HubSpot and Salesforce: How to Integrate and When to Migrate

Casey Peddicord (00:14)
Hey everybody, welcome to today's SmartBug on tap, HubSpot and Salesforce. We're talk about how to integrate, when to integrate and what that looks like. I'm Casey Peddicord, I'm the Senior Director of Channel Sales here at SmartBug. And over the years, I have helped dozens, if not hundreds of companies optimize their revenue tech stacks and make confident data-driven decisions about their sales and marketing platforms. If your company is juggling both HubSpot and Salesforce, or you're thinking about whether to double down on one or the other,

Yeah, absolutely. It can be tough to know which is the right move. And so that's why I'm really excited about today's conversation. We're going to cover when integration is the right approach, when a full migration makes sense and how to avoid the common traps that can slow down your growth.

Today I'm really excited. I'm joined by Alex Basillion, a powerhouse in the HubSpot solution architecture ecosystem with a deep experience scaling, go to market systems and aligning technology to business outcomes. Real quick, you'll probably hear me refer to him as Biz. At SmartBug, we have several Alex's and so we call Alex B Biz. So if you hear me say Biz, that's who I'm talking about. Biz, great to have you. You want to introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about you.

Alex Bisaillon (01:21)
Hi Casey everyone, my name is Alex, I'm from Montreal, Canada. I've been around the EDSPOT ecosystem for more than 10 years, so I'm super happy to be here today and talk about integration, is something I like to do a lot during my day-to-day job.

Casey Peddicord (01:33)
Perfect. Man, it's so good to have you. And a wealth of knowledge around Salesforce cost me and you have done so many Salesforce migrations and integrations over the years. It's hard to count actually. We've done so many of those, but let's kick it into high gear. So I think about integrations first, like making the most of both. You what are the common reasons that you feel like companies integrate HubSpot with Salesforce rather than going like, Hey, I'm going to go all in on HubSpot or all in on Salesforce.

Alex Bisaillon (02:00)
If we look at the scenario when we want to make making both the better world lights is mostly to answer one question marketing attribution reporting. So most of people during their setup they're going to have HubSpot as their marketing tool and Salesforce as their sales tool and their marketing team needs to be able to tag along and see how effective their campaigns are.

So by syncing both systems altogether, like this is where you kind of create a magic because you're able to see how the end-ups happen, what's happening in Salesforce site and how after that you can report on those, I'll say hours spent or budget spent versus the dollar that you created for your business.

Casey Peddicord (02:37)
Yeah, that's so true, man. And I feel like a lot of folks miss that part too, from a marketing attribution perspective or don't have it really clear or it's not really easy to be able to see. Any other main reasons that you would pick integrating versus, you know, one way or the other?

Alex Bisaillon (02:51)
The other reason that we see very often is how easy some reporting are easy to build and do inside HubSpot Sales report especially and having the capacity of integrating Salesforce pipeline and sales process within HubSpot and just creating those reports directly in HubSpot. Even if HubSpot isn't the source of true on the data itself or not the owner of where the data needs to be moved, there's a way within the same to let Salesforce be the owner of the sales process.

for everything regarding opportunities and deals inside HubSpot So you're able to use all those reports and maximize your use of HubSpot.

Casey Peddicord (03:27)
Yeah, that's awesome. I'm sure there'll be some more that'll pop up as we walk through this, but I'm interested in, we're going to dive like real deep here real quick, but what, what do you feel like makes a HubSpot Salesforce integration successful?

Alex Bisaillon (03:42)
Technologies like HubSpot and Salesforce, they're powered by human. So when we do that, we talk a lot about the human process behind it, how you work in marketing, how you work in sales, all this end up needs to happen. How's the retroaction when you send a lead from a marketing perspective to sales perspective and they're going to say, it's great lead, it's not a good lead. Like all this retroaction, some of this can happen within the, I'll say, technological system.

but some of it needs to happen on a human side. So we never forget about the human side. The human side is part of the things that you need to check. that's my very, very first recommendation I'll give.

Casey Peddicord (04:19)
Yeah, I think about two, it's, you know, to me, it's always been doing a really good mapping session and understanding, you know, what's really important for the, for the client or the customer. Cause I feel like between, you know, the probably hundreds of Salesforce integrations that we've done over the years, it, vary a lot. I think, you know, like HubSpot has that out of the box integration where you can do, you know, your main objects and add in your custom objects. But it seems like the end goals a lot of times are different or sometimes wildly different.

And so having somebody that's knowledgeable around being able to walk through those can be hugely beneficial for the client.

Alex Bisaillon (04:53)
That's part of our service offering that where we're going to have not only technical people like an endo that sync, but also I'll say once again, people that live in marketing and same thing goes on sale. So they can attach to string altogether and being able to be like an outsider of a situation. It's usually a good way for us to be able to come as an advisor and give like, Hey, we saw similar cases in the past. This is also my customer. We're able to.

make it happen, the magic, this is an unknown, let's figure out a path to get to this unknown, become something we're being comfortable to work with.

Casey Peddicord (05:30)
Love that. absolutely. So Biz, what do you think are the red flags that signal, hey, an integration isn't working as it's intended?

Alex Bisaillon (05:42)
When you cannot answer a simple question. That's like the basic once again. How many leads that I've generated were about to close at sales? What are my sales team doing? Like basic question about what's your team doing on a daily basis. This is usually like you're within your own I'll say your data journey you're missing something.

Casey Peddicord (05:52)
Yeah.

Yeah. think folks that are listening to, and maybe you're listening today and you're on Salesforce and maybe you've had marketing cloud or PowerDot or something like that. And what's interesting is when we talk about integration, I feel like the HubSpot Salesforce integration is stronger than most of the Salesforce to Salesforce integrations. Do you agree with that? Do you feel that way too? Got it. Cool. So Biz, a question that I get a lot.

Alex Bisaillon (06:24)
Yep. Yep.

Casey Peddicord (06:29)
on the sales side is, hey, you know, how do we determine which one is the source of truth? Like what sort of process, what things should we be looking for? What sort of questions should we be asking to figure out if we are integrating, do we lean more towards sales source? Do we lean more towards HubSpot? What's your take on that?

Alex Bisaillon (06:47)
And we have cases where we're going to try once again, simple process where we're going to identify even either if it's HubSpot or Salesforce, the source of truth, but we do have customer that will say for the marketing side, HubSpot is going to be the source of truth. And we're going to make a pass at some point saying, pass from a lead generation perspective on the, I'll say we go to the qualification that these get qualified. That's all right, Salesforce now owns the process. the good fun is with the integration, you can do both scenario.

And once again, just going back to reporting afterwards, like if you want reporting to happen in OpsPot, for example, I feel like OpsPot needs to be the source of the end of the day. So Salesforce can own a part of the process, but OpsPot needs to have those data and have a view of seeing those data.

Casey Peddicord (07:29)
Yeah. And I think that it, you know, I think you're talking about to a little bit of a misnomer in the, especially in Salesforce world today of like how strong HubSpot is, you know, I'd share with folks that, if you're doing it in Salesforce today, you probably could do it in HubSpot, you know, and I think sometimes that gets lost a little bit, you know, there are some exceptions in there and I think we'll talk about those here in just a little bit, but for the most part, if you're, if you're living in a Salesforce world, you can probably live in a HubSpot world.

Alex Bisaillon (07:54)
You're right. And to be honest, like there were cases like two, three years ago that you could, it was complicated to make them work in a startup spot, but a spot is leaning towards like CPQ capacity now where you can build it. I'll say you need, you still need technical people as of today, but I'm confident in just knowing how the product has evolved over the years. They're going to break that gap at some point at the same time where they're going to let non-technical people.

being able to do complicated job. And once again, that's part where I feel like the magic happens, where you have more people bringing their side of perspective of things that are not necessarily technical people and like they're operated and they make like complex stuff. That's for me like this, where we encourage, create builders. And when you build, you're going in the right direction.

Casey Peddicord (08:45)
Yeah. If, and I think about to, let's dive into like, you know, we talked about integrating, let's talk about migration for a second. You know, like if you're a company today and you've got Salesforce, what are those signs that you should start thinking about or start looking for like, Hey, the red alert or flags in the air type thing around moving off of Salesforce and fully onto HubSpot, I guess, what are those signs that you would look for?

Alex Bisaillon (09:09)
first sign I'll say what are you doing on a daily basis? And we have a saying, you and I keep saying that when we're on sales call or talking to customer on support like are you working for your CRM or your CRM is working for you? Like that's the basic and once we get that you can start calculating how much admin tasks am I doing as a salesperson? And once again, simple data. If I save you one hour per day, so

Casey Peddicord (09:23)
Yes. Yeah, dude.

Alex Bisaillon (09:38)
five hour per week of admin stuff and you can be on the field setting for five more hours, there's a good chance at end of the month you're going to increase your sales. Even if you have the worst closing rate, unless you're at zero, you're going to sell more. It's just pure mathematics. At some point there, velocity was coming. So that, once again, very first time when you start working, you're not working for yourself, you're working for a CRM. And the tools there are,

Casey Peddicord (10:04)
Yeah.

Alex Bisaillon (10:06)
I'll say once again, like I like to say on the sales perspective, has made a good tech stack where it works for me. Like I can be on recording that podcast right now. I maybe have two follow-ups going up to customer that forgot to give me a sign on proposal that we're supposed to sign today. So I'm just chatting with you today while sequences work the magic and just making sure that I sit on top of my game. So if it's something that you hear on a daily basis, like you forget to do some follow-ups.

Casey Peddicord (10:30)
Yeah, that's right.

Alex Bisaillon (10:35)
So that's the question, how easy is your tool right now?

Casey Peddicord (10:38)
Yeah. I always think about, I'm going off track here just a little bit, but the example that you just made around the follow-ups, man, that's true. It's like, I think of Salesforce is like bolt-ons. You know, there's all these little bolt-ons that you have to have and HubSpot's kind of like built it all in. You know, it's already there. HubSpot will tell you it's all the same code base. And I think that's probably an evolution of not saying that Salesforce is bad at all. I think it's great for certain situations and not saying that HubSpot's the end all be all either.

You know, there's, definitely a place for both, but just sort of like how the, both the products evolved of sales source evolved through acquisition and HubSpot continued just to build out their own system.

Alex Bisaillon (11:09)
year.

And

you're right, and just gonna, once again, just like different perspective of things, that's going to be my, I'll say, two minutes talk, like more technical talk. Like in a system, you always have an object. Like for example, contacting the HubSpot is the way that, for example, I'll create your record. So first name is Casey, last name, Petticoat. Like these are fields within an object. You're within a contact, you exist as Casey Petticoat because first name is Casey, last name is Petticoat. In Salesforce, you're going to have the same things for contacts, leads.

which are two different objects. So KC could exist in both objects. So if you search for KC by the card, there's a chance that you pop up depending on your setup on Salesforce, you're going to exist twice. In HubSpot, you're going to be just always KC by the card. If you become a customer, they're going to use a property of field to say, hey, this is the status of KC. Salesforce, I'll call it like it's in a, it evolved through object. In HubSpot, it evolved through your customer journey. And once again, it goes back to the root of making thing easy and simple.

to people to understand. So once again, that's usually a first reason why I said to customer, hey, maybe us, but maybe a better solution as of today, like how easy is the solution to operate? How easy it is for you to find the data.

Casey Peddicord (12:24)
Yeah, I love that. When you're thinking about a big move, you know, hey, I've got Salesforce and I've explored HubSpot. feel like HubSpot's a good fit. And let's say I've had Salesforce for a long time. You know, I run into instances with folks who have had it for 10 years. What, you know, how do you get key stakeholder buy-in for such a big move? I think about from like a sales and IT standpoint too.

Alex Bisaillon (12:47)
I'll say on a sales standpoint, just going back to what I was saying, like what you do on a daily basis. Can you show some number that if you move to another system, you gain a gain of productivity pricing? There's going to, might be a difference. Sometimes close to the same, sometimes different. Once again, depends on your contract, depends on the setup. So I can keep that argument on the side, just like do your own homework, talk with both.

company if you're looking for that, there's might be a chance that you're going to pay less on the ups and downs. That's usually the saying. I leave those two parts, I go like, oh, what is the risk for myself to move from a situation that, okay, I know some of the good stuff, I know some of the bad stuff, but things are working. We need to break that barrier. Start looking at what you're going to gain. We talk about productivity, we talk about ease of use, we've talked about getting the right

I'll say that at the right place to be able to take the right decision. Those could be also a good factor to go in. So, and afterwards, like to look at which process exists to migrate both systems. So, as well as an integration tool that you can build the sink. So, instead of just going, hey, I'm going to make a migration, first set of migration, I'm going to do a delta after my cutoff. I'm going to change like the behavior of all people within two, three weeks. Just buy both product, start the sink.

make the data flow between both systems, start building on your new ecosystem, start training your people on the new ecosystem. They're going to create new habit. And at some point you can just cut off that sink and you're good to go.

Casey Peddicord (14:24)
Yeah, it's interesting from a stakeholder point of view, feel like Salesforce went to market around selling to that executive suite. You know, it's really around the reporting and hey, this is, this is an executive tool. HubSpot went more towards frontline, you know, like, Hey, we're building this for the users instead of the executive team. now with that being said, HubSpot today caters to that executive team really, really well, but it still has that feel around.

Hey, sales rep actually enjoys using it. You know, it actually helps them do their job better versus just from a Salesforce point of view. think a lot of times, and I'll say this coming from a Salesforce point of view for 10 years, it sometimes felt like you were just putting stuff into the system, right? Like you're always updating opportunities. It's there to be able to report on, but as far as like actually enabling me as a salesperson or a sales manager, doesn't do a lot of that. You have to have some sort of add-ons that to do some of those things.

Alex Bisaillon (15:20)
Yeah, and I'll say on a manager's perspective, I would like to know how I can help my team. Like not only I know there's some lot of people saying at first, like I'm installing a big brother system or I'm already in a big brother ecosystem. It's like looking at me, but people have to understand like there's a part where your data, what you do on a daily basis, can.

empower yourself, but they can also empower your colleagues like upsell opportunities, like aiming for a vertical. HubSpot is going to give you a way to make it easy. Let's say, hey, I've sold, for example, let's say that we sold an onboarding to a customer. They didn't buy a web product because they were not due to rebrand or rebuild their website. Now I know that I HubSpot installed. Maybe I try to teach them why they should think about rebuild. What is the beneficial of rebuilding your website? Same thing with AI stuff, like everything that you could have in mind.

I'll say the opportunity you can create and once again the data is going to be able to be one key factor between this and other just to be able to tell you hey where's the opportunity rise for this customer and we're going to go get it good and I'll say probably couple of next months are going to be complicated in some cases on a sense perspective like we're not in a market where we see a lot of growth we see a lot of opportunity but you're going to have to

Also, to get that opportunity in, you better have the right tool to help you be at the top of your game. Because at the end of the day, it might be one person that makes the difference between a close one and a close loss.

Casey Peddicord (16:47)
Yeah, the margins are so, I don't want to say thin, but in a lot of cases they are thin and that 1%, 2%, 3 % makes a massive difference. It's funny. You've probably seen this joke going around on LinkedIn, but you know, 10 years ago as an IT professional or head of IT or CIO of company, know, Salesforce was that safe move. You never, you know, you put it in, there's no way to get fired from that decision. I think today that's very different. You know, today you can

You can really mess that up. I always say the other joke that floats around too, the folks that have Salesforce that say they love their Salesforce instances usually have seven, let's say five to seven years inside of Salesforce, heavily customized. I'm not saying it's a bad system at all, but especially right out of the box HubSpot typically is much easier to adopt than a Salesforce.

Alex Bisaillon (17:42)
And

yeah, and I saw just like surfing on an example, like if you're looking for a good reason to maybe make the switch, look how much you can spend per year just to maintain Salesforce. And I'm just going back, just going back to that contact lead customer example that Casey could exist up to three times within the same name, but on three different objects with different fields. How do you synchronize all those fields? You need to build lots of automation.

Casey Peddicord (17:54)
Mm-hmm. yeah.

Alex Bisaillon (18:10)
to make sure that the data, if it gets updated at one place or the other, you push the right value to the other place. during migration, we see a lot of different cases where it wasn't happening. So we were looking at three different, same person, three different data, which one is a good one. And this is where you need to involve, once again, you need to involve human in this case, because on a developer standpoint, on a technology standpoint, you cannot say which street address is the right one. Maybe I go on Google to do so.

Casey Peddicord (18:24)
Right.

Alex Bisaillon (18:37)
but who's going to pay me to go surf on Google for that? They are going to want to do it themselves. So once again, ease of use, super important.

Casey Peddicord (18:43)
Yeah.

When, when, when, if folks have a Salesforce incident here and think about, thinking about migrating onto HubSpot, what are some of those key things that they should think about or prep? You know, I think about like data or workflows and that kind of stuff.

Alex Bisaillon (19:00)
I'll put it this way. First thing first, fundamentals in OpsBot. When you start working on onboarding with us, this is one of the very first things we're gonna teach you. Contact, main priority, default priority that needs to be there. If it's not there, it's going to break the magic. On contacts, it's email address. It acts as a unique identifier. You cannot have two contacts with the same email address in OpsBot. Seems like a blocker for some people, but...

Think about it for a second. I add a capacity within my Google Apps application. So for example, Gmail for command, I'll say as a command name to write an email, having the HubSpot extension connected on it, just sending an email to a customer and a prospect. HubSpot is going to make a look if that prospect exists or not inside my CRM. True the email address, it doesn't exist, bang, it creates it and logs my email directly on it. Then I go to the company name. It's going to search for a domain name. So within the email,

everything at the right of the A commercial is going to be your domain name. It's going to do the same thing with the company. Does it exist? No. Bang! creates it. Associated contact with it. Associated email you send to both the contact and company. If it already exists, it's going to update the record with the latest information, the latest engagement. So very first, going back to your question, if you want to know if ISE is going to be like search for contacts duplicate.

contacts email duplicates for companies search to make sure that you have at least your website URL or a contact associated with a corporate domain name. That's the very first key. Afterwards, we go to and going back to human process. Are you comfortable with the process you have in place or what are you looking to improve? Take a second to think about it. Put it on paper. Don't comment with like big data schema stuff like that. We're not there yet. Just take a pen, take a sheet.

Write words. This is what I want to do at first. This is what I want to do then. This is how my end up happen. Come to a partner and show them this is what I want to do. Trust me, like they're going to get a better understanding of what you're about to do. And they're going to be able to advise you correctly and saying, hey, this is the pitfall that we see. This is what you need to work in. But instead of just going in and discovering it through different phases, you're going to get some more answers. So data mapping then comes in.

the more info you can provide, the better it is. And on our side of things, when we try to sell, we try to sell what we know, but we try to put in place a process for the unknowns, to answer those unknowns and kind of give a path of resolution to get to the destination you're looking for. So in the case of migration, we wanna make sure that we bring the right data with the right quality and we get as soon as possible ready to run.

Casey Peddicord (21:40)
Yeah. Yeah. I think about, if you're, if you're sitting, if you're listening to this today and you've got Salesforce and you're thinking, Hey, I could make a move to HubSpot or, I always think about like the core data and then there are some of the ancillary data, right? Your core data around contacts, leads, accounts, opportunities, cases. Maybe you've got some custom objects built out and then, you know, I sort of put that in one bucket. And then the other bucket is around things like attachments, email histories, you know, one-to-one emails that are in their contracts.

Um, any sort of files, um, those things typically affect that pricing on our side. If we've, know, if we're doing it for a client, uh, or showing them how to do it. Um, but yeah, I'm really excited to dive into the last part of this, uh, cause it's my, think it's my, I think it's going to be my favorite part around best practices or different tips. Again, we've done hundreds of these over the years. Um, and I feel like we're, we're, we're pretty good at Salesforce migrations and Salesforce integrations. Uh, but I'm interested to really tap your, tap your knowledge here, Biz.

What are some of the top migration tips that you've learned working with clients over the years?

Alex Bisaillon (22:44)
first one is take your time. Don't rush stuff. Like if you're about to end a contract, like within one month since you want a migration to go fast, there's a chance that you're going to, I'll call it like you have to choose a poison. And poison is going to be either budget because you need to put a high intensity on it. So you're going to ask your partner to match that intensity, but you also need internally to be able to offer that intensity.

Casey Peddicord (23:01)
Yeah.

Alex Bisaillon (23:13)
which gonna lead to loss of cost of opportunities. So first things first, take your time, plan it. Like a quarter, three months is perfect. Can it move fast? Short answer is yes. As I mentioned before, we already have a tool within the ecosystem that you connect an account to a Salesforce account. But moving the data, it's part of the journey.

Getting comfortable of using the tool is also part of the story. So think about like within a month you need to get comfortable. Change habits for some people. It's not always easy when you're working with the same system for more than a life, two, three years and you're going to a new ecosystem with new rules, new stuff, new UI. It can become like, you can get confused, can get uncomfortable and people, you have to provide a way to your employees to be comfortable being.

uncomfortable to break that barrier. And again, they didn't create. So if you can take at least two months to read the process, we'll be able to create that help you out, create that magic. So they're going to come in and they're going to feel a magic. We are going to find a way within the process to, hey, this is going to be a plus. Let's put it in front of a customer right away. people will come in, they are going to feel uncomfortable, but they're going to see one thing that like change their

Casey Peddicord (24:04)
Yeah.

100%.

Alex Bisaillon (24:30)
daily basis or something they do on a weekly basis. They're going to be able to answer a question pretty quickly being fast at responding to a customer. Let's create that first magic and then we create momentum. we create momentum, you can break walls, you can do whatever you want, you can build.

Casey Peddicord (24:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. think for folks, you know, that are listening, if you have a runway between the two systems, that's ideal. You know, if you have three months, let's say, man, it's perfect. You know, if you're in a situation where you're down to, let's say, 30 days before your sales source incident cuts off, and sales source is very well known to say, hey, when you're cut off, you're cut off, you don't get your data. If you're in one of those situations, yeah, I would definitely say reach out to us or reach out to a partner that knows what they're doing with something around some...

a and HubSpot, because we can help guide you because there are different avenues, right? It's not like you have to use this one way to integrate it or this one way to migrate it. There are lots of tools at our disposal that we can help you ⁓ speed that up or go slow. Yeah. No, you're fine.

Alex Bisaillon (25:27)
Yeah, the strategy can... I'm just going to interrupt you for a second.

There's different technique to make things happen and we have a toolbox of those things on our side. And trust me, we had cases when things when solid customer had to move within and we got a case like a year and a half ago, close to Christmas, we had 15 days, minutes of record. So...

Casey Peddicord (25:38)
100%.

Yeah.

Alex Bisaillon (25:52)
Strategy was not, hey, let's make everybody comfortable. It was like, hey, let's make sure that we have a safe place where our data is going to live while we take care of the rest. So we prioritize what was needed on day one or even on day zero, like before people comes in, what is like mandatory. Then we go with essential, then to, it's cool to have it. It's okay if we have it to...

Casey Peddicord (26:05)
Right, that's a great point.

Yeah.

Alex Bisaillon (26:20)
It's not important, but we want to refer to it on the year, for example. So once again, there is different there's different way to approach this project.

Casey Peddicord (26:24)
100%.

Yeah, yeah, if you're in that situation where you're 15 to 30 days out from that Salesforce contract expiring, just know that there are options, right? Talk somebody who's walked through it before, we'll definitely help you there. But I love your point. Yes, like get that data out. Even if you've only got five or 10 days left in your Salesforce contract, there's a way that we can get all that data and sit it somewhere and then slowly put it back in the HubSpot the right way for you. Any other tips?

Alex Bisaillon (26:49)
When you can take your time, take your time. Human first. Once again, I'm going to repeat myself, but it's the key process like being able to free time on your end to help your partner or put time on it to be able to say, I can test some of this stuff. I have user story. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm going to take a second for that. People tend to forget user story. What is a user story? It's basically

Casey Peddicord (26:53)
100%.

Alex Bisaillon (27:12)
a narrative where you tell me what you do on a daily basis. Alex is doing this on a sales perspective. Courtney is doing this on the marketing side. Casey, when he needs to close a sale, this is what he needs to have within his set of tools. So writing this user story, once again, make it easy for everybody to understand like, hey, this is the current situation. This is what we have right now. Then you create those extra user story where you envision yourself what you will like to be able to do once you're getting to the on-app spotlight. This is what I envision.

This is not only going to create the help us and any other partner or even yourself internally being able to create that journey to start thinking about our migration to actually do the job, but it's also going to unlock you a unit testing like we call it unit testing, but QA QA question and answer and you need to be able to double check prior to say, Hey, I've done my job. Migration is complete. So this is going to lead to that QA listing where you can verify.

Casey Peddicord (28:06)
for sure.

Alex Bisaillon (28:12)
what you build.

Casey Peddicord (28:13)
Yeah, I think too, there's sometimes a, I don't want to say a thought process that's out there that, hey, I have to pay to get some sort of consultation to, you know, we want to let folks know you're happy. We will give you a way through this, through this podcast or video where you can get ahold of us and we're happy to help give you some guidance there. Again, there's typically no charge from a consultation standpoint. So if you're having those types of questions, you know, you're thinking about, Hey, am on the fence? You know,

We're happy to help you there this real quick. I know we're coming up on time, but what sort of support or partners should companies look at when they're thinking about a migration or a deep integration project? Maybe not just cell source, but other things too. Like what are the things you should look for?

Alex Bisaillon (28:55)
Are you working with an experienced partner in the field? And I'll let you, I'm gonna let you like, always count the same story when people ask us, hey, Biz, hey, Casey, have you built an integration for that system? And I'm gonna tell you a small tips, like 60 % of what we do, it's always for a new system. It's not, we don't have past experience of that specific system, but we do have a recipe. I'll let you count like the little anecdote that you say to people each time you get,

Casey Peddicord (29:13)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Bisaillon (29:22)
ask why you didn't do exactly this one.

Casey Peddicord (29:23)
the Peyton Manning. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I get that question a lot. Like, Hey, have you integrated this before? and have you integrated that before? you get, gosh, there's so many pieces of software now. Sales for us, obviously really easy when we've done literally hundreds. I don't think we've made it to a thousand, but literally hundreds of those over the years. But I think I always use the analogy of like Peyton Manning, know, Peyton Manning, the great NFL quarterback.

Peyton has never played on my high school football field, right? He's never come to Tennessee to play on that field, but he is an expert in football, right? If he came to play on my field, I bet he would kick my butt. You know, like he's going to be really, really good at football. And I feel like that's how smart bug is like biz. You and your team have done so many integrations and migrations over the years. would say easily thousands of, of all different types. And, and so there are, there is a certain framework.

Alex Bisaillon (30:09)
Not probably getting any close death.

Casey Peddicord (30:14)
that works really well in integrating with pretty much any type of software. And it could even be like on-premise systems too. think about, you know, old AS400 systems that we've connected to over the years that are sitting in a closet somewhere, right? There are ways to do that. And so get an expert in that part. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be an expert in integrating that one specific system, but overall, like be that quarterback, be that NFL legend of like, hey, I can play it. I can have the whole game, right?

So I hope that's helpful. Biz, for letting me share that. It's probably...

Alex Bisaillon (30:44)
Yeah, and just

like to kind of resume it, like summarize it in a way like ask your partner about their process. How are they going to handle the challenge you give them? That's end. You're going to be able to, once again, people tend to know when salespeople call bullshit, like you'll be able to say, hey, I'm not comfortable versus, I'm talking to the right expert. I'm talking to the right person that I feel like.

knows this stuff. Like he can show me past experiences of what he did, he can walk through me through the process. He won't be there always telling me that it's going to be easy and it's going to be flawless. Like there is going to be probably challenges down the road. How do you handle this challenge? How do you communicate this challenge? So thanks to my second place communication. Ask them about how they communicate on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. What are their service level agreements on communication? Like I don't care about the skill set of people.

like it's important but lots of issues within the world just start without because two different people with two different perspectives don't communicate to each other and it goes back to the Java and I said things are things that can be it can be very simple once you communicate your issue on both end you can find a way to get a solution and make things work.

Casey Peddicord (31:47)
Mm, yeah.

Yeah, 100%. I think one last tip that pops into my mind before we go is, you know, talk to that partner about who is actually performing that integration work. Especially in the HubSpot ecosystem, there are a lot of partners who outsource that, right? At SmartBuck, we don't do that. We do that all in-house. Those are full-time folks who are in the US or Canada. We don't outsource to other countries. But I see that a lot in the ecosystem, and especially if you're coming from a Salesforce.

Alex Bisaillon (32:12)
You're right.

Casey Peddicord (32:24)
especially in certain industries that have cell source, you may not want that data to go outside a certain place or sit or be vulnerable. So that's definitely a question to ask or tip that I have is, you know, ask and make sure that they're transparent with you on, hey, who's performing that? You know, you may be talking to somebody here, but if they're using some third party or something else to be able to do that, you know, there's definitely, usually there's some concerns for me around some of those.

Alex Bisaillon (32:48)
And you're right,

I'm just going to add, and it's a great point, I'm just going to add that. And I'll give you an example on our end, like when we configure a system like SAP in its suite, like more complex CRP, I might have an expert on the other end that knows the system well. But once again, we're going to be transparent saying, do you have someone in the house? We know someone within our network, we're going to present you that person who's going to own that very small part of the process. we're going to be able, for the rest, we're going to be

running the ball for you guys. But you can have an expert. It's not bring the right people in the mix to make it happen. But yeah, make sure that if your partner or the company you're looking to work with, they're not outsourced that process because you're going to create that extra layer where communication is going to get more complicated. And you're going to feel it within the project. It's going to be like you're going to be seeing signs where you're going to ask questions and those questions will take time to answer.

Casey Peddicord (33:38)
Now, love it.

Alex Bisaillon (33:47)
Do you get an answer?

Casey Peddicord (33:47)
Dude,

100%, so many good tips here. Biz, thank you for joining us today. I this wraps up our episode of SmartBug on Tap. Huge thanks to Biz for your insights and your experience over so many years. Not calling you old here, but I've been around the system for a long time. His experience across CRM Strategy and Platform really is second to none. His experience scales brings real clarity to the topic that can feel overwhelming to a lot of people or a lot of teams.

You know, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're feeling like you're currently trying to make sense of that tech stack, or you're stuck deciding between optimizing and integration or going all in on HubSpot, definitely let's have a chat. Let's talk, you know, at SmartBug we've helped companies cleanly migrate off Salesforce, build powerful integrations between those two. If you're staying on Salesforce and basically help future proof your revenue systems. and just, you know, to make it really easy, you can reach out to me or Biz anytime.

You can reach us through smartbugmedia.com, our website, shoot us a message. Our emails are in this episode description as well. If you found today's conversation helpful, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes filled with all kinds of practical advice and platform strategy tips around HubSpot and HubSpot ecosystem. My name is Casey Peddicord again. Thanks for spending time with us today and we'll see you next time.