Okay, so you've just acquired one or more HubSpot Hubs for your business. Now, you want to start using the tools available to you. There's just one problem: you already have a cornucopia of other standalone solutions that you were using and now you need to integrate HubSpot into your existing tech stack.
The question is: how can you accomplish this? Adding a solution as robust as HubSpot can be a major challenge since it covers a wide spectrum of marketing, sales, service, and content management tools that you can mix and match.
Unlock the full potential of your marketing and sales efforts by mastering the art of integrating HubSpot with your current technologies.
Assess Your Current Tech Stack Before Integrating HubSpot
Before you jump into the digital embrace of HubSpot, let's play a bit of technology matchmaker. To ensure a harmonious integration, you should:
- Identify all the tools and platforms you currently use. A detailed list of your existing tech stack and tools is necessary for a smooth integration of (or migration to) HubSpot.
- Assess whether these tools play well with HubSpot. Are there already integration apps and tools for your current tech stack in HubSpot? These resources could help make the transition faster and easier.
- Determine if any customizations are needed to maintain smooth operation. Do your business processes require custom properties or objects not found in the default HubSpot properties? You might want to set up custom objects and properties in HubSpot before completing the integration/migration.
- Evaluate the scalability of your current stack compared to HubSpot’s capabilities. HubSpot offers numerous automation tools to make your business processes more scalable than ever. But, it's always a good idea to verify how the migration will affect the scalability of your processes.
- Document all processes that will be affected to anticipate changes post-migration. Having documentation makes it easier to adapt HubSpot to your business's needs and helps you avoid creating gaps in important business processes.
Planning Your Data Migration Strategy for HubSpot
Now, let's map out your data love story with HubSpot. Follow these steps to a tee:
- Gather all stakeholders for a kickoff meeting to discuss goals and expectations. One of the biggest challenges to integrating any new technology is overcoming resistance to change. Part of this is organizing a meeting with key stakeholders in your organization and highlighting the reasons for the change and how it can help them. Additionally, this meeting is an opportunity to gather feedback about how you can integrate the new technology.
- Define the scope of data to be migrated and categorize it accordingly. How much data are you moving into HubSpot and how is data defined? It's important to define the scope of your migration/integration before starting it to ensure you have an accurate estimate of what needs to be moved and how long the process may take.
- Choose a migration method – DIY with HubSpot’s import tool or hire data migration experts. HubSpot offers integrations with popular solutions like Salesforce, Shopify, and NetSuite. Using the integration apps and tools built into HubSpot can allow you to DIY the integration process. Alternatively, you can opt to hire a data migration/integration team to oversee your move to the HubSpot platform.
- Set a realistic timeline with milestones to keep the process on track. Integrating or migrating data from your current tech stack to HubSpot takes time. Not just for setting up the movement of data, but also for testing the migration/integration and troubleshooting any issues that may arise. When creating your migration/integration roadmap, be sure to include enough time to cover the basic process as well as time for testing and reworking your integration.
- Perform a 'test migration' to ensure everything transfers correctly before the full move. If you have a HubSpot Enterprise subscription, you can create a sandbox account where you can test your integration or migration before taking it live. This helps you troubleshoot any issues with the migration/integration in a safe environment where it won't affect your business.
- Have a backup plan in case of disaster. Before conducting the migration, be sure to create a backup of all important data you need to keep. Consider exporting data to a table or some other easy-to-retrieve format in case your primary data source is compromised.
Customizing HubSpot to Fit Your Business Needs
HubSpot is an incredibly flexible platform for businesses of all sizes and industries. From choosing different Hub subscriptions to creating custom objects and properties, acquiring additional seats, and purchasing other add-ons as needed, there are numerous ways to customize your HubSpot portal.
To make HubSpot integrate more smoothly with your existing tech stack, here are some important customizations to make:
- Dive into custom objects to store unique business data. HubSpot's standard objects cover a variety of needs, but some businesses may use special object types not covered by these defaults. So, this is where creating custom objects in HubSpot becomes important. These objects allow you to go beyond the basic object types offered by HubSpot to capture and store information that wouldn't fit neatly into standard objects. Note: this requires an Enterprise HubSpot subscription.
- Utilize custom properties to track data that's specific to your operations. In addition to custom objects, you can also create and edit new property types in HubSpot. This allows you to customize the information you track and store unique information for your business. Also, unlike custom objects, custom properties are available to all HubSpot subscription types (though you're limited to 1,000 custom properties per object in HubSpot).
- Implement custom pipelines to reflect your actual sales process instead of a "cookie-cutter" version. The default HubSpot deals pipeline is valid for a general deal setup, but can't account for all of the unique interactions businesses in different industries may have—or the differences that individual departments in a single business might have. Setting up custom deal pipelines to reflect your deal process as closely as possible is key for ensuring you smoothly integrate HubSpot with your processes.
These customizations help you ensure that your HubSpot integration provides the maximum possible ROI for your business.
Ensuring Data Integrity and Compliance During Migration
Protecting your data during migration is a critical step of the process. If your data is compromised or lost, it could have a massive impact on your business.
How costly? According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach event in 2023 was $4.45 million. Meanwhile, Invenioit estimates that a data loss event can cost "anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $15 million, depending on the volume of data."
These costs cover a range of expenses, like data breach remediation, loss of business opportunities, disruptions in company operations caused by data loss, etc.
So, protecting your data from illicit access or loss during the migration/integration process is important. Here are a few tips for safely migrating or integrating a new solution with your existing tech stack:
- Scrub and clean your data before the move to avoid importing outdated or duplicate records. Managing duplicate data is important in HubSpot. Duplicated data can lead to errors in workflows or other issues. Additionally, migrating duplicate data means migrating a larger, more unwieldy data file. To reduce errors and expenses, deduplicating data is a must before migration/integration.
- Map data fields accurately between your old system and HubSpot to maintain data structure. To ensure that every piece of data you're moving into HubSpot transfers smoothly, map out the data fields as comprehensively as possible. The closer you can get to a 1:1 mapping of your data, the better. This is where creating custom objects and properties ahead of the migration can help.
- Regularly back up your data because it’s always better to be safe than sorry. I know I said it earlier in this post, but be sure to create a comprehensive remote data backup of all your data before attempting a migration/integration. This can be especially important if you're setting up a two-way integration where data in either tool can overwrite the other!
- Research and stay compliant with data protection laws. When operating any business, it's important to understand the different data protection regulations that may govern how you can gather, store, and manage customer information. Take the time to review data privacy guides (like this one from White & Case) and consult with an attorney specializing in data protection regulations to review the guidelines affecting your business and how to comply with them.
- Employ data encryption and other standard cybersecurity tools. Data encryption for data-in-flight and data-at-rest (i.e., data being transmitted and data in storage) is a basic precaution to prevent illicit data access during data migration/integration. Thankfully, HubSpot offers security tools that can help you protect your data from illicit access—such as data encryption and access management resources.
- Assign role-based access privileges to your HubSpot portal. Who needs access to what data? Restrict access to your HubSpot portal and customer data on an "as needed" basis to limit the risk of illicit data access.
These are just a few basic guidelines to help you protect your data.
Maximizing the Value of HubSpot with Continuous Optimization
The journey doesn’t end with migration or integration—that's just the beginning. As your business continues to grow, you may find yourself needing to adapt your use of HubSpot to support the increasing scale of your business.
To keep your HubSpot engine purring:
- Regularly review how your teams use HubSpot. Try to collect feedback from them about the tools they use. Is there a specific issue they're having that is addressed by a HubSpot feature that they aren't leveraging? Train your team how to use the feature so they can get more done.
- Review and revise active workflows in HubSpot. HubSpot workflows can help you automate your customer outreach, but some workflows might get a little stale after a year or two. If you have workflows in place for several years, review them and make changes as needed to adapt them to your current business processes and brand voice.
- Analyze the performance of your HubSpot tools and make data-driven decisions to refine your strategies. One of HubSpot's core strengths is the depth of the reporting tools available on the platform. Be sure to set up dashboards and reports that help you see how your HubSpot tools are performing so you can make adjustments as needed.
- Stay updated with HubSpot’s latest features and train your team to use them effectively. The HubSpot team is constantly iterating on their products and features to make the platform as valuable as possible. This means new integrations, features, and even Hubs may come out before you know it. So, be sure to subscribe to HubSpot's product updates to keep track of all of the new features and tools that HubSpot offers so you can integrate them into your business!
Embrace the spirit of continuous improvement, and you'll find that HubSpot can become an even more powerful asset over time.
Need Help Migrating to HubSpot?
Here at Bluleadz, we're proud to be a long-standing HubSpot partner agency with over a decade of experience with the platform. So, if you need help migrating from your current tech stack to HubSpot or integrating HubSpot with your current tools, please schedule a meeting with our integration and migration experts!
We look forward to hearing from you about how you used HubSpot to transform the way to market, service, and sell to your customers!