About

Experience

Hubspot and other CRMs

I have a depth and a breadth of experience in CRMs—as an end user, an admin, on the decision team for evaluating and selecting a CRM for implementation, and the manager of vendors we worked with to help us with our implementation.

Just in the last couple years, I led two CRM migrations. The first was from Salesforce to a CRM built for nonprofits. We contracted a vendor to help us, but we found it can be difficult to communicate our business needs and explain how our business works to a vendor while learning a whole new CRM and just getting used to the change in the clicks and how to use the software. That one didn't pan out, and so I led us to migrate from there to Hubspot. This time, I decided we should handle the migration ourselves. One of my employees also had experience in Hubspot, and between the two of us, I didn't think we could find a vendor to do it better or more efficiently than we could do it. To be honest, we did a great job. In six weeks, the core of the migration was complete and the key function of Hubspot was active. We accomplished more in six weeks than we accomplished in nine months in the previous CRM migration attempt where we partnered with a vendor.

I had been a Salesforce end user, with some admin access, during a short stint in customer success role before that and developed some basic data-capture improvements that the sales and customer success teams appreciated.

I've also worked in deployments of both Salesforce and Hubspot.

My general background

Most recently, I was Chief Technology Officer at a medium-size nonprofit in Austin, TX. I was responsible for our tech architecture, tech operations, managing my team of two employees, IT & Information Security, and filling in the gaps in other areas—or as my boss would put in his out-of-office responder emails, "For all other YAL logistics questions, please contact Philip Parker."

Not long after college, I joined a small software startup as junior product manager, also responsible for customer support. It was a super lean team, so I was the only person doing customer support, which was fun because I got to pick the support tool, create the expectations for how we answer support requests, collaborate with counsel on SLA terms, and all those sorts of things that generally a junior person might not get to have much influence in. I worked there for about six and a half years, jumping into other areas of the company:

• Customer Success
• DevOps
• IT
• even wrote some (really basic) code on occasion (that got pushed to production; I was proud of this at the time)
• professional services