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The situation: Following multiple strategic acquisitions, VC3 wanted to standardize the process of integrating the HubSpot portals of newly acquired companies. The goal was to accelerate post-acquisition integration and drive user adoption of VC3’s Enterprise HubSpot CRM platform.
With critical operational changes to deploy, VC3 decided to enlist outside expertise for effective HubSpot portal consolidation.
How Bayard Bradford helped VC3 integrate five different organizations into one.
- HubSpot multi-portal consolidation
- HubSpot management & administration
- Ongoing strategic & technical consulting
“A lot of companies claim they’re ‘experts’. But often, they’re less up to speed on HubSpot specifically. That’s not the case here. Bayard Bradford are true HubSpot experts. They want to know everything context-wise to figure out how to make HubSpot as successful as it can be for partners.”
— Courtney Casey
Director, Marketing Operations
ABOUT VC3
VC3 is a managed IT and cybersecurity services provider serving municipalities, financial services organizations, and businesses throughout North America. Organizations come to VC3 for help navigating the technology journey, and to get the expertise they need to manage cyber risks and IT infrastructure.
Over 1,100 municipalities and 700 businesses rely on VC3's cybersecurity expertise, sector-specific focus, ability to grow with their clients, and relentless automation to manage, protect, and accelerate their organization's technology.
VC3 can become your IT department, work alongside your internal IT team to make them more successful, or help you with specialized needs such as cloud hosting, data backup, or application development.
GOALS & CHALLENGES
Maintaining sales productivity after integrating multiple acquisitions
Key Goal: Obtain historical reporting data for each newly-acquired company.
How do you unify and optimize multiple HubSpot CRM portals - to boost sales productivity across five newly-merged teams - without hitting ‘pause’ on the day-to-day of servicing long-standing client relationships?
VC3 had already merged with another company years prior. By the time VC3 reached out to Bayard Bradford, they’d racked up four further acquisitions, three of which came with their own HubSpot portals.
Challenges included:
- a lack of standard operating procedures
- redundant or broken automation
- unattended data sources
- plus account, contact and data duplicates.
With clear and urgent growth objectives, HubSpot had to play a central role. Switching to a new platform just wasn’t on the table or even desirable.
As a close-knit team of dedicated specialists continually servicing deep-rooted client relationships, the VC3 team needed to stay light and responsive. Pausing the day-to-day to figure out a multi-account HubSpot merger just wasn’t an option.
“We wanted to have all that historical data”
“We just didn’t know how we were going to merge so many HubSpot portals using our own capabilities under such time restraints. How do we do that? That’s why we started looking.
Our goal was to access historical reporting data for each of the acquired companies. We could have simply chosen not to pull the data, but we knew it was there and wanted to empower Sales & Marketing teams to work out of the same HubSpot instance and gain richer insight.”
— Courtney Casey
Director, Marketing Operations
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
HubSpot data hygiene & technical debt
After over two years without the right workflows in place, VC3’s HubSpot CRM had accumulated significant data hygiene issues as well as technical debt that would challenge their productivity and business intelligence in pursuit of further growth.
Jargon buster
- HubSpot data hygiene: When CRM data is gathered from multiple sources, maintaining data uniformity becomes tough without having to place annoying restrictions on how teams collect and log records.
Without continual CRM maintenance, prospect and customer records become outdated and inaccurate, leading to poor sales insight that put holes in revenue. - HubSpot Technical debt: is a problem cost that arises from a cluster of housekeeping issues that accumulate such as: a lack of standard operating procedures, redundant or broken automation, unattended data sources, plus account, contact and data duplicates.
Maintaining low technical debt across your techstack correlates directly to higher performance and revenue.
Concerned about potential data hygiene issues
and technical debt lurking in your CRM?
THE GROUNDWORK
How Bayard Bradford approached a 4-way HubSpot CRM portal consolidation
The requirements assessment brought together stakeholders from Sales, Marketing and Customer Success. Those three business functions are seamlessly supported in the HubSpot CRM, so the consolidated HubSpot portal would need configuring and customization to reflect those business processes.
Key objectives
The requirements assessment identified VC3’s transformational objectives:
- Integrate four newly-acquired business entities into a single CRM
- Create standardized processes with enough flex to allow each unique element of each business to be captured while providing consolidated reporting across all businesses
- Ensure that the Enterprise HubSpot CRM platform was implemented and customized to address accumulated technical debt and resolve data hygiene issues.
Bayard Bradford worked closely with VC3 leadership to define short and long-term outcomes and a roadmap for addressing data, reporting, and adoption issues.
The plan: test, deploy, train and scale
To achieve these objectives, we selected a central business unit for developing an approach that would later be scaled into remaining business units.
Into that business unit - that acted as a central benchmark - we first implemented a fresh HubSpot CRM instance to create a baseline for testing new, standardized processes with clean data and reporting.
Eventually, the remaining three business units could be blended into the newly-established core processes created for the central HubSpot CRM instances.
Process mapping
Each of the additional business units needed to have existing processes mapped against newly-designed processes prior to being merged.
All associated data and supporting documentation, per business unit, were first clearly defined and cleansed in advance of the final enterprise HubSpot platform consolidation.
Training and change management
We provided each business unit the HubSpot CRM training they’d need to ensure user adoption. Our implementation team tailored the training according to specific knowledge gaps at each business unit..
All training was recorded and documentation provided on a HubSpot dashboard to facilitate practical independence day-to-day as the newly combined VC3 team populated the new HubSpot portal.
The icing on the cake was in enabling future acquisitions to integrate quickly by following the same benchmark processes in order to preserve the consolidated reporting and process management.
OUTCOMES & SUCCESS INDICATORS
What were the results? And how did VC3 know the work was successful?
After HubSpot reimplementation in the initial business unit, VC3 reported adoption from 100% of sales personnel who converted seamlessly to the new platform at Go-Live.
- Zero reported errors at Go-Live
- Streamlined marketing-to-sales handoff
- Improved sales lead response times
Besides a flawless Go-Live phase, we were encouraged about the proven success of the project when VC3’s executive team approved finally archiving the legacy platform. In projects such as this one, this is always a high-conviction indicator of satisfaction.
“Every HubSpot instance is different, each user is different, integrations are different. We’ve learned a lot together and there was zero noise from anybody in the business after all the portal migrations. That’s how we know it was a total success.”
— Courtney Casey
Director, Marketing Operations
TODAY
Continuing the partnership
After the reimplementation of the base HubSpot portal, VC3 retained Bayard Bradford for HubSpot technical services and consulting. VC3 plans to add multiple companies per year. Bayard Bradford will support the VC3 team in managing these processes.
This engagement includes:
- Promptly addressing and resolving support tickets
- Regular meetings with technical and business leaders
- Ongoing strategic and technical guidance and consulting
In these ways, Bayard Bradford can help VC3 keep tactics responsive to evolving scenarios while continually keeping all HubSpot portals pulling together optimally and flexibly in a single direction.
Underpinning all of this is the ongoing work we’re engaged in with each of the four newly acquired business units aimed at maintaining consolidation into the central HubSpot CRM on a project basis - all with scope for integrating around multiple new planned acquisitions per year.
THE VERDICT FROM VC3
How does VC3 rate their experience with Bayard Bradford?
Following the multi-portal HubSpot consolidation, VC3 reported having succeeded in meeting growth objectives across all business units involved in the merger.
“On the ‘ongoing support’ agreement side of things, it’s been super helpful for giving our team back some precious time. We have a higher headcount now, but managing the HubSpot day-to-day just doesn’t fit on anyone’s plate - so we’re glad to hand over to capable experts that truly are an extension of our team.”
— Courtney Casey
Director, Marketing Operations
WRAP UP
Looking to the future: how is VC3 doing now?
After successfully migrating and implementing a total of six companies into the centrally-positioned HubSpot CRM portal, we’re now moving onto a seventh that’s nearing completion.
Since the initial project, VC3 has acquired two more companies currently being rolled into HubSpot. They’ve also grown rapidly from 250 to 600 employees in the last 12 months and increased their top line.
Thanks to the outcomes achieved, high user adoption of HubSpot, plus the utility of newly-established processes, VC3 has fully committed to utilizing HubSpot as they continue to acquire multiple additional businesses per year for the foreseeable future.