About the Client
Company: Mid-sized UK Workwear & Uniform Supplier
Industry: Branded Workwear & Uniforms
CRM Stack: HubSpot (Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs)
Client Team Leads: Sales Ops Manager, Director, plus internal Sales and Marketing stakeholders
This long-established workwear supplier serves a diverse B2B client base ranging from sole traders to large factory groups. With ambitions to grow outbound sales and better retain leads, they needed a CRM overhaul—fast.
Before our engagement, HubSpot was a cluttered, underutilized mess: legacy Mailchimp syncs, overlapping lifecycle stages, and minimal automation. Sales reps were working hard—but flying blind.
The Challenges We Inherited
- No consistent lead follow-up process: thousands of contacts, but no visibility into who needed attention.
- Confusion between Contact Lifecycle Stage vs Deal Stage, leading to reporting nightmares.
- Heavily manual workflows, especially for email nurturing and sales sequences.
- Sales and marketing misalignment: different teams operating in silos.
- CRM usage fatigue: team members weren’t trained or confident in using the tool effectively.
- Legacy Mailchimp integration causing double handling and list chaos.
- No segmentation to distinguish B2B personas (e.g. marketing assistant vs managing director).
Our Solution: A Four-Phase HubSpot Transformation
Phase 1: Discovery & Planning
- Held two process mapping workshops to unpack:
- Lead sources (website forms, referrals, outbound lists)
- Customer journeys for different segments (marketing-led vs sales-led)
- Handovers between marketing and sales
- Key friction points in current workflows
- Mapped out current state vs desired state flows
- Audited HubSpot usage: custom properties, workflows, lists, automation logic, reports
- Set mutual success criteria with the internal team
Phase 2: HubSpot Cleanup & Restructure
- Rebuilt lifecycle stages and deal pipelines to reflect actual buyer journeys
- Standardized lifecycle transitions across sales & marketing
- Created segmentation logic to classify contacts into buyer personas
- De-duplicated contacts and deleted stale lists & properties
- Disconnected legacy Mailchimp sync and consolidated email lists in HubSpot
- Cleaned and renamed pipelines, custom properties, and internal naming conventions
Phase 3: Automation & Enablement
- Built out lead nurturing workflows for inbound and outbound contacts
- Automated task reminders and deal rotation for sales reps
- Created lead score models based on key behavior and profile data
- Built email sequences for cold outreach and warm nurturing
- Implemented SLAs for contact response based on source
- Created internal alerts for MQL handoffs to sales
Phase 4: Training, Testing, and Feedback
- Delivered two team-wide HubSpot training sessions
- Created a Notion-based wiki with embedded Loom videos for future training
- Developed SOPs for:
- Contact & deal management
- Workflow naming conventions
- Reporting dashboards
- Ran a post-implementation feedback loop to adjust logic and flows
- Enabled dashboard tracking for sales KPIs, rep performance, pipeline velocity
Outcomes
- ✅ 80%+ of team is now actively using HubSpot daily (vs \<30% before)
- ✅ 3x increase in lead follow-up speed
- ✅ Real-time dashboards for sales managers
- ✅ Reduced duplicate contacts and pipeline bloat by over 60%
- ✅ Increased rep confidence with clear task flows and automation
Live feedback
Common Mistakes to Avoid in HubSpot Implementations
Over the course of this and many other HubSpot revamps, here are a few recurring missteps we've seen that you should avoid:
- Treating Lifecycle Stage and Deal Stage as interchangeable: They serve different purposes. Lifecycle is for contact-level marketing context; deal stage is for sales pipeline progression. Mixing them causes reporting chaos.
- Overusing automation without understanding the sales process: Many teams build workflows before properly mapping how a lead should flow across teams. Start with workshops, not workflows.
- Custom properties overload: Adding a custom field for everything leads to clutter. Define the minimum viable data you need to act on.
- Forgetting the team: No matter how slick your setup is, if the sales team isn’t trained and confident, adoption stalls. Training is not optional.
- Mailchimp zombie lists: Legacy syncs with other tools (especially Mailchimp) often cause duplicate sends, list fatigue, and deliverability issues.
- Using static lists for reporting: Instead, create dynamic segments using filters that auto-update—especially for lifecycle or persona views.
- Neglecting change management: Teams need to be brought along the journey, not just handed a login. Ask for feedback and iterate.
What Made It Work
- Deep collaboration with internal stakeholders
- Structured process mapping before a single workflow was built
- Transparent milestone tracking and flexible workshop cadence
- Prioritized simplicity: removed fluff and focused on what reps actually needed
- Scalable foundation built to support future outbound campaigns
Timeline & Pricing
Engagement Length: 5 Weeks
Want a Setup Like This?
If you’re struggling to get HubSpot working for your team instead of against it, we’d love to help.