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

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HP ： https://blackbelt-corp.com/
Blackbelt Inc.
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 roles in healthcare, covering pharmaceutical companies, medical devices and life sciences.

Their strength is very high-quality matching at senior level, and they have grown on a firm network within the industry.

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

With future growth in view, Blackbelt adopted Salesforce early and built a sophisticated information base.
But as a small, senior team balancing a heavy daily matching workload with running the system, the amount of manual work and the limits of the configuration began to eat into their time.

Specifically, they faced three problems.

Problem 1: heavy manual work and the burden of updating statuses
Candidate information from LinkedIn and other main sources had to be entered into Salesforce by hand, which was a significant cost within an already busy day.

When a placement 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 easy to create.

Problem 2: Salesforce hard to customise, permission errors, and double entry
They wanted to tag records flexibly with multiple healthcare specialisms such as cardiology and orthopaedics, but the Salesforce configuration at the time limited category selection in the standard features, making it hard to customise at the pace the work required.
Permission settings also meant sales staff struggled to reach the Match screen, a core part of the system.

To keep client work first, they had to manage their pipeline, selection process and activity in Notion as a stopgap, and data was unwillingly being maintained in two places.

Problem 3: no resource to build reports, and KPIs in a black box
Conversion rates by individual – meetings, documents sent, calls – were not visible, which they also wanted to fix.
Salesforce is very capable, but creating and maintaining reports that show those day-to-day rates exactly as needed required a great deal of configuration work.

With a small team busy with daily sales activity, reporting never reached the top of the list, and valuable activity data was not being used in analysis.

Adopting HubSpot: designing and configuring a CRM around how the work is done
To address this, as a HubSpot partner, NowVillage worked through Blackbelt’s detailed requirements as they decided to migrate from Salesforce, designing and configuring a CRM around their daily processes.

We did four main things.

1. Simplifying the object structure and separating by view
Rather than separating candidates and hiring managers, we brought them into a single contact object, added a classification flag as a property, and proposed switching between them with view filters.

We also created a custom card on the record page for CV text, so that the information needed is stored there and easy to search.

2. Flexible properties for sales, invoicing and margin

Respecting their wish to keep the sense of achievement at a placement, we deliberately kept the move to the Close stage manual, while setting up a workflow that creates a revenue record automatically when a deal reaches a given stage.

To avoid missed invoices around start dates, we added start date and invoiced checkboxes to the deal properties and built a view showing those due to start this month that have not been invoiced. We also implemented logic that calculates gross margin automatically, deducting costs such as job board fees from the placement fee.

3. Matching, and faster copying of job details

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

We also added a one-click copy of job data such as company, position, responsibilities and salary, ready to paste into an email, reducing manual typing. For more on Matching Extension,

see here

4. A weekly KPI dashboard

So that progress is easy to check, we built a custom dashboard following these rates.
Meetings with candidates and with companies
New jobs created
Submissions sent
Interviews secured and held

Calls (call history by candidate and by company contact)

Using goal templates and similar features, we set it up so that 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 a design that makes use of HubSpot’s flexibility, and the team has seen the following in efficiency and in the use of data.

Information in one place: no more double entry in Notion

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

The work of duplicating pipeline, selection progress and activity by hand into Notion, to work around the Salesforce permission problem, is no longer needed, and the risk of data diverging between systems has gone.

Less administration: faster CV search and job detail copying

Storing information in the custom card for CV text means candidate experience can be searched by keyword quickly.

And because company, position, responsibilities and salary can be copied from the matching screen with one click and pasted straight into an email, manual typing and transcription errors per match have fallen.

A sounder process: no missed invoices, and margin calculated automatically
The invoicing view, linking the start date and invoiced checkboxes, filters instantly to those starting this month who have not been invoiced, so even a small team has a way to prevent missed invoices.

And a calculated property that automatically deducts costs such as job board fees from the gross fee means accurate margin is visible in the system without manual work.

A visible sales process: weekly view of the key rate, first interviews

With the weekly dashboard running, meetings by candidate and by company, submissions sent and call volumes are collated automatically.

In particular, progress on first interviews, which the team sees as the most important rate on the way to a placement, can be taken in at a glance in the Monday morning review, and a cycle of reviewing sales on precise figures rather than impressions has taken hold.

A comment from Mr Kure, Representative of Blackbelt Inc.

“We were looking for a way to run things flexibly around our process, share data in good time, and make it visible through reports.

NowVillage understood our recruitment work deeply and made proposals that drew on HubSpot’s strengths.

The matching that brings jobs and candidates together smoothly, the invoicing view that makes sure payments are collected, and the dashboard that shows the weekly numbers at a glance have been a real help.

They taught us how to use it carefully too, and we can now add and customise properties ourselves. Migrating let us build the efficient way of working we had wanted.”

The certified HubSpot partner behind the project: NowVillage Inc.
As a HubSpot partner, NowVillage Inc. covers initial configuration and, with a deep understanding of each client’s business and goals, builds CRM and SFA that make work more efficient and lead directly to results.

In recruitment and in B2B sales more widely, if you
want to reduce the burden of daily data entry and administration

or want a system your team finds intuitive

please get in touch with NowVillage.