Monica Caraway
“This one had a lot of moving parts." That’s how Rebecca Gonzalez, CEO of Orange Marketing, described the Hilldrup implementation, which had four business lines, 56 sales seats, and multiple legacy systems all needing to work together in one platform.
When a $160 million logistics company tells its current platform vendor they need marketing automation capabilities, the last thing they want to hear is that'll be "six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars." But that's exactly what they were quoted.
With operations spanning residential moves, employee relocation, and complex logistics projects, waiting half a year wasn't going to work.
The Problem with "Good Enough"
Hilldrup's CRM wasn't broken. It just wasn't built for what they needed to do. The real issue was everything happening outside of it.
Teams were using Calendly for scheduling. Customer data lived in Quotes2Go and Yembo. Call tracking ran through CallRail. Reviews were managed in Podium. Each system worked fine on its own, but nothing talked to each other.
"We didn't have any email tracking," the team revealed during project debriefs. "It was just impossible for anyone to track anything through Dynamics 365 because everything was just a giant cluster."
The result? Sales reps couldn't see the full customer picture. Leadership couldn't get accurate reports. And every process required manual handoffs between systems.
What Made This HubSpot Implementation Different
Coordinating 56 Sales Enterprise seats across four business lines would be complex enough. But Hilldrup also had a call center that relocated to the Philippines during the implementation, multiple legacy system integrations to manage, and sales processes that varied significantly by business unit.
William Collins, Hilldrup's Fractional CMO, put it this way:
"The real challenge was creative problem-solving; taking the complexities of multiple business lines and diverse stakeholder needs, then architecting a unified solution that HubSpot could seamlessly execute."
This wasn't a standard CRM migration. It required:
- Custom objects to handle their specific business processes
- Multiple pipeline architectures for different sales motions
- Integration of legacy systems that teams still needed to use
- Approximately 30 automated touchpoints for residential moving alone
- Training for teams who'd never worked in a unified CRM
Orange Marketing started by meeting with key stakeholders on each team, including individual salespeople in some cases, to make sure the pipeline stages matched how they actually worked. The goal wasn't just to implement new software. It was to rebuild how the organization tracks and manages revenue opportunities across every business line.
The Timeline
Total implementation time: approximately 12 weeks.
That's 12 weeks to migrate from Microsoft Dynamics, integrate multiple third-party systems, build custom pipelines for four business lines, train dozens of users, and get teams actually using the platform.
Compare that to the six-month timeline Dynamics quoted, which would have only added marketing automation, not addressed the fragmented tools, disconnected data, or visibility issues that leadership needed to solve.
Worth Considering
Your business probably doesn't have four distinct lines of business or 56 sales seats to coordinate. But if you're dealing with:
- Multiple tools that don't talk to each other
- Manual reporting because your systems can't give you what you need
- Sales processes that vary by team or product line
- Data scattered across platforms
- A current vendor quoting long timelines and high costs for basic capabilities
Then Hilldrup's approach is worth looking at.
They decided the cost and timeline to expand their existing system didn't make sense compared to moving to a platform built for what they actually needed to do.
Want to see the full implementation details? Read the complete Hilldrup case study to see the exact architecture, integrations, training approach, and results from this project.
