Client Profile

Global Data Innovation guides CEOs, Boards, and executive teams to lead confidently in the face of AI, privacy, and cybersecurity risk. Founded by renowned attorney Dominique Shelton Leipzig, GDI advises companies through certificate programs, industry-tailored engagements, and annual Digital Trust Summits.

For GDI, relevant, timely communication with its audience isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s how the business runs.

Case Study Highlights

Global Data Innovation had outgrown Salesforce in the area it mattered most. GDI’s audience relationship depends on consistent, segmented, well-timed email — and Salesforce, as configured, couldn’t deliver it. The team was effectively unable to execute basic campaigns, let alone the personalized, event-driven communication their audience expected.

Simple Machines led a clean, low-risk migration from Salesforce to HubSpot. We mapped data and processes up front, moved records with validation and QA, configured HubSpot to match GDI’s sales and marketing workflows before go-live, and trained the team on the platform they’d actually use every day.

Today, the team runs personalized, highly segmented campaigns driven by events attended, company profile, and engagement behavior

Key deliverables included:

  • Salesforce to HubSpot CRM migration

  • Sales process mapping, pipeline design and lifecycle stage alignment

  • HubSpot training and role-based process documentation

  • Marketing Hub configuration: subscription types, lists, segmentation properties, templates

  • Dashboard setup and custom reporting

The Challenge

  • Salesforce had become the bottleneck for the exact capability GDI most needed: reaching its audience. The GDI team could not execute even basic email campaigns out of Salesforce. For a business whose growth is tied to audience trust and ongoing engagement, filling that gap was a top priority.

  • Despite consistent efforts to troubleshoot, campaign emails to segmented contact lists could never be sent from Salesforce due to unresolved object-level bugs — forcing the team to manage outreach manually through Outlook mail merges and a patchwork of Google Sheets and Docs.

  • GDI needed a partner with the technical experience to quickly and seamlessly migrate them from Salesforce to HubSpot so that they could rebuild their email program without further delay.

The Solution

  • Simple Machines led the full migration from Salesforce to HubSpot — planning, data and process mapping, import, validation, and QA — including a Marketing Hub implementation designed around GDI’s segmentation needs. To ensure clean contact lists, we helped set up and leverage NeverBounce for email validation as part of the data cleanup process.

  • To help GDI identify who fits their ICP in HubSpot, prioritize nurture flows, and personalize communications, we leveraged several custom properties such as event attendance, board member association labels, and smart property data enrichment that fed into fit and engagement scoring.

  • Once email was up and running in HubSpot, we further improved the channel by integrating Seventh Sense for personalized send time optimization, Enrollem for automated Sequence enrollment, and created an n8n workflow to track bounced sales emails in HubSpot.

  • Along with the migration, we delivered training and documentation to the GDI  team, and set up automated weekly reports to keep the leadership team updated on key metrics.

The Results

Improved Sales Email Engagement

Across Sequences, GDI enjoys a 36.88% open rate, 2.58% reply rate, and 41.69% company engagement rate.

Marketing Emails Optimized

By leveraging segmentation and optimization tactics, GDI’s marketing emails improved to 7.4% click-through rate and only 0.3% unsubscribe rate (compared to HubSpot’s benchmark of 0.45%).

Event-Driven Segmentation

GDI can now prioritize which leads to follow up with based signals that actually matter: event attendance, ICP fit, engagement history, and lifecycle stage.

Data-Driven Optimization

With weekly automated reports providing insights into lead engagement and email performance, GDI can continuously optimize the channel with trustworthy data.

AI Chatbot
“Simple Machines was a great partner in CRM migration from Salesforce and in setting up our email marketing afterwards. Charlie and Christine are knowledgeable, clear, and good at translating our business requirements and workflows into matching processes in HubSpot. Highly recommend!”

  • Dominique Shelton Leipzig, CEO and Founder, Global Data Innovation

Let’s Chat

Want to be our next success story? Fill out the form to get started.