One CRM for marketing, sales, and leadership

The challenge

The business had outgrown its CRM. It had been set up for a lean, referral-led sales process, with one person in sales using it. That worked when most new business came through referrals, but it couldn’t support a growing marketing function.

There were no lifecycle stages, no separate marketing and sales pipelines, and no marketing automation. Without them, it was hard to see where a contact had come from, what stage they were at, or what should happen next. For me as the new marketer, it meant there was no baseline. I couldn’t yet measure conversion at each stage, so I couldn’t tell which marketing would work best.

The management team wanted to see the pipeline clearly, follow up every lead, and have reporting they could trust.

My approach

My approach was to start with the people and the process, not the platform. I brought together one representative each from sales, delivery, account management, design, and management, and asked how they wanted to use a CRM and where the current one held them back. From that I built a requirements list, much like a short RFP.

I compared HubSpot with two alternatives. I’d already moved another business to HubSpot, and it met nearly every requirement on the list, so the team chose it.

Before migrating anything, I focused on the data and processes that would make the new CRM useful. Moving everything across without cleaning up the fields and agreeing how the team would use them would have carried the same problems into HubSpot.

What I built

Pipelines based on how the business sells. I sat down with our sales manager, one of the co-founders, and walked through exactly how a deal progressed, from first enquiry and qualifying call through discovery, quote, and contract to a decision. I then mapped the marketing side alongside it, from first visit to enquiry. Together these became a lead pipeline and a deal pipeline.

I named every stage as a completed action, such as "Discovery call complete" or "Contract sent". A deal could only enter a stage once that action had happened, which made pipeline reporting far more consistent.

Clean data, mapped field by field. I exported every field from the old CRM and mapped each one to an existing HubSpot property or a new one, matching field type, purpose, and when it would be collected. Management signed off the field list before anything moved. I then worked through the data with sales, filling gaps and cleaning records, so we only brought across data that was accurate and would actually be used.

A month running side by side. For the first month, our sales manager and I used HubSpot alongside the old CRM. We fixed anything that made data entry harder, and checked that workflows fired correctly, contacts sat against the right companies, and pipeline estimates were accurate. Only then did we run the first sales meeting from HubSpot.

I kept joining the weekly sales meeting after launch to see how the team used it in practice. Based on what I saw there, I adjusted required fields and views, and stopped deals from moving backwards.

Automation behind the scenes.

• Lead source attribution, using UTMs and automatically collected fields to bucket every contact into a known source
• Required lost reasons and follow-up dates on lost deals, with automatic reminders to sales on that date, along with the contact’s notes
• Breeze Intelligence automations that added companies matching our ideal client profile, ready for contact research in Firmable
• Alerts when a target company returned to the website, so sales could enrol them in a sales sequence I helped build

Reporting and integrations. I built dashboards for sales, marketing, and management. Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads were connected through HubSpot’s ad integrations and our social accounts through its social tool, so campaign results sat in the same reports as the pipeline.

Training. I set up every user with the right permissions, ran a team walkthrough, and then offered one-on-one sessions, along with HubSpot’s own courses and resources.

Results

• Leadership could see the pipeline. What was in it, what stage each deal had reached, and what to expect in the coming months.
• Lost and paused leads came back around. Each one had a reason, a follow-up date, and an automatic reminder to sales.
• Marketing could be measured to revenue. Lead source stayed on each contact through to closed-won, which is how I could show Google Ads returning 5x its spend, and report on the ABM program.
• Sales knew more before they called. They could see who they were talking to, what that company had looked at on the website, and when to get in touch.
• Still in use today. The business continues to run its marketing and sales through HubSpot.

What I’d measure earlier next time

• Baseline numbers before the move, such as time spent on admin and follow-up rates, so the improvement is easier to show.
• Data quality from day one, such as the share of deals with every required field complete, reviewed monthly with sales.