CRM implementation and CRM consultants in Australia

Rebuilding the old mess in a new tool. A team decides the old CRM is the problem, buys a new one, and migrates every field, every pipeline and every bad habit across. Within a month the new CRM has the same duplicates, the same stages nobody uses and the same reports nobody believes. Only now it cost a licence and a project to get there.

It happens for a sensible reason. Moving everything feels safe. Nobody wants to be the person who left a field behind that turned out to matter, so the migration becomes a copy, and the project that was meant to fix the CRM moves it instead.

When we scope a migration, most of what people ask to bring across turns out to be unnecessary. Trav White, who started Neighbourhood in 2015, puts it to clients like this: Nine times out of ten, it’s like we don’t need that. It doesn’t make sense for us to bring that over.

We see the result in portals we are asked to fix. At Chief Executive Women, legacy Salesforce properties were still sitting on member records next to thousands of duplicate contacts, and membership numbers were estimates. At Gro Clinics, a booking integration was creating up to 270 deals a week, many of them duplicates. Both were fixed by deciding what to throw away first, then rebuilding on what was left.

Every field, stage, workflow and report gets one of three answers before anything is imported: keep it, fix it, or leave it behind. You sign off the list. The default for anything nobody can explain is leave it behind, with the old data kept in an export you can go back to.

Move the simple, clean data first

We often run the migration in two passes. The first brings across the records and fields the team needs to work from the first week. The second comes later, once the team has used the CRM: we go back to the archive and bring in anything they have actually asked for. Most of it never gets asked for.

Build the pipeline fresh

Where the old pipeline is the problem, we build a new one from scratch and migrate only the deals that are clean and still live, rather than renaming the old stages. Field by field, the steps are in the CRM data migration and field mapping checklist.

Five phases, whether this is your first CRM or a move from another one. A first CRM off spreadsheets usually takes four to six weeks. A migration from another CRM with integrations takes eight to twelve.

The written walkthrough is the CRM implementation process in 10 steps. The HubSpot specifics, week by week, are on HubSpot implementation and onboarding.

A CRM migration is moving your records, and the history attached to them, from one system into another. The import itself takes hours. The weeks go on deciding what to bring and cleaning it first. Four things set the length:

• How many sources. One spreadsheet is a day of mapping. An old CRM, a marketing tool and three personal spreadsheets is a week.
• How much history you need. Notes, emails and closed deals take longer to map than contacts and companies. Decide what history someone will actually look up.
• How dirty the data is. Duplicates, free text where there should be a dropdown, and dates in four formats all have to be fixed before the import.
• Custom records. Properties, policies, sites or bookings that are not contacts, companies or deals need their own objects in HubSpot, designed before anything moves.

Moving from Salesforce has its own trade-offs. We compare the two for mid-sized teams in HubSpot vs Salesforce for 60 to 200 people.

We implement HubSpot, and we know it well enough to say where it fits a business and where it does not.

HubSpot’s own overview of its CRM lists what each hub adds.

Our CRM implementations start from about $7,000, plus the HubSpot licence. That covers a first CRM or a simple move, set up over four to six weeks. A migration from another CRM with integrations is priced once we have seen a sample export, because the state of the data decides the number.

For context, on our reading of published Australian partner pricing, a partner-led HubSpot setup runs from about $8,000 to $15,000 for a clean single-hub setup, and $15,000 to $35,000 when there is a real migration and two or three integrations. The licence is extra, on HubSpot’s CRM pricing page.

Leaving things behind is also the cheapest decision in the project. Every field that does not move is a field nobody maps, cleans, tests or trains on. Our guides break the numbers down: how CRM setup pricing works, and what a HubSpot build costs a 100 person business.

Most CRMs that fail were set up fine and never used. After the old mess, three patterns cover most of the rest:

• The stages do not match how the team sells. Deals pile up in the first stage or get renamed to fit. At one B2B hardware company we worked with, 120-odd leads sat in New. After we cleaned up the board with them, four were left.
• Every record asks for fields nobody fills in. So people drift back to the spreadsheet they know.
• Everyone moves on the same day. Every small problem lands on one admin in the same week. Two champions per team, testing first, catch most of them.

That is why we count a CRM done when the team uses it. Read what a bad CRM implementation costs a growing business, the CRM problems that only show up months later and a 90-day CRM adoption plan for small teams.

Moving customer records means moving personal information between systems, which the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles govern. APP 11 makes keeping that information secure your job, including while an export sits in someone’s downloads folder. APP 8 covers sending it overseas, which is worth checking before anyone hands an offshore team a copy of your database.

Consent moves too. Under the Spam Act, you need consent to send marketing email, so a migration should carry each contact’s consent status and unsubscribes across with the record. Importing a list without them is how a business emails people who asked it to stop.

In practice: dead records stay behind, so they never move. HubSpot can host your data in its Sydney data centre, which its data hosting FAQ covers. Our trust centre sets out where your data lives while we work on it.

Guides from the team on choosing, setting up and moving to a CRM.