The Customer Journey Maestro

If you can't beat them, join them. I have resigned from my own career as a freelance writer because AI is replacing people like me, and there's no point in waiting around for the inevitable. Now I'm focused on learning how business people can leverage AI. I don't yet have a service to offer around this, but I'm happy to discuss the practical applications of AI anytime.

B2B Strategy Advisor and Consultant

I specialize in building and executing content marketing strategies for companies seeking sustained revenue growth. My process is to create a customized messaging framework (aka, “brand story”), develop a content strategy and calendar, and execute the content strategy by building a content team and/or writing brand content.

Fractional Content Director

I love to write and create content of all kinds. My broad and deep experience across sales, marketing, and customer success gives me a unique perspective and the ability to write compelling content for just about any industry. My approach is to get the inside truth from the people behind each story, and I don’t believe in taking shortcuts. I write and publish for your customers, to engage them, educate them, and compel them to take action. The SEO stuff comes along for the ride. Let’s talk about your freelance writing/content needs.

Freelance Writer

I help B2B companies build and execute modern marketing strategies focused on customers.

B2B Marketing Advisor

Hire me on a full-time or part-time basis to up-level your go-to-market strategy. And it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Go-to-Market Strategy Advisor

Your customers have their own Journey that may not match your Funnel or Flywheel. If you want to understand their journey and be there when they need you, that takes work. Designing a customer experience that builds trust, now that's another level entirely. I'm here to help - on your journey.

Customer Journey Guide

On-demand expertise in marketing strategy, demand generation, content marketing, social media marketing, product and customer marketing, sales and marketing alignment, and customer success.

Fractional CMO/VP Marketing

CMO for Hire

Are you in transition? Starting from scratch or making a pivot to a new revenue growth strategy? My Virtual CMO services provide proven expertise to help you jumpstart sales, marketing, and customer experience prior to hiring executives and staffing departments. It's a low-cost, low-risk way to get the strategic advice you need.

Virtual CMO

Riptide Business Press

Ed Marsh and I have written a book, titled Common Sense Revenue Growth, that helps CEOs understand the digital and consumer disruption facing them today and develop plans to grow in spite of those challenges. Buy the book at www.commonsenserevenuegrowth.com.

Author, Podcaster and Consultant

Kuno Creative

Co-owned one of the first and most successful inbound marketing agencies, Kuno Creative. Grew the agency from a handful of talented marketers and designers to a 50+ person agency with clients ranging from national healthcare and technology companies to international consortiums and manufacturing giants. Specialized in marketing technology and sales enablement - helping companies fix leaky funnels and sales pipelines via strategy, marketing automation and optimized CRM utilization. Please visit Kuno's website, www.kunocreative.com for more information, or follow me on LinkedIn.

EVP and Co-Owner

Awakening Technology Company

Developed corporate websites from scratch using HTML/CSS, then created a proprietary CMS for creating client sites backed by a SQL database using ASP.net and later, Ruby on Rails.

Web Developer

Zydeco Energy

Independent oil and gas exploration company in Houston, TX. No longer in business.

Executive Vice President and CTO

INEXS

Exploration Geophysicist

Raytheon - GeoQuest

Product Marketing Specialist

Shell

Research professional working in electron microscopy for Shell Research and in geophysical interpretation research for Shell Exploration and Production.

Research Geoscientist

B2B Marketing Strategy Advisor With Company, Agency, and Freelance Chops

I retired in 2017 from a 40-year career, mostly in sales and marketing, for a variety of energy, manufacturing, and software companies. My penultimate position was co-owner of Kuno Creative, a digital marketing agency and one of HubSpot's first agency partners. My contributions continue as I seek to help other agency owners, professionals, and free-wheelers navigate their way through gnarly challenges in business and life.

John McTigue

I help your team get your Hubspot and RevOps projects over the finish line. We design your strategy and provide your team with the extra bandwidth so you can get projects off your to-do list.  Let's win together. My primary goal is to turn your team into RevOps Tech Stack experts.

HOW WE HELP:
🧐 Are you utilizing the software stack in your business effectively? 

💻 Is your data consistent and accurate so your teams can execute on a day-to-day basis? 

🤯 Are you struggling with software/tech adoption in your company? 

♻️ Do you have a repeatable process improvement culture? 

Today, it is easy to purchase software yet hard to implement. There are thousands of options and usually not enough time to complete the process effectively.  Our mission is to simplify the software buying and implementation to drive results for your team.  We are flipping the script of the traditional consulting experience and are hyper-focused on delivering results and building your team. We focus on coaching, teaching, and training your team to utilize the technology stack to drive revenue in your business. 

Our team of consultants is ready to work with your team, learn about your business, and complete the list of RevOps projects on your list. 

WHAT WE DO:
- RevOps alignment- Marketing, Sales, and customer success
- Repeatable playbooks and training so you can grow and scale efficiently
- Technology and Software education - Make everyone a power user!
- RevOps automation - simplify the follow-up, data entry, and task management for your team

Follow Me here on LinkedIn

HIGHLIGHTS:
📈Grew SaaS startup from 5 to 100 employees in a 3-year period

📗 Learned consulting framework and how to manage projects effectively in Big 4 Consulting. My most important takeaway - make it easy for your customers to work with you and get projects off their to do list by getting them done

🖥 Now it's time to take all those learnings to modernize the consulting business model.

MY MOTTOS ARE:
✌🏼 ”Be authentic"

✅ "Be intentional"

🏆 "Enable your team to win" 

🎉 “Celebrate those wins”

💪🏼 "Be comfortable with being uncomfortable, it's a normal feeling"

OUTSIDE OF WORK I:
🎶 Love going to concerts to see my favorite bands

⛳️ Always trying to get better at golf  

🏝 Travel around the world 

👩🏻‍🤝‍👨🏼 Stay connected with my family and friends

Adam Sharrow

HubSpot just made a serious move in attribution.

They quietly released a beta that lets you associate Contacts, Companies, and Deals directly to Campaigns. (Check out first comment)

That might not sound flashy.

But it fundamentally changes what Campaigns are in HubSpot.

Until now, Campaigns were mostly an organizational tool. A clean way to group emails, landing pages, ads, and social posts. Helpful, yes. But for attribution? Limited. Asset-dependent. And honestly, not something I leaned on heavily for revenue reporting.

This update changes that.

Now, you can associate CRM records directly to a Campaign from:

• The Campaign tool
• Contact, Company, or Deal records
• Index pages
• Workflows

And when you associate a Deal, it contributes to attributed revenue.

That is a big deal.

Why?

Because modern marketing does not live inside tracked clicks.

Buyers listen to podcasts.
They attend events.
They talk in Slack groups.
They get referred by friends.
They have conversations your tracking pixel will never see.

The “dark funnel” is real. Offline influence is real.

And until now, Campaign reporting in HubSpot struggled to reflect that reality.

This beta gives you a way to manually connect influence to revenue. Not just digital touchpoints. Not just form fills. Actual pipeline.

Now, is this a perfect replacement for custom attribution models? Not always.

If you need weighted multi-touch models, advanced revenue splitting, or highly opinionated attribution logic, you may still want a custom setup.

But for many teams, this is the first time I would confidently say:

Yes. You can use Campaigns for real attribution.

If you are a HubSpot admin or RevOps leader, this is worth turning on and testing.

This is one of the more meaningful Campaign updates HubSpot has shipped in a long time.

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Certified Revenue Architect

Sales Hub Implementation

HubSpot Community Ambassador 

Inbound Sales Certification

Sales Enablement Certification

Sales Software Certification

Certified Public Accountant (CPA)

Sales Hub Enterprise Implementation Expert

Service Hub Software

Unleash the full potential of HubSpot in your business - Diamond Partner, Ops-minded problem solver, Dad

RevOps & HubSpot Consulting | Scalable systems, clean data, reporting you can trust | Founder @ Process Pro

I’ve seen a lot of posts lately from HubSpot Solution Consultants reacting to the new seat changes. And honestly... I get it.

For years, one of HubSpot’s biggest strengths was how easy it was for partners and freelancers to jump in and help customers without needing to buy a seat just to do the work. It lowered the barrier to collaborate, troubleshoot, and build together.

Seeing that change stings for a lot of people in the ecosystem, along with the fee. 

But it also got me thinking about something.

There are a lot of incredibly talented HubSpot freelancers and small groups out there who have built real expertise helping customers solve hard problems. If you’re feeling like the ground shifted a bit, you might also be thinking about what’s next.

So I’ll just say this plainly.

At Process Pro, we’re continuing to build this year.

Our goal isn’t to become the biggest HubSpot agency in the world. We’re focused on building the best, fun-loving team of HubSpot operators we can. A business that’s sustainable. A place where people can grow personally and professionally while working on the right projects with the right clients.

Right now, we’re especially interested in talking with:

- HubSpot Solution Consultants
- Freelancers or small groups of freelancers who might want a home base
- People who love solving real RevOps and CRM problems

We’re also starting to think about our first dedicated sales hire, so if that’s your lane, I’d love to talk as well.

No pressure. No formal pitch. Just networking and learning more about you!

If you’re curious about what we’re building at Process Pro, send me a DM. I’d love to connect.

Most CRM index pages are glorified spreadsheets. *New Inline Association Beta*

But the real answers you need?
They live in the relationships.

The new inline association table lets you see and act on associated records directly from any CRM index page.

No more clicking into 27 records to answer a simple question like:

“Which contacts have a deal closing next month?”

Now you can:

• Expand a record right from the index page
• View associated object data instantly
• Filter and search across associations
• Customize columns
• Run bulk updates without leaving the page

This is what good UX looks like.

Less navigation.
More action.
More context where you already work.

For RevOps and sales teams, this is a quiet but powerful shift. It saves time, reduces friction, and helps you make decisions faster without building some over-engineered report.

Available across all hubs and tiers.

One of the fastest ways I can tell if a company is actually using HubSpot?

I open the reports tool.

Then I sort by:

Last viewed

Last updated

And it’s always shocking.

You’ll see dozens of reports that haven’t been viewed in 14 months.
Dashboards built by someone who left two years ago.
Five versions of the same pipeline report with slightly different names.

It tells a story.

Either:
A) The team doesn’t trust reporting
B) No one owns it
C) The portal has turned into a cluttered archive

And clutter kills adoption.

That’s why I love this new HubSpot release:

🧹 Cleanup Automation for Unused Reports

It’s simple. Which is exactly why it’s powerful.

Here’s how it works:

• Go to Settings → Account Cleanup
• Find the Reports automation section
• Choose your threshold (3 months to 3 years)
• Review what will be deleted
• Turn it on

After that:

It runs immediately

Then runs on the first of every month

Deletes reports that haven’t been used in your selected timeframe

Sends a notification after each cleanup

And gives you 90 days to restore anything from Recently Deleted

That’s it. Automation that makes sense

Ever had a HubSpot workflow break because someone left the company?

A deal closes...
A task is supposed to be assigned...
A notification should go out…

But the workflow is still pointing to someone who left six months ago.

And suddenly your “automation” isn’t automated anymore.

HubSpot just released a feature that solves a surprisingly common RevOps headache: Find and Replace Users in Workflows.

Admins can now search for a specific user referenced across workflows and replace them in bulk. No more opening 40+ workflows one by one just to update an owner or task assignment.

This matters more than it sounds.

As companies grow, workflows quietly accumulate references to specific people. Sales reps change roles. Managers move teams. People leave. But the workflows stay the same.

That leads to:

Missed task assignments

Broken notifications

Automations that technically run… but don’t actually do anything useful

With this update, you can quickly swap references and keep automation running without a full manual audit.

One note from testing: trust but verify.

Like most brand new features, we’ve seen a few cases where the replacement didn’t update every reference exactly as expected. Nothing catastrophic, but it’s still smart to spot check the workflows after running the replace.

Bulk updates are powerful.
But RevOps rule #1 still applies: always verify the outcome.

Overall though, this is a great quality-of-life improvement for anyone managing a busy HubSpot instance.

Curious: how many workflows do you have referencing specific users right now?

Process Pro has hit a new stage. We’re looking to hire a founding Account Executive.

About a year ago I stepped in to lead growth across sales and marketing, supported by a fractional marketing team. Since then we’ve been building the foundation for how we want to grow.

Now we’re ready for the next step.

We’re looking to hire a founding Account Executive.

Not just someone to run deals. Someone who wants to help shape how sales works at Process Pro.

We’re looking for someone who:
• Has agency sales experience in the HubSpot ecosystem
• Understands how to sell consulting and complex implementations
• Enjoys working closely with solution architects and operators
• Wants real ownership over process, messaging, and how deals are run

Our customers don’t come to us for boilerplate execution plans.

They come to us because something in their revenue engine is broken:
their CRM architecture, their data model, their reporting, their integrations, or their operations.

So the sales motion here is different.

It requires curiosity.
It requires listening.
It requires working alongside our consultants to design the right solution for the business, not just the fastest proposal.

This role is ideal for someone who:
• Is currently selling for a HubSpot partner or RevOps agency
• Is a HubSpot consultant who enjoys the commercial side of the work
• Wants to move from “running deals” to building the sales engine

You’d be helping define:
• Our sales process
• How we qualify and scope complex RevOps projects
• How we translate business problems into the right consulting engagement

Our goal at Process Pro is to build a focused, high-performing agency that does great work for the right customers.

We want to build a sustainable, high-performing team that works on meaningful problems for customers who actually want to fix them.

If this sounds interesting to you, send me a DM.
Happy to talk through what we’re building.

Every company we work with has a RevOps person. Most have a RevOps team.

And every single one of them has a backlog that looks like this:
- Fix lifecycle stages
- Clean up attribution
- Rebuild renewals process
- Improve reporting
- Rework territory logic
- Automate handoffs

It’s not that they don’t know what to do. It’s that they don’t have the time to do it.

Strategy isn’t the constraint anymore. Execution bandwidth is.

You don’t need another workshop.
You don’t need another 40-slide deck.
You don’t need another here’s what you should do.

”You need someone to actually build it."

The dirty secret of scaling SaaS companies is this: Your RevOps leader is stuck running the business. They can’t also transform it.

So the backlog grows.

And every quarter you say, “Next quarter we’ll fix it.”

What would change if the backlog actually started shrinking?

That’s the difference between advisory firms and execution partners.

One tells you what to do.
The other helps you get it done.

And getting it done is what unlocks growth.

Wanna attack your backlog? Let’s chat.

Every time I see a spreadsheet forecast with 17+ tabs, I know what happened.

Someone got burned in a board meeting.

So now there’s a “backup system.”

Daily exports from HubSpot.
Manual deal reviews.
Custom categories for everything possible.
A “real forecast” tab and a “board version” tab.

Pulling the number directly from the CRM feels risky. 

Or, over time there have become ways you want to slice and dice the pipeline that simply aren’t set up in the CRM.

So Excel becomes the workaround.

Your forecast drives hiring plans, burn rate, CAC efficiency, and investor confidence.

If you’re exporting before every exec meeting, HubSpot isn’t your system of record.

It’s just data entry.

Sales management can successfully fixe this at the source:

Clear stage criteria.
Standardized deal properties.
The right segmentation is built into the CRM.
Core dashboards everyone uses weekly.

So they can measure:

- Sales velocity by source
- Sales velocity by segment
- Win rate by ICP
- Forecast accuracy by stage

Build the framework once. Run the business from it.

If you’re in Excel because your CRM can’t answer leadership questions, let’s fix that.

Defining your business process isn’t CRM customization.
I hear this a lot: “We need to customize our CRM.”

Most of the time, that’s not actually the problem.
What’s usually missing isn’t a feature.

It’s a clearly defined process.
“Standard” doesn’t mean generic.

It means understanding how the CRM was designed to run:
standard objects
standard properties
standard relationships
and the automation the CRM provides out of the box

Two companies can use the exact same CRM setup and operate very differently.
Different definitions. Different expectations. Different sequencing.

That’s not customization.
That’s doing the work.

Where teams get stuck is skipping a layer.
They jump from:
“Here’s the system”
straight to
“Let’s build something custom”

Without first defining the foundations:
how leads enter
how they’re routed
what follow-up is expected
when a deal is created and why
how feedback loops work

When those foundations aren’t clear, the CRM feels either too rigid or too loose.
Both reactions lead to unnecessary customization.

Customization can be the right move.
But it should formalize a process that already exists and is followed consistently.
Not compensate for ambiguity.

If you’re debating standard vs custom, I’d start here instead:
Are our foundational processes actually defined?
Are they enforced consistently in the CRM?
Are we solving real friction or hypothetical future states?

Define the process first.
Then decide what the system needs to support it.

That’s how teams actually work

One of the things we care most about at Process Pro is truly becoming an extension of our clients’ teams. Not just a vendor that completes tickets, but a partner that helps RevOps leaders turn their GTM ideas into reality.

Our Monthly Support model is built for exactly that.

Teams often know what they want to improve in HubSpot or across their revenue systems. What they’re missing is the extra capacity and expertise to actually execute.

That’s where we step in.

Grateful for the trust our clients place in us and proud of the team that delivers this work every day.

Great work, team!

RevOps leaders, if you're looking for bandwidth on your team, I’d love to chat.

Wow. 2,500 dots. 8.1 billion people.
And only a thin strip at the bottom represents people actively using advanced AI.

If you’ve felt behind this year... you’re not.

You’re early.

The loudest voices on LinkedIn make it feel like “everyone” is using AI tools, coding assistants, building agents, and automating everything.

They’re not. We are all doing this together!

Most of the world hasn’t touched this yet.

So if you’re experimenting with prompts...
If you’re paying for ChatGPT…
If you've moved to ClaudeCode...
If you’re building workflows…
If you’re even just curious…

You are on the cutting edge.

Perspective matters.

Wow.

There are two types of forecast calls.

One reviews the pipeline.
The other rebuilds it from scratch.

The difference is the CRM.

The weekly forecast call usually looks the same on the surface. CRO on Zoom. Sales managers. Reps dialing in with coffee and their pipeline open.

But I’ve seen this meeting play out two very different ways.

In the first version, the CRM exists... but no one really trusts it.

A dashboard might be open, but it’s mostly decorative. Within a few minutes, someone shares a spreadsheet. Then another. Managers have their own rollups. Reps have personal forecasts. RevOps has a “cleaned up” version of the pipeline.

The meeting slowly turns into a reconstruction project.

“Walk us through this deal.”

“Well procurement is slow but they’re still interested.”

“We think it will close this month, but it could slip.”

“Legal just needs to approve it.”

Twenty minutes later the team is debating close dates, commit vs best case, and whether the amount in the CRM is even right. The number everyone came to review becomes the number everyone negotiates.

Forecast calls become deal reviews when the system isn’t trusted.

Now compare that with a healthy CRM environment.

Same meeting. Same people. Same Zoom call.

But the experience is completely different.

The forecast dashboard is open and everyone knows what they’re looking at. Stage-based forecasting shows the projected totals. Commit and best case are already defined. Pipeline coverage is visible.

The CRM is doing what it’s supposed to do: answering the basic questions.

Instead of reviewing every deal, the system highlights where attention is needed.

Deals that have been stuck in stage.
Deals with no next steps.
Deals that look risky based on activity.

Now the conversation changes.

The CRO isn’t asking, “What’s the number?”

They’re asking, “Where are the risks?”

Managers focus on the handful of deals that actually need discussion instead of getting an update on every opportunity in the pipeline.

It’s faster. It’s more focused. And it’s actually useful.

Healthy CRMs answer questions.

Broken CRMs create debates.

If you run forecast calls...

Which one sounds more familiar?

For the last few years, our newsletter has been called Trust the Process.
It’s where we’ve shared HubSpot updates, RevOps resources, and a few lessons from the field.

But over time, the conversations we’re having with leaders have shifted.
They’re less about features and more about how teams actually work.
 - Who owns the system 
 - How processes are defined
 - Why systems that technically work still feel broken

So we evolved the newsletter into something new: How Teams Work.

It’s a look at the operational patterns we see across real client environments. Not theory. What actually shows up inside the systems teams rely on to sell and grow.

We’ll be sending it every other week.

If these deep dives into RevOps topics like this sound interesting, the subscribe link is in the comments.

RevOps burnout doesn’t come from complexity.

It comes from unfinished work.

There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing exactly what needs to change and watching it sit untouched for six months.

You already know your lifecycle stages are messy.

You know attribution isn’t trustworthy.

You know, renewals are duct-taped together.

You’ve diagnosed the problems.

But diagnosing isn’t the same as fixing. What creates the pain is the gap 
between clarity and capacity.

When strategy outruns execution, tension builds:
• Sales loses trust in reporting
• Marketing loses trust in attribution
• Leadership loses trust in the CRM

And suddenly, the system becomes the villain.

It’s rarely the software. It’s the backlog.

Every unfinished RevOps initiative compounds operational friction.

The companies that feel “buttoned up” aren’t smarter. They just close the gap between knowing and doing.

Execution is what prevents operational drift.

And drift is what quietly erodes growth.

Do you need help closing that gap?

Comment below what the top projects are on your list? 

I’m guessing a lot of them have AI attached

I can tell pretty quickly when a HubSpot CRM hasn’t been set up correctly.

Not because of one catastrophic issue, but because of patterns.
- Simple reporting questions are difficult to answer.
- Teams define the same thing differently.
- Automations are conflicting or not well thought out.
- People start working out of spreadsheets instead of in the system.

None of these signals is dramatic on its own, but together they usually point to the same underlying issue: the system was never set up to align with how the team actually works.

In this week’s issue of our How Teams Work newsletter, we break down 8 signs we look for when evaluating a HubSpot portal to determine that it hasn’t been set up correctly.

If you missed it this morning, we’ve also published the full article on the Process Pro Consulting blog.

And if you want future issues sent straight to your inbox every other week, you can subscribe below.

Process

Your RevOps backlog is costing you revenue. It just doesn’t show up as a line item.

No one sees “unfinished lifecycle cleanup” on the P&L.

There’s no expense category for “renewal automation we’ll get to next quarter.”

You won’t find “attribution distrust” listed under operating costs.

But the impact is there.
- When lifecycle stages aren’t clearly defined, forecasting gets fuzzy.
- When renewal workflows aren’t tight, retention quietly slips.
- When routing rules lag, speed-to-lead slows and conversion rates soften.
- When attribution isn’t trustworthy, budget gets allocated on shaky assumptions.

Individually, these don’t feel catastrophic. They feel manageable. So they stay in the backlog.

But over 12 months, those “manageable” gaps compound. A few points of retention drag. A slight drop in pipeline efficiency. A small delay in follow-up.

That’s real money.

Most companies treat RevOps work like optimization.

It’s not optimization. It’s revenue protection.

Execution bandwidth isn’t overhead. It’s leverage.

Do you need help closing that gap?

What projects are sitting in your backlog right now?

Great point, if you are using the Salesforce to Hubspot Integration, watch out for this new update, it resets your directions of synced properties to "Always use Salesforce," which may be okay, but... be careful

Adam Sharrow 🤙🏼

HubSpot Freelance Consultant | Navigator of Digital Marketing Strategies | Helping Marketing Systems Sail | Ex-Liveaboard Sailor ⛵️⚓️

Upgraded Company Sync. Sounds great, right? Who doesn't love an upgrade?

Here's what I wish we'd known before clicking that button.

HubSpot released a new "Upgraded Company Sync" option in the Salesforce integration settings. It shows up as a card with a simple "Upgrade" button. Looks like it might open more info or a preview of what's changing.

It doesn't. One click and it's on. No confirmation. No "here's what this will do." No undo.

When it activated, every single Company field mapping reset to "Always use Salesforce." HubSpot stopped pushing any Company data to Salesforce entirely. And the "Prefer Salesforce unless blank" sync option? Gone. Removed completely.

Our Salesforce admin caught it when a contact's account relationship wouldn't sync. Our integration specialist found all the field mappings had been overwritten with the same timestamp. We traced it back to that one click.

The fix required a full audit of every Company field mapping, a spreadsheet documenting each property's current state and proposed sync direction, and a phased remediation plan.

So before you click, here's what I'd do:
• Document your current Company field mappings. Screenshots, export, spreadsheet. Whatever works. Just have a baseline.
• Check if any of your sync logic relies on "Prefer Salesforce unless blank." That option doesn't exist after the upgrade. You'll need a new strategy for those fields.

The upgrade itself may be a good thing long term. But the rollout caught us off guard, and I'd rather you be ready for it than learn the hard way like we did.

#HubSpot #HubSpotCRM #RevOps #SalesforceIntegration #Automation #CRM #HubSpotTipsandTricks

“We can’t forecast out of HubSpot.”

I was on a call with a CRO last week when he shared what he thought was a tooling issue.

That’s always an interesting moment.

So I asked a few followups:.
- How do you ensure deals are updated?
- What are the exit criteria for each stage?
- How often are you personally reviewing HubSpot reports?

Silence.

Then:

“Well, we’re not really inspecting that consistently.”

There it is. You’re not inspecting what you expect.

If you’re not using the reports, your reps won’t either.

If the stage criteria aren’t clear, data drifts.

If sales leadership isn’t looking at the dashboard, the dashboard dies.

Then forecast calls turn into full deal reviews where you're nagging reps about the details of specific deals/prospects, they're on the defensive, and nothing really gets done, and someone is updating a spreadsheet on the side to get you a moment-in-time view into an accurate forecast number that’s only good in the moment.

Now you have two systems.

One people ignore.

One people trust.

HubSpot isn’t the problem.

If you define your sales process clearly, align stages to the buyer journey, and inspect deal hygiene weekly, forecasting becomes mechanical.

The next-level CRO doesn’t ask, “Why won’t HubSpot forecast properly?”

They ask, “Why aren’t we operating the system we already have?”

That feeling when you ask, “How many active customers do we have?” and proceed to get 3 different answers...

If an active customer is pulled three different ways by three different teams, your CRM is broken.

Three people jump into the system.
- One filters by lifecycle stage.
- One uses “customer status.”
- One filters by close date.

Then someone manually reviews it before sending it to Finance.
- At Series A, that’s scrappy.
- At Series C, that’s dangerous.
It makes sense. We see it all the time.

As companies grow, silos form. Definitions drift. Segments sprawl.
Over time, no one is sure which report is “right.”
And when definitions aren’t unified:
- Sales reports one number.
- CS reports another.
- Finance adjusts it.
-RevOps reconciles it.

That’s operational drift. 

But here’s the part most teams miss:

When you fix this, it unlocks everything.

You can integrate cleanly across systems.
- Accounting.
- ERP.
- Billing.
- Product data.

Because now you have a unified customer record.

You know exactly who is a customer.
- Where they sit in the lifecycle.
- What they pay.
- What they use.
Manual review disappears. Reconciliation disappears.
And manual review does not scale.

Define it once. Align every team to it. Build every system off it.

That’s how you move from growth to scale.

How many active customers do you have?

If that triggered a frantic feeling, let’s chat.

taplio

The Battle

John McTigue

Adam Sharrow

Followers

Posts

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taplio

The Battle

John McTigue

Adam Sharrow

Followers

Posts

Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Adam Sharrow's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreAdam Sharrow's LinkedIn Performance