Review of Clearbox Strategies — HubSpot/AirCall Onboarding

We engaged Clearbox Strategies in January to migrate our CRM and communication systems from Pipedrive and Aloware to HubSpot and AirCall. This review is meant to give a factual account of our experience for other businesses evaluating a HubSpot onboarding partner. Scope of work: Full migration of CRM data, workflow automations, lead routing, and SMS/communication systems, along with team training on the new platform. Timeline: Purchase and engagement began January 29. Implementation and configuration ran from early February through early June. Team training sessions were held, including a working session in late March covering email creation, automation, and segments. Training sessions were 15 min google meets, held each week with an overseas team. They were attentive, and seemingly helpful, although most meetings didn't have much clear direction and usually ended with "do you guys have any questions?" and since we had never used HubSpot we didn't know what to ask. By mid-May, the Clearbox team assured us that the system was considered ready for go-live, with remaining work described as final cleanup and activation. We trusted that the team was correct and then quickly discovered they were not. What did not work as expected after go-live: * Lead stage changes ("Connected," "Qualified") triggered duplicate leads and deals to be auto-created * SMS automations had un-enrollment logic gaps, allowing multiple messages to go out in a short window in some cases * Marketing emails were not sending from the correct sender address/name for individual reps in several sequences * Marketing segments were not configured correctly, affecting webinar invitation, reminder, and recording emails * Lead routing/round-robin assignment did not follow specified exclusions, and leads (and deals) were at times assigned to the mismatched sales reps * A number of backend fields had labeling and configuration errors After go-live support reply times reduced and we waited many days in some cases to get replies on what we considered critical fixes needed. Eventually, the CEO of Clearbox got involved but his replies were also delayed. After several months of working to resolve these issues, we made the decision to end the engagement and bring in a new onboarding partner to complete the stabilization. We requested a refund for the unresolved portion of the work; Clearbox declined to offer one. We share this account not to discourage anyone from working with Clearbox, but so that other businesses considering them for a HubSpot migration have an accurate picture of what our engagement involved.

Wonderful!

I have really enjoyed working with Clearbox. They know their stuff and guided me to success! Clay and his team are the best!