While we consult with hundreds of clients about finding the right tech for their business, we’d like to share an inside view of how we fit the right tech for our business.
We recently completed a major CRM transformation, migrating sales users across our business units to HubSpot Sales Hub Professional. Here’s how we did it, what challenges we tackled, and where we’re headed next.
Here at New Era, we have a dynamic global sales organization with over 150 sales users focused on this migration ranging from account executives and sales engineers to sales support roles. And over time, as our teams grew and evolved, so did our need for a unified and scalable CRM solution.
Accelerated Growth Can Cause Duplicated Efforts and Disconnected Tools
Like many businesses that experience challenges from rapid growth, our teams were operating in silos—each business unit used different CRM platforms and processes. This led to:
- Redundant effort: Teams were recreating the same opportunities across different pipelines leading to measuring only team-specific performance. Sound familiar?
- Reporting headaches: To obtain a company-wide sales report meant digging through countless spreadsheets saved in different folders, with inconsistent access permissions. We hear this all too often with our clients.
- Platform limitations: While we did have a CRM, ConnectWise, it lacked critical CRM features. Sales users couldn’t track outreach activity, integrate their emails, or utilize enrichment tools. More problematic, ConnectWise wasn’t built for sales operations— so we were stretching it to fill a CRM role it wasn’t designed for.
We Knew it was Time to Make the Switch to HubSpot
It was clear we needed a true CRM—one that was customizable, scalable, and integrated easily across teams. We found HubSpot to be the right fit, for several reasons:
- Our marketing team is already using HubSpot Marketing Enterprise, and inside sales were familiar with Sales Hub for prospect outreach.
- HubSpot is made for aligning marketing and sales. We knew it could streamline processes and improve visibility.
- HubSpot offers robust customization and reporting we need. For example, we moved from using scattered checkboxes to a single dropdown field using HubSpot’s native “Deal Type” for better categorization and reporting across revenue streams. And we saw that, as just the beginning!
- Our sales users finally had a CRM where they could log activities and more effectively collaborate, and cross-sell, across our different business units.
How Did We Make the Switch? Very Quickly
Our digital practice that supports our clients in HubSpot implementations and onboardings handled our configuration and deployment. They are a team of certified HubSpot consultants with deep knowledge of the platform. Many CRM transitions at this size can take 6 months to a year plus, but with the HubSpot platform and our strategic planning, the switch was in just 2 months!
Here’s a few tricks we did:
- Onboarding kicked off mid-May, starting with training key stakeholders and collecting user feedback to tailor the platform. We identified opportunities to unify with a keep-it-simple approach. This is a crucial step in configuring the platform that other HubSpot vendors sometimes miss.
- A pilot group of 15–20 users participated in a soft launch in early July, allowing us to test and fine-tune the system before scaling. Again, the test and learn approach is key to success, especially with varying processes and bringing different business groups together.
- We further tailored the platform, as we built custom dashboards, configured permissions, set up pipelines, and collaborated with a third-party vendor to integrate HubSpot with ConnectWise.
- The official go-live for all 150 users was Monday, August 11.
And the results are…
While we have just gone live, the early feedback is promising:
- User experience is vastly improved: Sales reps now start their day with a personalized dashboard.
- Fewer spreadsheets, more insights: Centralized reporting means less time hunting for data and more time using it.
- Streamlined processes: Activity tracking, pipeline visibility, and cross-team collaboration are already smoother.
Our here is what our sales team is saying about the switch:
Transitioning to HubSpot has been very smooth and I feel that it will streamline our workflows. The intuitive interface and features have made it easy to adapt quickly. I look forward to seeing productivity gains with so many “at a glance” features through the dashboard. - Laura Justham, New Era Account Executive
So what’s next?
HubSpot isn’t just a new CRM for us, it’s the foundation for a more connected, data-driven, and collaborative sales organization. And while we’re just getting started, here’s what we are planning for:
- Next wave of migration: We’ll onboard additional sales teams currently using Salesforce and Dynamics.
- CPQ integration: We're exploring Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tools that integrate with HubSpot to bring quoting functionality into one platform.
By aligning our people, processes, and platforms, we're setting the stage for smarter growth and better results.
If you are considering HubSpot for your marketing and sales organization, we’d like to connect. We will be at HubSpot’s conference: INBOUND Sept 3-5 in San Franscisco.
