Financial Lender Migrates from Marketing Cloud to HubSpot Marketing Enterprise
INTRODUCTION Greystone modernizes communications strategies with HubSpot Marketing
Greystone is a private commercial real estate finance and investment company with unmatched experience in debt, equity, investment sales and loan servicing solutions. With over 13 billion in annual loan originations nationwide, Greystone's creative capital have been refined for over 35 years.
Burdensome processes, gaps in capabilities, and failed sends were about to be a thing of the past as they planned their migration into HubSpot.
CHALLENGES SFMC was overcomplicated and underperforming.
The Greystone marketing team was frustrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- They were unable to tell if leads were qualified.
- Marketing Cloud required support from a full-time partner, and they craved autonomy.
- The complicated production process led to elongated production time and extra effort.
- Lack of empowerment and high support costs.
- Lack of trust in outsourced partners who held the keys.
- Had added on Einstein, but were unhappy with the cost-to-value.
- Important communications on behalf of Originators were suffering from failed sends.
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The timeline to migrate was tight, requiring a collaborative effort and shared workload between the Greystone and Instrumental Group teams.
SOLUTION Migrating to HubSpot and Message IQ.
Instrumental Group worked with Greystone to develop a phased attack plan, knowing success hinged on the collective ability to activate HubSpot with a host of campaign assets and a working integration with Salesforce. Once re-platformed, they could move into a continual expansion and improvement process.
The phase 1 migration project included the critical MVP components for onboarding, asset recreation, Marketing & Content Hub Enterprise configuration, and Salesforce <> HubSpot integration.
HubSpot Marketing & Content Enterprise Onboarding
Instrumental Group, introduced a dedicated specialist for HubSpot Onboarding to help Greystone activate their new HubSpot license quickly. The HubSpot Success Manager (HSM) ensured they had a well-rounded and complete understanding of the entire HubSpot Suite. The HSM set forth to complete the following steps.
- Kickoff and Goal Setting: We begin all onboarding projects with a dedicated kickoff call. The call covered introductions, the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder, the project's priorities, and areas of focus for subsequent training calls.
- Global License Configuration: We offer to pick up all the initial settings and global configurations on new HubSpot licenses. We started with a workbook to ensure we had the proper branding elements, then jumped in to set up the Marketing Enterprise features to ensure their instance was ready for customization.
- Primary license brand elements.
- Custom contact & company fields.
- Website integration to pull all web consumption into HubSpot.
- Template Setup & Styling: One of the big value-adds we offer new Marketing license owners is build-ready templates for landing pages and emails. Themes were imported and styled to Greystone's branding.
- User Support: Our HSM also reviewed early progress, offered advice and direction, and set up their first training call. A master training dashboard was built in HubSpot to house helpful resources and training recordings.
Integrating HubSpot with Salesforce Sales Cloud
Our team was tapped to successfully configure the native application to establish a bi-directional sync between HubSpot and Sales Cloud.
Discovery Series
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Planning: Outline processes, identify data points, and put together an integration plan.
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Tool orientation: Mapping guidance, basic workflow logic, and integration rule settings.
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Data architecture and segmenting: Orientation with HubSpot's data tools available at your plan level, as well as quality assurance tactics.
Application Configuration
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App Installation: We completed a step-by-step process to install the Native Salesforce app developed by HubSpot in the HubSpot app marketplace.
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Settings Configuration: Our DA then carefully configured the native application with the host of appropriate integration settings available.
Integration Documentation
- Documentation: We provided detailed project tracking documentation, supplemented with our handy integration templates to streamline the integration process.
Marketing Configuration & Asset Recreation
Our team led a series of discovery and strategy calls to establish the requirements for the MVP launch of HubSpot's sophisticated marketing capabilities. This element of the project truly supercharged and streamlined the production process, providing improved autonomy to the Greystone marketing team.
Marketing Hub Configuration
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Subscription Center setup to provide choice and preferences to subscribers.
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Opt-out lists and automation for non-marketing contacts to prevent unnecessary data fees.
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Lead Object and Lifecycle Stage configuration for improved lead qualification.
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Email workflows for nurturing and automation with Smart Lists to segment the database.
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Dynamic Originator signatures for all Originators at the organization, including contact information, headshots, meeting links, and profile page links.
- Dynamic headers and footers to ensure proper branding between Greystone and real estate partners.
- Robust email marketing preference center to maximize personal preference of recipients while reducing bulk unsubscribes.
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Editable fields for dynamic population of background color, button color, button text, fonts, and number of characters in the description.
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Recreation of Greystone's 10 priority campaigns.
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Recreation of 3 reporting dashboards.
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Creation of 4 priority email templates by cloning the dynamic template and adjusting for specific use cases.
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Design and development of an internal landing page with a form and subscription status.
"Our relationship with Instrumental has been a pleasure. We appreciated their guidance and expertise as we re-platformed, and consider them a strategic partner as we continue building on our success."
Pascale Sejean
MAKING AN IMPACT Generating big engagement from a priority email campaign
As the team moved into the following support plan, it was clear HubSpot could revolutionize the way they communicated with contacts of all types. One of Greystone's primary channels is email marketing. While they leverage paid media, social media, content, SEO, and other tactics, email marketing is critical.
The Greystone marketing team leverages dynamic email templates to send monthly rate updates and market outlooks on behalf of the Originators. The monthly rates email campaign is foundational to keeping in touch with prospects and generating interest from potential clients. Engagement with this email campaign is a great indicator of interest and a sales trigger for Originators to reach out to cultivate the opportunity further. Over the first 5 months of 2025, Greystone found tremendous success with the campaign:
- 42.71% open rates!
- 27.86% click-through rates!
- 99.26% overall email deliverability
SUCCESSFUL REPLATFORM Streamlined marketing operations
As most migration projects, the journey to re-platform Greystone out of Salesforce and into HubSpot was filled with hiccups, wrinkles, and challenges. Instrumental Group's project team worked side by side with the Greystone marketing team through it all.
From kickoff to wrap up, the teams leaned on each other to overcome all obstacles successfully. As it all came together, Greystone was able to activate its marketing strategies. Ongoing efforts to refine, streamline, and produce are happening even as you read this article. With HubSpot, the sky is the limit.