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From Zoho to HubSpot: how Great Place To Work unified marketing, sales and service

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From Zoho to HubSpot: how Great Place To Work unified marketing, sales and service
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Great Place To Work helps organisations understand and improve their workplace culture, and recognises the ones that get it right through Certification and its Best Workplaces lists. In APAC, the organisation runs across eight markets, each with its own website domain, sales lead, marketing business partner and local commercial rules, all supporting the same global brand and the same survey and certification products.

That structure is the strength of the business and it is also what makes the systems side hard. Every market needs to look and feel local while the region needs to see one consistent view of its pipeline, its customers and its marketing performance. Great Place To Work came to Engaging.io to build that view, and to move a region off a CRM that could no longer support the way the team wanted to work.

The problem
Where the platform reached its limits

Before this project, the APAC region ran marketing, sales and customer success on Zoho. The platform held the records, but the automations and actions that the team wanted to deploy were not supported by the platform.

Lead nurture, quote and deal management and reporting presented challenges that required high-value work being manually handled in each market with limited shared visibility across regions.

Problem 1:

Automated nurture in Zoho lived outside the CRM, in a separate product, so an automated follow-up programme meant keeping lists, consent and behaviour in sync across two systems. That made anything beyond a straightforward send harder to build and harder to trust, and it put a ceiling on what the marketing team could realistically automate across eight markets at once.

Problem 2:

Attribution reporting was single-touch, which meant the region could see the last thing a lead touched but not the combination of webinars, events, content and paid activity that actually built the relationship. For a business where the buying journey is long and multi-market, that gap sat directly in front of the questions leadership most wanted answered.

Problem 3:

Quoting, billing, proposals and pipeline management each worked somewhere different. Pricing that varies by market and by exchange rate had to be reconciled outside the CRM, and quote documents sat apart from the deal record they belonged to. Bringing a single deal to close meant moving between systems that did not talk to each other.

Problem 4:

Customer Success ran on its own Zoho product, which meant the team delivering the work and the team selling it were looking at different records. Prioritising by customer health or satisfaction signals was not possible from within the service tooling, disconnected tools preventing the team from new opportunities.

The solution
One regional platform, designed from the data up
We worked with GPTW to move from their Zoho instance and various tools, into a single HubSpot platform spanning Marketing Hub Enterprise, Operations Hub Professional, Sales Hub and Service Hub Enterprise, configured for eight markets inside one business unit with market-specific domains, footers and forms.

The decision that shaped everything else was to design the data model around what Great Place To Work needed next, rather than porting the existing structure across. At the start of each phase we worked through a sample export with the client's technical lead and agreed what should carry forward, which fields mattered to the way the team works today, and what belonged to a previous era of the business. That gave us a deliberately scoped, purpose-built data model instead of an inherited one, and every subsequent decision on properties, associations, imports and reporting was made against it.

We sequenced the work so each hub built on the one before it. Marketing came first because it owns lead capture, consent and the lifecycle logic everything downstream depends on. Sales followed once those foundations were settled. Service came last, because a service pipeline is only as good as the sales handover feeding it. Delivering hub by hub also gave a team spread across eight countries time to absorb each change before the next arrived.
The Strategic Plan
The Implementation
The process
  1. We started by agreeing with Great Place To Work what the region needed its CRM to hold going forward, and shaped the HubSpot structure around that rather than replicating the previous system.
  2. Doing this first meant everything built afterwards sat on a model designed for the way the business operates now.
Design the data model first
The process
  1. We started by agreeing with Great Place To Work what the region needed its CRM to hold going forward, and shaped the HubSpot structure around that rather than replicating the previous system.
  2. Doing this first meant everything built afterwards sat on a model designed for the way the business operates now.
Stand up marketing as the front door of the region
The process
  1. With the model agreed, we configured Marketing Hub Enterprise and Operations Hub Professional so every market could capture leads consistently, run automated nurture from within the CRM, and report into one regional view.
  2. Marketing had to come first because it owns the forms, consent, lifecycle stages and lead data that sales and service later rely on.
Bring the commercial process onto one platform
The process
  1. Once records and lifecycle logic were live, we built the lead to deal journey, the product and pricing structure, quoting and renewals, so the full commercial motion ran in one place with the quote, the pricing and the deal record all connected.
Connect service and fulfilment to the same customer record
The process
  1. With sales live, we configured Service Hub so tickets, fulfillment and customer feedback ran against the same record the sales team works from, making the handover at closed won a continuation rather than a restart.
Build the team's independence in parallel, not at the end
The process
  1. Throughout every phase we worked alongside nominated super users and the region's technical lead, then delivered the training sessions, recordings and documentation so Great Place To Work could run, extend and change the platform without depending on us.
The Implementation

Data and migration
We configured the native Zoho connector and ran object to object mapping sessions with the client's technical lead, agreeing field by field what would carry forward.  Inclusion criteria were set in advance so the migration brought across records with active commercial relevance and left historical artefacts behind, and imports were configured to preserve existing HubSpot values rather than overwrite them where a source field was empty. Operations Hub workflows were built to maintain data consistency automatically after go live.

Marketing
We built modular email and landing page templates from the client's brand guidelines, designed so the in-house team could assemble their own campaigns afterwards without returning to an agency. Eight markets were configured inside a single business unit with additional domains and dynamic footers, so a send from Vietnam or the Philippines carries the correct local entity details without needing a separate portal. 


Contact Us, Demo, Get Certified and Best Workplaces forms were rebuilt in HubSpot and replicated per market with data privacy and consent handling, using a hidden country field to route submissions to the right owner. We configured subscription types, lifecycle stages, lead scoring, and nurture workflows covering new business, closed lost, renewal and remarketing, alongside native Google and Meta connections and two reporting dashboards.


Sales 
We built the lead pipeline through to deal creation, with deals generated on qualification rather than on a meeting booking, and country deal pipelines configured under the initial licence. Pricing was the most technically involved piece: we used HubSpot calculation properties to reproduce the region's pricing model natively, handling market-specific pricing, a fixed internal exchange rate for consistent reporting, tax treatment that varies by country, and discretionary discounting. 


Products were structured into the Product Library and flow through to line items, quotes and subscriptions. We integrated Qwilr for proposals with terms and conditions blocks, connected Xero as the billing source of truth, and built renewal logic so opportunities are created ahead of the renewal date automatically. Permission sets, the Sales Workspace, sequences, playbooks and both management and individual dashboards completed the build.


Service
We configured ticket pipelines separating inbound support from product fulfilment, with round-robin allocation and routing rules that send higher-tier customers directly to their assigned Customer Success Manager.  SLAs were built with two levels of escalation, alongside CSAT and NPS surveys triggered at delivery milestones, a knowledge base, a chatflow for self-service, and a playbook the team could clone. For the parent and child ticket requirement we recommended the simpler of two viable structures, implementing a ticket to ticket association rather than a custom object layer, so the team could maintain and extend it without specialist help.

 

The Impact and Results
One platform, one customer record, one regional view

 

Great Place To Work APAC now runs marketing, sales and service for eight markets on a single platform, with one customer record behind all three.


Automated nurture now runs natively inside the CRM rather than across connected products, so the marketing team can build, launch and adjust programmes for eight markets from one place, using templates they own. Reporting moved from single-touch to a data model built to support multi-touch attribution and customer journey analysis, which were the two capabilities the region set out to gain. 

On the commercial side, quoting, pricing, billing and pipeline now sit against the same deal record, so a quote reflects the region's pricing model automatically and renewals surface as opportunities ahead of time. Service and fulfilment work from the same record as sales, so what was sold and what is delivered are visible in one place.


The clearest measure of the handover is what the team did next. When the region upgraded its Sales Hub licence, Great Place To Work's technical lead consolidated the country pipelines into a single pipeline using business units without needing us.
With the foundation in place, the region can extend into further markets without rebuilding, and can keep adding capability on a system its own team knows how to run.

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