B2B SaaS: CRM Migration and Commercial Ontology Build

The Client

A B2B SaaS company with 45 employees selling a mid-market analytics platform. They'd been on Salesforce for four years but had outgrown their implementation — or rather, their implementation had never kept pace with the business.

The Problem

The Salesforce instance was a museum of every previous admin's decisions:

• 12 record types for Opportunities, only 3 in active use
• Custom objects that duplicated standard functionality
• No lead scoring — every lead was treated equally
• Manual reporting — the RevOps team spent 15 hours per week pulling data into spreadsheets
• No commercial ontology — Products, Solutions, and Use Cases weren't defined, making messaging inconsistent across sales, marketing, and customer success

The company had decided to migrate to HubSpot. But migrating mess to a new platform just creates faster mess. They needed architecture first.

The Engagement

Phase 1: Commercial Ontology

Before touching the CRM, we defined the commercial ontology:

• Products — the commercial anchors (what you buy)
• Features — the noun-like capabilities of each product
• Solutions — the verb-like problems each product solves
• Use Cases — the persona-specific contexts where solutions apply

This ontology became the foundation for everything: CRM object model, website content, sales pitch decks, and marketing campaigns.

Phase 2: CRM Architecture Design

With the ontology defined, we designed the HubSpot architecture:

• Clean Contact → Company → Deal pipeline with predicate-based stages
• Lead scoring by fit (firmographic) and engagement (behavioural), separated into two scores
• Deal stages with documented entry/exit criteria
• Lifecycle stages aligned to the ontology: each stage maps to a specific Solution the prospect is evaluating

Phase 3: Migration Execution

We migrated the data with field mapping rules that cleaned on import:

• 12 Salesforce record types → 1 HubSpot pipeline with property-based segmentation
• Legacy custom objects → standard HubSpot objects with custom properties
• Historical data preserved with proper date stamps for reporting continuity

Phase 4: Go-Live & Training

The sales team received structured training on:

• The new commercial ontology and how it maps to their pitch
• Stage transition rules and what documentation is required at each gate
• Dashboard navigation and self-service reporting

The Results

Metric	Before (Salesforce)	After (HubSpot)
Weekly reporting time	15 hours	2 hours (automated)
Lead scoring	None	Dual-score (fit + engagement)
Deal stage compliance	~40%	92%
Sales-marketing alignment	Low (no shared language)	High (shared ontology)
Data hygiene	12 record types, 3 in use	Clean single-pipeline architecture

Key Takeaway

The migration wasn't the hard part — the ontology was. Once the commercial structure was defined, the CRM architecture fell into place naturally. Without it, we would have replicated the same mess on a different platform.

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Related Products

• Commercial Ontology — Define your Product → Feature → Solution → Use Case structure
• CRM Architecture — Data model and pipeline design
• Revenue Systems — End-to-end revenue infrastructure

→ Book a Consultation — Planning a CRM migration? Let's do it right.