The Client
When implementing a new CRM, the ultimate goal is to streamline operations and unlock new efficiencies. For ACS, a company looking to tighten the alignment between marketing and sales to optimize ROI tracking, a transition from Microsoft Dynamics to HubSpot was the clear next step. After an initial integration attempt by another partner left room for improvement, ACS’s forward-thinking leadership team called on ClearPivot to refine the system and fully realize their strategic goals.
ACS delivers innovative, single-source solutions that bridge facility design with specialized equipment engineering. From its headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, and its regional office in Troy, Michigan, ACS serves global clients across demanding industries, including automotive, aerospace, energy, and manufacturing. The company specializes in the execution of highly intricate projects—designing and fabricating custom test equipment, automation systems, and software, while simultaneously managing building construction and final commissioning. By overseeing both the facility and the technology inside it, ACS ensures complex systems operate seamlessly from day one.
Recognizing that their CRM infrastructure needed to match the high standards of their engineering projects, the ACS leadership and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams partnered with ClearPivot for a comprehensive solution.
The Challenge
In October, ClearPivot began a thorough audit of ACS's sales and marketing processes. The discovery phase revealed that the core challenges lay within the legacy configuration of their Microsoft Dynamics environment. ACS had successfully utilized Dynamics for 13 years; however, over more than a decade of business evolution, a patchwork of custom modifications had accumulated. This made the user workflows very complex, impacting daily data entry and pipeline visibility for the busy sales team. Because critical deal information was often captured primarily near the close of a sale, it limited real-time forecasting and cross-departmental reporting.
ClearPivot’s deep dive provided the clarity needed to make a strategic pivot. In November, we presented our findings to the ACS executive team. The president recognized that a legacy system overhaul would be less efficient than a complete shift. He chose to sunset the legacy CRM and set an ambitious goal: to kick off the new fiscal year on February 1 with a fully modernized process and a clean HubSpot environment.
ClearPivot’s mission evolved from a simple patch integration into a comprehensive system restructuring — carefully preserving ACS’s core operational strengths while introducing modern efficiencies and executing a clean data migration for a fresh start.
The Solution
With a firm go-live target of February 1, ClearPivot had just a few weeks to customize the new HubSpot system, migrate historical data, and onboard the marketing and sales teams. The migration sprint required precise coordination, but the underlying data structures allowed our team to move swiftly.
A key priority was preserving ACS's established sales methodology. In Dynamics, deals progressed through specific stages tailored to the Sandler sales method (which balances deliberate early-stage nurturing with an efficient closing process). Because the Sandler method is foundational to ACS's business model, leadership and the GTM teams wanted to ensure their successful selling practices remained unchanged.
ClearPivot configured HubSpot to mirror the Sandler sales process perfectly, while simultaneously eliminating legacy bottlenecks and redundant steps. This ensured the sales team felt immediate confidence in the new platform.
To safeguard historical records, we replicated ACS’s legacy data within a HubSpot Sandbox environment. This allowed us to isolate, map, and manipulate data streams without impacting live operations, alleviating any concern about losing critical business history. Over multiple iterative sessions, ClearPivot worked with ACS to streamline data properties. For instance, ACS utilizes a unique 13-month fiscal calendar and tracks custom objectives for deal losses and goal metrics. HubSpot simplified this complexity; simple property alignment allowed ACS to retain their custom fiscal periods while gaining access to powerful, real-time reporting dashboards.
The HubSpot Sandbox proved invaluable for collaboration. ClearPivot brought ACS's data operations, sales, and marketing leaders together to co-design the new workflows. Having three to four key stakeholders involved in every decision ensured total cross-functional alignment. By testing and tuning the environment before launch, the team identified and eliminated three legacy custom objects that were no longer required, keeping the new system remarkably clean. This collaborative approach allowed ACS’s data analysts to visualize exactly how the new infrastructure would support robust reporting.
To ensure long-term adoption, ClearPivot provided targeted onboarding and training, starting with ACS business development leaders who served as "super users." This internal champion model minimized post-launch confusion, built immediate internal support, and set ACS up for sustained success in their brand-new HubSpot ecosystem.
Results
After more than a decade of accumulated technical debt, ACS's Microsoft Dynamics environment had become a liability rather than an asset, one that teams had learned to work around rather than with. This project was never simply about migrating data from one platform to another. It was about understanding the root causes of a stymied process, earning cross-functional trust, and rebuilding the system in a way that would actually get used.
The results reflect that approach. Marketing leads are now actively followed up by sales, with a new 7-day SLA and automated lead routing eliminating the manual coordination that previously required the president's direct involvement. Territories and lead distribution now run without escalation.
Adoption — often the quiet killer of CRM implementations — was not an issue. Because ACS's sales, marketing, and data operations teams participated in building the new environment, they stepped into it with confidence. The Sandler sales process they had relied on for years was preserved exactly, making the transition feel like an upgrade rather than a disruption.
The clearest proof of success: no one has logged into Dynamics since go-live. Data that previously arrived late (or not at all) is now available to every stakeholder who needs it, when they need it. For a team that once had to wait until a deal closed to capture critical information, real-time pipeline visibility represents a meaningful shift in how the business operates.
