Oyster Yachts
Custom migration from Microsoft Dynamics to HubSpot CRM hub
A unique migration using HubSpot custom objects
With over 40 years of seafaring expertise, Oyster Yachts design, built, and broker luxury sailing yachts, and provide after-sale support and maintenance. They approached Blend to support their migration from Microsoft Dynamics to HubSpot CRM.
The challenge
Oyster Yachts had a unique challenge. As a broker, they needed to be able to track the ownership of each boat as it is sold from one contact to another. To do this, they needed to see who the current and previous owners of each boat were, and which boats each contact had owned. They also needed to store boat specification details and make these visible to users.
To achieve this, we needed two custom objects:
- Ownership property - a record of who has owned the boat.
- Boat property - a list of specific details for each boat.
These also needed to be associated with a contact record (customer details). While this was possible in Microsoft Dynamics, the functionality wasn’t yet available in the HubSpot CRM.
Building a custom HubSpot app integration
In collaboration with the team at Oyster Yachts, we mapped out the necessary objects, properties, and relationships within an Entity Relationship Diagram.
We built a custom HubSpot integration exclusively for Oyster Yachts, that allowed them to track historic boat ownership. As the solution required a secondary server and wasn’t natively supported by HubSpot, this was a temporary fix until HubSpot rolled out custom objects.
Introducing custom objects
In HubSpot, standard CRM objects represent different types of predefined data (Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, Products and Tasks) and each has its own properties that you can use to collect information.
Custom objects run on the same infrastructure but can be customised to meet the needs of a business.
In October 2020, HubSpot released custom objects. Using this feature, we created a custom object for ownership records (which had previously existed outside HubSpot) and another custom object for Boats. Using HubSpot's sandbox feature, we were able to set up a safe and secure environment in which to build and test the new custom objects without impacting live data, or interrupting the customer experience.
Blend were able to build a custom object as a temporary solution before it was implemented by HubSpot. We were very impressed that they had the foresight to know that it would eventually be natively integrated into HubSpot.
Molly Marston
Oyster Yachts
We migrated all the data and properties securely into the new custom objects and set up new workflows to process the data and keep records up-to-date.
Unlocking data-driven insights
The data is now embedded natively in HubSpot’s CRM platform, empowering the sales, marketing, and customer services teams to deepen their relationships with customers and provide a better experience. The team can now access and report on critical data and insights, enabling them to scale their marketing activities, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and make better business decisions.
Now all the data is hosted within HubSpot, it's future-proofed. As the HubSpot CRM evolves, automatic updates will help keep their data secure and add new functionality that will continue to improve internal processes within the business.
The team at Blend worked hard to really understand our unique challenge and created a solution that worked for us. Blend are very knowledgeable, professional, and responsive. I would highly recommend them as a HubSpot Partner.
Molly Marston
Oyster Yachts
