“Don’t boil the ocean”; 4 things to consider when moving to a marketing automation platform
We recently made the decision at Idealist Consulting to switch from HubSpot to Pardot in order to achieve better integration with Salesforce. We’ve seen Pardot make huge improvements in the past two years and the time has come for us to join the party!
We help clients with change management and switching technology solutions all the time, but changing marketing automation solutions is more complex than just swapping your mass email platform or forms tool. It is more akin to switching CRMs in that there are many components that are intricately connected.
After working through the change ourselves, here are our four top tips for managing the switch from one marketing automation platform to another.
Know why you are making the change
When you are in the deep, dark weeds of WYSIWYG editors, UTM codes, and list filtering rules, it’s easy to feel the grass is greener pretty much anywhere else. Don’t be fooled! Every technology solution has its pros and cons. In our case, although the case was strong for moving to Pardot to achieve tighter integration with Salesforce, we will be leaving behind a lot of great training tools that we loved about HubSpot, as well as some social media functionality.
Be clear on what you will gain and what you may lose, and the transition will be much smoother.
Make a plan and don’t do it alone
Switching technology platforms is a complex project and must be approached as such. Hire a consultant to help with the switch if you do not have the bandwidth to manage this internally. They can help with everything from migrating email templates and forms to helping you think through what you should leave behind that wasn’t working and what you can optimize in your new platform.
Even if you work with a consultant, try to involve at least one other team member internally as well in the transition. It will help with getting you up to speed faster when you’re using the new solution.
Budget for 1-2 months of overlap between marketing automation solutions
This is key. At Idealist Consulting we only had one month overlap over a time period that included the Thanksgiving holiday, and we were gunning it to get everything done. I don’t think it would be possible in anything less than a month. Even though it will be an upfront expense to pay for two solutions at once, you will need this overlap time to migrate everything out that you need.
Here are some of the primary areas you will want to consider in your migration:
- Leads/Contacts: even if you have all records in Salesforce, do a contact export so you have all marketing automation properties for future reference just in case.
- Landing Pages and forms: which forms are used on which landing pages?
- Email Templates: can you save these as HTML?
- Lead Scoring: what is your current methodology?
- Drip Campaigns/workflows: can you document the logic? Do you want to bring in all the same workflows or only ones that are working best for you?
Use this as an opportunity to discard what doesn’t work and adopt new tactics
One of the things I was most excited about with our move to Pardot is the opportunity to use both scoring and grading in our prospect management: Pardot has very smart tools that allow you to both qualify and nurture leads. I’m using these tools to reduce the amount of manual work we currently spend on lead qualification.
On the flip side, we have not done a great job of using drip campaigns to nurture people who aren’t ready to buy consulting services from us yet, and so this gave us a great opportunity to abandon some tactics and be smarter about how we approached drip campaigns in Pardot.
But don’t boil the ocean
Finally, be gentle with yourself and as Salesforce sometimes says, “don’t boil the ocean”. This means start with the basics and expand from there. Marketing automation solutions are powerful tools. Giving your team a baseline level of excitement and willingness to experiment is more important than using every feature to its fullest right out of the gate.
