides and coaches who apply it for clients. Much of what it sells is certification, and a good deal of that can be sold on a payment plan, so the company’s customer records are also its revenue records.

When StoryBrand came to us in August 2021, its business ran across three systems. Keap (then Infusionsoft) held the marketing contacts and the tags that recorded what each person had done. Pipedrive held the sales side: deals, organizations, products, activities and the email history behind them. Zendesk held support, with its tickets, canned macros and a library of FAQs.

The Challenge

Each system knew a different slice of the same customer. A Guide who had bought a certification, asked a support question and been in a sales conversation existed three times, under three records, with no view that joined them.

The tags were the hard part. Over the years StoryBrand had built up a large tag library in Keap, and those tags were how the company knew what a contact had done. Moving the contacts without their history would have left the marketing team starting over.

StoryBrand also wanted to calculate commissions for certified Guides and coaches from payment data inside the CRM, which it had been told would need custom development. It needed the consolidation done without losing deal history, open tickets or ticket attachments, and it needed its team trained on the new platform as it arrived.

The Solution

We moved all three systems into one HubSpot portal and onboarded the team on marketing and sales.

From Keap, we migrated the contacts with their properties created and mapped automatically, carried extra phone numbers into custom properties, and brought secondary email addresses across through the platform’s secondary email API. The roughly 500 tags StoryBrand selected became custom behavioral events, so a contact’s tag history survived as events on the record. We migrated the email program from Keap in two parts.

From Pipedrive, we migrated contacts, organizations as companies, deals with their pipelines and stages, activities and emails as engagements, products and custom fields, with associations created automatically between every object type. We ran a full dry run before the production migration.

From Zendesk, we migrated contacts and tickets into Service Hub with their replies, notes and attachments. Zendesk macros became snippets, and the FAQ library became a knowledge base.

Matching one person across three systems needed a rule. Keap was set as the system of record for a contact’s primary email. Where a Pipedrive contact’s primary email was a secondary email in Keap, we matched it to the same contact on that secondary address, so the person stayed one record with the primary email they had always used. We also built recovery handling for contact records that failed to create because of invalid email addresses.

Alongside the migration we integrated Protagonist with the portal: credentials validated, the integration architecture stood up, field mapping with formulas, testing, UAT revisions and a historical sync, then handoff to support.

Onboarding ran in parallel. We held a lead scoring workshop and working sessions for the marketing and sales setup, recorded trainings on CRM objects, building a lead magnet, customer success management and a day in the life of a salesperson on the platform, set up two sample forms and a leads dashboard, and ran a reporting session. For the commission question, we confirmed the approach and the data requirements for calculated properties fed by payment data, and we met with the HubSpot product team on StoryBrand’s behalf.

Migration audits and an internal handoff preceded the launch. The migration went into production on May 9, 2022.

What They Got

StoryBrand’s team now works from one record per customer. A Guide’s certification purchase, support tickets and sales conversations sit on the same contact, with the behavioral history that used to live as Keap tags preserved as events the marketing team can segment and automate on. Support answers from the old macros are a keystroke away as snippets, the FAQs live in a searchable knowledge base, and the sales team has its pipelines, deals and a leads dashboard in the same place.

Wrapping Up

Our standard on a consolidation is that every record arrives with its history and its relationships intact, that the matching rule between systems is written down before a single contact moves, and that every failed record is caught and recovered. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.