Dutch HR software's HubSpot Marketing Foundation: One Platform for Marketing and Content

This Dutch HR software company replaced ActiveCampaign and WordPress with HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub to run marketing and content from one platform. With ICP-driven lead scoring, lifecycle stages, and a clean migrated database in place, the marketing team works in one system and prioritizes the leads most likely to convert. A move to HubSpot Sales Hub follows in phase two.

Industry: HR Software (Software & Technology)
Company Size: Small (1 to 50 employees)
Services: HubSpot Implementation, CRM Migration, Data Governance

The case in one paragraph

The company builds HR software designed around continuous performance dialogue and talent engagement. The product philosophy was forward-thinking. The commercial tech stack told a different story.

Leads arrived, but the right ones did not convert. The team scored leads with a manual Bronze, Silver, Gold label system that measured engagement, not company fit, and had never been tested against a defined ICP.

Elixir replaced ActiveCampaign and WordPress with HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub, migrated and cleaned company and contact data from both ActiveCampaign and Capsule, around 7,000 companies in total, and rebuilt lead scoring around ICP fit, with lifecycle stages and nurturing workflows.

The company now runs marketing and content from one platform, with sales kept on Capsule through a temporary bridge during the transition and a planned move to Sales Hub in phase two.

One Platform for Marketing and Content

Lead Scoring and Lifecycle Stages in Place

A Clean, Structured Customer Database

The Challenge

Strong product vision, scattered commercial operations

The company builds HR software designed around continuous performance dialogue and talent engagement. The product philosophy was forward-thinking. The commercial tech stack told a different story.

Five disconnected tools, no single view

The company's commercial operations ran across Capsule CRM, ActiveCampaign, WordPress, Webinar Geek, and Moneybird for invoicing. Zapier workflows linked some of these in a fragile setup. No single platform showed the full customer journey, and each team worked in its own system with little data moving between them.

Leads arrived, but the right ones did not convert

The team scored leads with a manual system of labels: Bronze, Silver, Gold. Contacts were classified by hand, with Gold treated as sales-ready. The criteria behind the labels were never formally defined and never validated with sales. Scoring tracked engagement, opens, clicks, and page views, and never checked whether a contact's company matched the profile sales could close. Volume was never the problem. Fit was.

Lead qualification also depended on manual company research on LinkedIn, which did not scale with volume.

Limited visibility across the funnel

Marketing had little insight into what happened to a lead after handoff. In one case, marketing counted 30 high-potential leads while the CRM reflected only 3. Campaign reach also suffered from email deliverability problems, with expected emails landing in spam folders and creating double work on follow-up.

"The lead generation to lead qualification process is a black box. We need better visibility into what happens before sales engagement." Sales Manager

A website only one person could update

The website added another dependency. One person held the keys, and every update routed through them. The team wanted a site anyone in marketing could change without waiting.

"The current website is complicated to update due to its use of AI and HTML, making the marketing team dependent on one person. We need a flexible website that anyone on the marketing team can easily update." Marketing Director

Why the company moved to HubSpot

The company wanted one platform for marketing and content, with lead scoring and reporting the team could run without manual workarounds.

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub fit the requirement because they replaced both ActiveCampaign and WordPress, and gave marketing and sales a shared data model on one system.

Elixir was brought in to run the migration, build the HubSpot environment, rebuild lead scoring around ICP fit, and set up the governance the previous stack lacked.

The scope was phased on purpose. Marketing and content went first, against a fixed go-live date, with sales kept running on Capsule through a temporary bridge during the transition. A full move to Sales Hub, including deals and activities, was planned for phase two.

How We Made It Happen

1. Commercial process audit and roadmap

Elixir mapped the company's workflows across the existing systems and identified the critical data flows, integration points, and process gaps. With a November start and a January 22 go-live for Marketing Hub and Content Hub, speed mattered. The audit set the sequence: marketing and content first, sales on Capsule through a temporary bridge, Sales Hub in phase two.

2. Data migration and governance

Elixir migrated companies and contacts from ActiveCampaign and Capsule into HubSpot. The data set covered around 7,000 companies, roughly 5,000 contacts from ActiveCampaign and 4,500 from Capsule, with some contacts present in both systems. Because the company had no clear view of which records represented active customers, the migration included deduplication and cleanup, so the team started on a structured database rather than carrying the old fragmentation into the new platform. Migration of deals and activities is part of phase two.

3. Marketing Hub and Content Hub configuration

Elixir configured Marketing Hub Professional with lifecycle stages, nurturing workflows, forms, and email templates, and rebuilt lead scoring from the ground up.

The old Bronze, Silver, Gold labels held no numeric logic, so they could not be carried into HubSpot's scoring. Elixir rebuilt scoring around ICP fit as the gate, not a bonus, so contacts outside the target profile drop out before behavioral scoring runs. Sales and marketing defined the MQL criteria together.

Existing Gold contacts carried into an MQL lifecycle stage, which preserved their commercial intent. The rest of the pool started fresh on a new combined engagement score. Those contacts build their score from new activity going forward, because the company had no consolidated view of past engagement across the old tools to translate into the new model. Given the go-live timeline and the spread of data across systems, the company chose this approach over delaying launch to reconstruct historical scores.

For Content Hub, Elixir worked with the Grow Big theme and built 8 to 10-page templates aligned with the company's branding, set up so the team can create and manage content without developer support after launch.

4. Webinar tracking and data integrity

During setup, the Webinar Geek integration surfaced a data problem. Attendees who registered through Webinar Geek's own form landed on a second contact record, so their webinar activity attached to that record instead of the email they used on the HubSpot form. Split across two records, that engagement never reached lead scoring.

Elixir resolved this during implementation, so each attendee's webinar activity now attaches to the contact record they use on the HubSpot form. Webinar engagement feeds scoring on a single record per person.

5. A lifecycle-aware sunset flow

Elixir built a custom sunset flow to keep the marketing contact count aligned to real engagement. HubSpot bills on marketing contacts, the people you actively market to. Contacts sitting in the CRM without engagement should not stay billable.

The flow works in stages. Contacts with no marketing engagement for 45 days move to pending. After another 14 days without activity, a final check sets them to non-marketing, so they stay in the CRM but leave the billable pool. A lifecycle stage check runs at both points, so contacts in an active sales stage or with customer status stay out of the flow. Any engagement along the way resets a contact to active.

The flow never changes a live relationship to non-marketing to save cost.

sunset_flow_overview

6. Team enablement

Elixir ran onboarding sessions across Marketing Hub and Content Hub, combining technical walkthroughs with hands-on campaign and content creation, so the team operates the platform independently after launch.

The Result

The company replaced ActiveCampaign and WordPress with HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional and Content Hub Professional to run marketing and content from one platform.

What Elixir delivered:

Migrated and cleaned company and contact data from both systems, around 7,000 companies in total
Rebuilt lead scoring around ICP fit, replacing the manual Bronze, Silver, Gold labels, with MQL criteria set by sales and marketing together
Built one system where the marketing team manages campaigns, leads, and engagement
Built a lifecycle-aware sunset flow that keeps the marketing contact count aligned to engagement, so the company markets only to people who engage.

The project ran phased. Marketing and content went live on a fixed date. Sales stayed on Capsule through a temporary bridge, with the move to Sales Hub, including deals and activities, underway in phase two.

The team now runs the marketing foundation independently, with follow-up focused on the leads most likely to convert.

Start your own HubSpot marketing foundation

The company moved marketing and content off ActiveCampaign and WordPress and onto HubSpot, with ICP-driven lead scoring and a clean database the team runs itself.

If your marketing runs across disconnected tools, leads come in but the right ones do not convert, or you plan a phased move to HubSpot while keeping sales running, book a call.

Let's connect

FAQ

How do you migrate from ActiveCampaign and a separate CRM into HubSpot without carrying over messy data?

A migration is a cleanup opportunity, not a copy job. When contact data sits in two systems, an email tool and a CRM, the same person and company often appear in both, and neither source shows which records are active customers. Before loading anything into HubSpot, Elixir deduplicates across sources, removes inactive records, and sets data standards so the new platform starts clean.

In the Dialog project this covered around 7,000 companies and contacts from both ActiveCampaign and Capsule, with overlap between the two. Scope the cleanup before the migration date, not after, because cleaning inside the live platform later is slower and harder to control.

Should you move marketing and sales onto HubSpot at the same time, or in phases?

Sequence by risk and deadline, not by ambition. Moving marketing, content, and sales at once raises the chance of a missed go-live and disrupts active sales work. A phased approach puts marketing and content live first, keeps the existing CRM running through a temporary bridge, and moves sales in a second phase once the foundation is stable.

Dialog went live on Marketing Hub and Content Hub on a fixed date while sales stayed on Capsule, with Sales Hub, deals, and activities following in phase two. Phase the work when sales continuity matters and the marketing replacement has a hard deadline.

Why do leads come in but fail to convert, and how does HubSpot help?

Volume without scoring sends follow-up to the wrong people. If a marketing tool has no lead scoring and the team uses no lifecycle stages, every lead looks the same, so effort goes to low-fit contacts while high-intent ones go cold. HubSpot Marketing Hub adds lead scoring based on engagement and fit, and lifecycle stages give marketing and sales one model of where a contact sits in the buyer journey.

For Dialog, leads were arriving but not converting because the previous setup had neither. Define lifecycle stages and a basic scoring model first, then refine the thresholds once real engagement data builds up.

How long does a HubSpot Marketing Hub and Content Hub implementation take for a small B2B company?

Scope and data quality drive the timeline more than company size. For a small B2B team replacing an email tool and a website, with a migration from two source systems, the first go-live runs in the range of two to three months when the scope is fixed and the data cleanup is planned in advance. Dialog started in November and went live on Marketing Hub and Content Hub on January 22. Lock the go-live scope early and treat data cleanup as its own work stream, because migration surprises are the most common cause of slipped dates.

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