Beyond Implementation: Building a HubSpot Strategic Growth Engine

Why Organizations Only Use 30% of Their CRM Capabilities?

Sophie Schaffran: Sam, you're so passionate about CRM optimization and you've seen so many positive outcomes. Why optimization? Why this topic today?

Sam Annala: I kept hearing this statistic from HubSpot and other CRM companies that we use 30% of the environment we purchase, we have 30% utilization. This really sparked my curiosity. I began reviewing our clients' portals to assess was this true? Are they using 30% of what they have? I also conducted some client interviews with a cross section and found that this was true—30% utilization.

It was clear that while many organizations have invested in CRM, they were using it more as a database than a strategic growth engine. I discovered that when clients decide first to get a CRM, they focus on implementation and implementation by design is focused on tactical elements. Making sure HubSpot is functional, reliable, replicates your core processes. This is the walk before you run phase. And it is not only okay, it is essential.

We need a strong functional platform before we can move forward. But here's the catch: optimization, the phase where we automate, personalize and drive real organizational impact is rarely defined or planned for when we go to buy our CRM. Most teams don't fully understand what optimization is, what it looks like or how in heaven to get there. As a result, organizations often stop at functional, which means we're missing out on the strategic opportunities that turn HubSpot into a true growth engine.

What Does It Cost Organizations to Skip CRM Optimization?

Sophie Schaffran: What does this really mean when organizations never move beyond CRM implementation to what's considered true optimization?

Sam Annala: The costs are real. Manual processes linger, revenue opportunities are missed, decision making is limited, customer experiences are fragmented, the bigger strategic opportunity is lost. In short, never reaching optimization means your investment in this CRM delivers only a fraction of its potential. The organization continues to work harder, not smarter, leaving growth, efficiency, and innovation on the table.

Sophie Schaffran: There's kind of these three key areas where we really see the negative impact if we're not thinking forward to the optimization phase, right?

Sam Annala: Absolutely, Sophie. There's so many areas in cost of inaction. Things like constituent journeys remain generic. With segmentation and smart content features unused, opportunities for advanced personalization, such as dynamic welcome series, interest-based triggers, regional content are missed. Data silos remain leading to fragmented communication and inconsistent user and customer experiences. Lack of cross-channel orchestration results in missed engagement and retention opportunities. Users become disengaged if they don't see clear improvements or value from the system. They're absolutely going to disengage, and that creates resistance to future change initiatives and current investment then under delivers.

How Can Low Sales User Adoption Be Fixed with CRM Optimization?

Sam Annala: Let me give you an example, because those are a lot of words. One of our clients, but I'll be honest, many of our clients have this issue—the issue of sales user adoption. One of our clients had below 50% sales user adoption. Why does that happen? It happens because a sales team never saw value in HubSpot, their CRM. They viewed the CRM as Big Brother, forcing them to put data into a system for the company's benefit, not for theirs, so Big Brother could keep an eye on their sales activity.

The solution turned out to be so simple: automation. Sales sequences created to automate a time consuming weekly sales process, something they had to do every week, took a ton of time, and they didn't see value from the results. Time savings for the salesperson, ease of use of client follow up, a value proposition for the sales members themselves. Imagine that—this tool is actually doing something for me. User adoption now: 97%. I want you to remember this story because we're going to talk about it again when we get further down in the presentation.

What Are the Hidden Costs of Manual CRM Processes and Legacy Systems?

Sam Annala: Inefficiency—our second topic. HubSpot remains a basic database, not a growth engine, or imagine this, a competitive differentiator. The organization misses out on automation, AI, advanced integrations that could all drive innovation and, more importantly, your mission impact. Teams waste time on repetitive manual tasks that could be automated, double data entry between legacy systems resulting in increased errors and reduced productivity, ongoing spend on legacy systems, things that HubSpot could replace, time and money lost to inefficiency, manual workarounds, and rework.

Sophie Schaffran: I think one client that we worked with, Sentry Equipment, they're a manufacturer, and I think their story really highlighted both the manual process part of this and then the hidden costs. When they migrated off a legacy system into HubSpot, and then they also integrated their ERP, so Epicor with HubSpot, they were able to reduce their technology by about 20%. So obviously, that's going to be a huge cost savings for the team. And then that manual process, that back and forth every time—you say it's just a spreadsheet for this, it's just an email to accounting—obviously, and the bigger the organization gets, the more that all those pieces just start to add up, and then we know that is all gonna lead us to the revenue piece, right, top line and bottom line when we're wasting our time that way.

How Does Poor CRM Optimization Lead to Missed Revenue Opportunities?

Sam Annala: That revenue piece brings us kind of to our last key piece: missed revenue. Poor lead management and lack of automated nurturing means leads slip through the cracks—just what every business wants to hear. An inability to scale revenue without adding more staff as automation and workflows are not leveraged. Leadership lacks actionable insight due to poor reporting, segmentation, A/B testing. Key KPIs and ROI metrics are not tracked or optimized, making it hard to demonstrate value or course correct.

Remember that story I told you about earlier, that same organization and that same automated sales sequence put an additional $100,000 in net new revenue into the organization during the very first week it was launched. That sequence has consistently brought in an additional 80 to 120,000 a week, every week since. Talk about making up for that missed revenue.

Sophie Schaffran: That's one of my favorite stories. I love that one. And I think it's such a great illustration of how a lot of times what you need may already be in the system. But if you don't take this extra optimization step and connecting it with your goals, you could literally just be sitting on opportunity there.

What Are the 5 Steps to Achieve True CRM Optimization?

Sophie Schaffran: What are the steps now for optimization? I know we kind of took this down into five key pieces. How are these clients getting to the results? And what are the steps people can take to start getting there as well?

Sam Annala: This is the way we chose to break it down. As we just discussed earlier, a successful foundational CRM implementation comes first—getting to the basics, right, is essential. Once that's in place, we use these five steps to define, plan and achieve what we call true optimization. We can't optimize or scale until the foundation is solid. Walk, then run. But let's explore each one of these steps.

The five steps are: Goals, Refine, Optimize, Win, and Track. Plus there's a sixth element—Heighten—which is about ongoing growth and evolution.

Goals—this is where meaningful CRM optimization begins. It doesn't begin with technology, but that piece needs to be well founded. It begins with strategy. You can't optimize what you haven't clearly defined.

In this foundational phase, we work across every major functional group—sales, marketing, service—to ensure that every element of HubSpot is intentionally designed with your business goals. Think about this: business goals first, CRM alignment to those business goals. This step includes everything from high level reporting to minute level details, like custom properties, lifecycle stages, pipeline structures and automation logic.

When strategy leads and systems follow, CRMs become more than just a flat platform, they become powerful engines for scalable, aligned growth. Think about that. Many companies skip this step and jump straight into features and functions which often can result in wasted effort, misalignment and poor user adoption.

Let's take an example of turning strategy into proof. One of our clients had a clear goal: the marketing team committed to a 3% attribution towards the overall sales target. Now, that's a pretty bold move for marketing to demonstrate their value to sales leadership and the broader organization.

Problem: they had no reliable way to track, measure or prove that impact. The data was fragmented, lead sources were unclear and reporting wasn't aligned with the business goals. Despite their effort, they couldn't tell a meaningful story with any data.

The solution: we partnered with them to strategically align their CRM, lead management and attribution tools with their specific objectives. From defining the right properties to building custom reports, we ensured every part of this system supported that 3% proof goal.

The results: they didn't just meet their target, they proved it. The marketing team gained credibility. The sales team gained trust in what the marketing team was doing, and leadership had the insight they needed to see real value from both their marketing and their CRM investment. Leadership is asking, what are we getting out of our marketing? Here's the proof. What are we getting out of that CRM investment? Here's the proof. We can now report the proof you asked for.

Why Is Clean CRM Data Critical for Optimization Success?

Sam Annala: Your CRM is only as strong as the quality of your data. We're not going to spend a ton of time here, but this is a lesson you need to take away. The cleanup phase is not just a technical step. It's the foundation of success in your CRM for optimization.

Without clean, consistent, and reliable data, reporting becomes inaccurate and misleading. Sales and marketing teams lose confidence in the system. Automation and segmentation efforts fail. User adoption declines and strategic decisions are made on faulty insights. Clean data ensures that your CRM works as intended, powering accurate reporting, effective automation and meaningful engagement. It is a critical step to transforming any CRM from a database to a true growth platform. Don't skip this step.

What KPIs Should Organizations Track for CRM Optimization?

Sam Annala: We start by aligning KPIs with your core business goals. And then we focus on the areas that will deliver the quickest and most meaningful impact. From there we build the momentum.

What KPIs should I use? They're specific to every organization. But let me give you a few for sales, marketing and service.

Sales KPIs we're all pretty familiar with: number of deals created per month, lead to customer conversion rate, average deal size, average sales cycle length. They go on and on. There's a standard for everyone. Yours may be very different.

Marketing KPIs: marketing qualified leads, conversion rate from lead to MQL, open rates, click rates, landing page conversion, cost per lead—goes on and on.

Service KPIs: number of tickets created, number of tickets resolved, time to resolution, net promoter scores—all of those matter and can be aligned with your CRM.

These KPIs enable each business unit to measure the impact of the CRM optimization, ensuring alignment with broader business objectives, such as efficiency, revenue growth, customer experience and data-driven decision making.

How Does Change Management Impact CRM User Adoption?

Sam Annala: In the Win step, this is all about change management and user adoption. This is not a one-time event. It is a journey anytime you're talking about a growth engine in your organization.

Our entire optimization process is rooted in the ADKAR framework, so guiding your team through change in a way that ensures lasting success. By embedding the principles—awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement—into every phase is how you drive meaningful adoption and long-term value from your HubSpot investment.

The goal here is to help your team not just use HubSpot, but want to use it and use it well. So focusing again on change increases user adoption.

Track—this is a big one. It ensures you're learning from the data and adjusting your playbook just like you would in any revenue generating department, right? Here's our data. We're going to learn from it. We're going to change our playbook. We're going to make adjustments based on this data we're getting. If you're not reviewing performance regularly, you're flying blind.

This phase is about creating visibility, not just for the executive team, but across departments. It's where data becomes decision making fuel. And again, if you think about aligning it, you're getting back the data you asked for, and you're getting it in an efficient way. I may want it daily, I might want it weekly, I want it monthly, I want it in this form. CRMs allow you to do this. This is where you use the KPIs to measure success and adjust based on the actionable data.

What Does It Mean to Scale and Heighten CRM Capabilities Over Time?

Sam Annala: Heighten—last, but certainly not least. This is how we move from using CRM to growing with it. This doesn't mean growth in volume. It's about making sure the system evolves with your business. Think integrations, think AI advancement and automation, and most importantly, making the health of the system as you grow a priority.

Sophie Schaffran: Optimization isn't a one-time project. It's a growth engine.

Sam Annala: Absolutely. To build trust and momentum, tie every update, enhancement or new initiative back to your optimization strategy and plans. So if something changes in the business, we need to get that into our process here. This creates space to adapt, measure and grow with intention. Just like a business plan isn't created once and forgotten, your CRM strategy should evolve continuously. As market conditions shift, as new challenges or opportunities arise, your CRM should be regularly adjusted to support business goals and deliver that ongoing value.

How Can Strategic Automation Transform CRM Performance?

Sophie Schaffran: Within these five steps, what are some of the highest impact optimization opportunities that we see?

Sam Annala: In strategic automations, this isn't just about setting up basic email sequences or lead alerts. It's about automating high impact strategic elements of your sales and customer journey that drive revenue and efficiency. Let me give you an example.

After migrating from another nonprofit funding tool, a client used their new CRM to replicate basic email and data management functions. However, they soon realized that simply being functional wasn't enough to achieve their growth and engagement goals.

The challenge: email campaigns were managed as multiple separate sends leading to inefficiency and inconsistent messaging. Trigger series for constituent journeys were one dimensional and not leveraging available data. Manual segmentation and lack of automation meant staff spent significant time on repetitive tasks and opportunities for personalized engagements were missed.

What steps did we take to optimize? Smart content and dynamic emails, data driven trigger series, segmentation and lead scoring, automation and integration and A/B testing for continuous improvement.

What Results Can Organizations Expect from Email Automation Optimization?

Sophie Schaffran: What do you often see in this area as far as like the results and what gets impacted by some of these optimizations as far as like the efficiency gains?

Sam Annala: Results and KPIs are all impacted. Efficiency gains: reduce time spent building and sending emails by over 50%. In this example, fewer manual tasks for staff freed up hours for—imagine this—higher value work.

Revenue impact: higher email engagement meant higher conversion rates, faster follow up on opportunities for donors and volunteers, more engagement there.

Team productivity: more campaigns executed with the same team size, increased constituent touch points and additional opportunities without adding additional headcount to it.

Data quality: more complete and actionable constituent profiles, better reporting and insights for leadership.

The key takeaway from this example is by moving beyond basic implementation and embracing all the cool tools that HubSpot has and optimizing them through automation, personalization, integration, you are able to transform your CRM platform from a simple database into this true growth engine. The shift has not only improved efficiency and productivity, but also drove measurable gains in both the constituent engagement and donations.

How Can AI-Powered Tools Create Competitive Advantage in Sales?

Sophie Schaffran: We can't have a webinar in 2025 without talking about some AI powered growth. And that's important for everyone to think about, too, that that is part of the optimization phase as well. And kind of these foundational data pieces and the process piece—you really need all of that in place to start accelerating that growth with AI.

Sam Annala: AI is no longer a nice to have, it is a competitive advantage when used strategically. It helps surface what humans can't easily see and scale something that would otherwise take them hours now takes them minutes. Let me give you an example to explain that.

When a client first implemented HubSpot, their sales team used the prospecting tool to log calls and emails—big step forward from spreadsheets, but it's still mostly manual. The platform was functional. Deals were tracked, follow ups were scheduled, but reps still spent hours sorting through contacts and deciding who to reach out to next.

After moving into the optimization phase, they activated HubSpot's AI-powered agent, Breeze. Now, instead of manually reviewing these lists, Breeze automatically scores and surfaces their hottest prospects each morning based on engagement, fit and recent activity. It even suggests personalized email templates and optimal send times for each contact.

What did that mean to them? Reps spend less time guessing and more time connecting with the right people. Imagine that—we always say, I wish they were just talking to the right people at the right time. Follow up is timely and hyper personalized, leading to a higher response rate because it can be custom to you. The sales team closes more deals faster without adding extra headcount.

Key takeaway here: AI tools aren't just nice to have. They're a competitive advantage. This is definitely differentiating this sales organization. When you move beyond a basic setup and optimize with automation and intelligence, you unlock efficiency and growth that manual processes simply cannot match.

How Can Better CRM Reporting Prove ROI to Executive Leadership?

Sam Annala: Data storytelling and reporting—they're not vanity metrics anymore. They're about giving leaders confidence in the system and the strategy. So many of our clients hear this familiar theme: we're not seeing the value of our CRM investment.

This should immediately spark curiosity, not defensiveness. A simple but powerful step in addressing this is to ask executives what data they want to see, how often they want to see it—daily, monthly, quarterly.

One of our clients faced this exact challenge. Despite having over 200 reports in their system, the executive team still questioned the ROI of their CRM. Through a focused conversation about their reporting needs, we uncovered what truly mattered to them.

The results: executives received targeted actionable insights into the health of the business, and finally they had the clear ROI proof they were looking for for the CRM. The lesson here is sometimes it's not about more data. It's about the right data at the right time.

Sophie Schaffran: Such an important piece, and can lead to that analysis paralysis, right? You almost have too much information and like taking that up a level is so important, and having it at the right time.

What Is the Recommended Timeline for Building a CRM Optimization Roadmap?

Sophie Schaffran: How do we recommend building out this roadmap and what we've seen work really well to start establishing a rhythm?

Sam Annala: It's important that you understand how we go about doing this. And we're sharing this today in hopes that you can do the same thing. The first part is the foundation. This is an annual plan, just like you plan annually for your business, right? The foundational work gives you a clean, goal-aligned platform. Once done, assessments guide the quarterly rhythm for agility and optimization. So think I'm going to take my annual business plan and I'm going to create an annual CRM plan that aligns to that. That's kind of the first step. Now, that's a lot to bite off, right? It's big. So there's a step two.

Sophie Schaffran: Just to tie it back to those five steps that we talked about, this foundation phase is really talking about setting those goals and then refining that into the KPIs, right? Because this is going to be the foundation with which then we move to our next action and optimization step here.

Sam Annala: Great insight. So next up, I have my annual plan. Now, I want to break that down into quarters, right? A quarterly plan helps you stay agile. Business needs shift, and your CRM needs to keep up with it. So while we make a quarterly plan, be prepared that it may change, and we want to do a quarterly review of that as well. So we make a plan, we execute it on a monthly basis, and then we come back and review. Did we meet this plan? Did we meet those KPIs, and we adjust from there again, keeping us very agile.

Now that the system is aligned and clean, it's time to build, right? That's what this is all about. But in a focused strategic way. Each quarter you identify the top priorities based on the annual foundation and the evolving business needs, and frankly, the things that you can get to quickest first. What is going to give me the most value? What can I impact with the company quickly, and what is going to take some more time?

Sophie Schaffran: And within that, then, too, that ties back to the wins that we talked about, right? That's going to give you these smaller wins along the way. It's going to create that value across the team so that people continue to adopt and brings it into those smaller pieces. And then, of course, along this you've had your KPIs, you set up that reporting. So then you're tracking like Sam said, you're measuring back to that progress to see, are we on track? Are we hitting and moving towards those overall business goals that you set in that first foundation?

What Key Metrics Should Organizations Monitor to Measure CRM Optimization ROI?

Sophie Schaffran: We need to be quantifying and communicating that ROI throughout this entire optimization project. Sam, I know you have some ideas on the key metrics and just some suggestions of what people can look at through this process to say, okay, have we picked the right thing and is the optimization actually leading us where we're trying to go?

Sam Annala: Absolutely. Each organization will have unique goals, drivers, and KPIs. But just in case you're wondering, like, what are a couple of things I could and should focus on that are kind of standard in most of the work that we do?

• Efficiency gains: Average time to complete key processes—lead assignments, deal handoffs, things like that. Number of manual tasks eliminated or automated per month. Oh, my gosh! How do we get to that ROI? It's right there. Reduction in average response times to constituents, customers, inquiries—that matters to us. We all know the quicker you get to somebody, the higher the satisfaction.
• Revenue impact: Lead to customer conversion rate—that is on everyone's mind. Ties marketing and sales together. We got a lead, we went to an MQL, went to an SQL, we went to an opportunity, it went to a deal close. Every rate in that sequence matters. Average sales cycle length—can we accelerate that? Where are we dropping off? Total revenue attributed to automated campaigns or workflows. One of the number one requests in the story I told you is about marketing attribution. That seems to be a big trigger here. We're spending all this on marketing. How do we know we're getting something from it on the back end?
• Team productivity: Number of qualified leads managed per team member, number of campaigns or deals handed off per month, percentage increase in activities—calls, emails, meetings—per rep without adding headcount. A lot of it is, where can I pick up those efficiencies without necessarily adding to my staff and giving my staff an opportunity to work at a higher level?
• Data quality: Percentage of contacts with complete and up to date data profiles—is our CRM helping us get our data cleaned up? Number of data errors or duplicates detected and resolved—can run monthly reports on that. Frequency of actionable reports or dashboards accessed not only by leadership, but by the day-to-day users, marketing professionals, sales people, service people, all wondering, how am I doing against my performance goals?

These KPIs ensure you can measure the real impact of your CRM optimization on efficiency, revenue, productivity and data quality. We keep coming back to those four things, because they all directly support your business objectives.

How Can Organizations Assess If Their CRM Supports Core Business Objectives?

Sophie Schaffran: How do you know if HubSpot is actually supporting the objectives that you have? Maybe they haven't walked through this process exactly, but they've been using it for a while. What if you're not starting completely from scratch? How do you know if it's already supporting what you're trying to hit?

Sam Annala: I think what I'm hearing is, how do I know if my CRM and environment is supporting my core business objectives? You can look at that in a lot of different ways. Do I still have manual processes? Am I getting to my KPI numbers? If I said our KPI is this, can I see a report in my CRM that says we're meeting that KPI? Are my customers getting specific and customized personalized journeys? Or do we have just a generic journey out there? Are we still having data quality issues?

Again, back to those key four things. It's all about, what is my user experience? How are they saying that? What is my user adoption? All of those things tell you whether or not you're properly aligned with your business goals.

Who Should Be Involved in Setting CRM Optimization Goals?

Sophie Schaffran: When you think about setting those objectives and goals, who do you feel like should be in the room for some of those? If people are trying to start these conversations internally, kind of where do you begin with that?

Sam Annala: You start with your business plan, right? Every organization has one—living, breathing document. What are our business goals this year? We want to increase sales by 25%. We want to improve our customer satisfaction by 15%. We want to improve MQL to SQL conversion, which is a sales and marketing joint effort by 22%. Whatever your numbers are in that plan, whatever you're trying to achieve, that's where you begin.

Then you break down to the next level and meet with kind of the heads of those business units. What are you really trying to achieve? What measurements matter to you? And then the next question might be like, how do I even begin this conversation? It's those questions like, okay, these are our business goals. But what does this mean within your business unit, within your department, your organization? How are you going after this? How will you measure success?

And then the next question is, well, how do I know that I can help them? It's those questions about, are you doing manual processes that we could do in the system today? What are we doing manually? Look around. What takes the most time? What are your salespeople complaining about? What is marketing's biggest grief? Those are excellent places to start this conversation.

Sophie Schaffran: For this so often, it's not about executing it perfectly the first time. It's just opening the door to this conversation and even just really acknowledging, we need an optimization phase. We're not done just because we have this tool, right? There's a reason that we got this. There are things that we're driving towards. And really, today there's no reason to kind of accept that you can't do something, or you can't get where you're going, right? Like there's a tool, there's a process to support all of that. And so it's really just opening that door to the conversation to kind of start tying all the pieces together.