Moving from Salesforce to HubSpot removed double entry and manual work, with a KPI dashboard built for a recruitment business | Blackbelt Inc.

■ Company profile
Blackbelt Inc.
Website: https://blackbelt-corp.com/
Industry: Recruitment specialising in healthcare
Employees: 10 or fewer
Products: HubSpot Sales Hub (Enterprise) / HubSpot implementation and migration support

Blackbelt Inc. (founded 2024, Minato-ku, Tokyo) is a recruitment agency specialising in sales, marketing and engineering professionals in the healthcare industry, including pharmaceutical companies, medical devices and laboratory science.
Their strength is very high-quality matching at senior level, and they have grown on the basis of a firm network within the industry.

The problem: Salesforce adopted with growth in mind, and the burden of “configuration and data entry” for a small team

With future growth in view, Blackbelt adopted Salesforce right from the company’s founding and was building a sophisticated information infrastructure.

However, as a small, elite team balancing a huge daily matching workload with running the system, the amount of manual work and the limitations of the setup began to eat into the members’ valuable time.
Specifically, they faced three main problems.

Problem 1: heavy manual work and the burden of updating statuses

Candidate information obtained from LinkedIn and other main acquisition channels all had to be entered into Salesforce by hand, which took a great deal of effort in an extremely busy working day.
In addition, when a placement was closed or a candidate received an offer, the statuses of several related records had to be changed by hand, which made gaps between reality and the data almost inevitable.

Problem 2: difficulty customising Salesforce, and “double management” caused by permission errors

They wanted to tag records flexibly with multiple healthcare-specific specialisms (such as cardiology and orthopaedics), but under the Salesforce setup at the time, category selection with the standard features was limited, and they found it hard to customise at the speed the work required.
On top of that, because of account permission settings, sales staff had trouble accessing the “Match (deal)” screen, a core feature.
To keep day-to-day client work the top priority, they had no choice but to manage the pipeline, selection process and activities in Notion as a stopgap, and, against their wishes, keeping data in two places became a bottleneck.

Problem 3: no resource to build analysis reports, and KPIs in a black box

Another issue to address was that conversion metrics (KPIs) by individual, such as the number of meetings, documents sent and calls, were not visible.
Salesforce is extremely feature-rich, but creating and maintaining reports that show these “day-to-day conversion metrics (KPIs)” exactly as needed required a huge amount of configuration work.
As a result, a small team kept busy with daily sales activity never got round to reporting, and their valuable activity data was not being fully used for analysis.

Adopting HubSpot: CRM design and configuration support matched to their business processes

To resolve these problems, NowVillage, as a HubSpot partner, listened carefully to the detailed requirements of Blackbelt, who had decided to migrate from Salesforce, and supported the design and configuration of a CRM matched to their day-to-day business processes.
Specifically, we did four main things.

① Simplifying the object structure and separating records by view

Rather than separating “candidates” and “hiring managers at client companies” within contacts (customer information), we combined them into a single contact object. We then proposed adding a classification flag as a property and switching what is displayed using view filters.
We also created a custom card for “CV text” on the record page, so that the necessary information can be stored there and found more easily.

② Flexible development of sales, invoicing and gross margin properties

Respecting their wish to keep the sense of achievement when a placement closes, we deliberately left the move to the “Close” stage as a manual step, while setting up a workflow that automatically creates a “revenue” record when a deal reaches a particular stage.

To prevent missed invoices tied to start dates, we added “start date” and “invoiced” checkboxes to the deal properties and built a view (invoicing targets) that instantly shows “people starting this month who have not yet been invoiced”. We also implemented logic that automatically calculates “gross margin” by deducting costs paid to job boards and similar from the fee (revenue).

③ Implementing matching and making job description copying more efficient

We placed a “matching screen (Matching Extension)” in HubSpot, following the previous design, so that candidate records and jobs can be searched against each other’s criteria.

We also implemented a feature that copies job data such as “company name”, “position”, “responsibilities” and “annual salary” with a single click, ready to paste smoothly into emails and elsewhere, reducing the effort of typing by hand.

For more on Matching Extension, see here

④ Building a weekly KPI dashboard

So that the progress of sales activity can be checked easily, we built a custom dashboard that tracks conversion metrics such as the following.

• Meetings with candidates, and meetings with companies
• New jobs created
• Recommendation letters sent
• Interviews secured and held
• Calls (call history by candidate and by company contact)

Using goal templates and similar features, we set up an environment in which each person’s progress is easy to review weekly (Monday to Sunday).

Results

Rather than reproducing the Salesforce design as it was, we migrated to and built a design that makes the most of HubSpot’s flexibility. As a result, the company is now seeing the following concrete results in operational efficiency and use of data.

Integrated information infrastructure: no more “double management” with Notion

Sales staff can now access all deal information smoothly from the same platform.

As a result, the work of “manually duplicating the pipeline, selection progress and activities in Notion to work around the Salesforce permission problem” is no longer needed, and the risk of data diverging between systems has been eliminated.

Less administrative work: faster CV searches and job information copying

By storing information in the custom “CV text” card on the record page, candidates’ backgrounds can now be searched quickly by keyword.

In addition, because the necessary job data such as “company name”, “position”, “responsibilities” and “annual salary” can now be copied from the matching screen with a single click and pasted straight into emails, the manual typing and transcription errors involved in each match have been reduced.

A sounder management process: preventing missed invoices and calculating gross margin automatically

With an invoicing view that links the “start date” and “invoiced” checkboxes, “people starting this month who have not been invoiced” are filtered instantly, giving even a small team a system that prevents missed invoices before they happen.
And with a calculated property that automatically deducts costs paid to job boards and similar from the fee (gross revenue), accurate “gross margin” can be seen in the system without any manual calculation.

A visible sales process: weekly tracking of the key conversion metric (number of first interviews)

With the weekly (Monday to Sunday) custom dashboard in operation, meetings by candidate and by company, recommendation letters sent and call history (number of calls) are now collated automatically.

In particular, progress on the “number of first interviews”, which the company regards as the most important factor in improving conversion to placements, can now be checked and assessed at a glance in the Monday morning review, and a cycle of reviewing sales and taking action based on precise figures rather than gut feeling has taken hold.

A comment from Mr Kure, Representative of Blackbelt Inc.

“We were searching for a way to run things flexibly around our business processes, share data in a timely way, and make it visible through reports.

NowVillage took the time to understand our recruitment business deeply, and then made proposals that made the most of HubSpot’s strengths.

In particular, the matching feature that lets us match jobs and candidates smoothly, the invoicing view that ensures payments are managed reliably, and the dashboard that shows our weekly numbers at a glance have been a real help.

They also taught us how to use it very carefully, and now we can easily add properties and customise things ourselves. Migrating has allowed us to put in place the efficient way of working we had been aiming for.”

The HubSpot certified partner behind the implementation: NowVillage Inc.

As a HubSpot partner, NowVillage Inc. provides everything from initial tool configuration to building CRM/SFA that directly improves efficiency and results, based on a deep understanding of each client’s business characteristics and goals.
In recruitment and in B2B sales more widely, if you are thinking

“We want to reduce the burden of daily data entry and administration”
“We want to switch to a system our team finds intuitive to use”

please feel free to talk to NowVillage.

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