Industries · Professional services
Ask a managing partner where next year’s fees will come from and you’ll hear names. A general counsel the firm has advised for a decade. An accountant who refers three matters a quarter. Very little of that sits in the CRM. When one of those senior people retires, the firm finds out how much of its revenue was never written down.
Before Thursday's client lunch
60+
professional and business services clients
17
law firms and legal services businesses
31
on bespoke HubSpot implementations
17
on ongoing support with us today
Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and an Anthropic partner. We work with law firms, accounting and tax advisors, consulting groups, HR and recruitment firms, and risk and compliance specialists. POS Consulting Group is one of our largest professional services clients. Across every sector, we’ve delivered 2,000+ projects for 900+ customers from Dublin, London, Rotterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Boston and New York.
The biggest mistake
So the firm configures a pipeline, asks partners to log their activity, and waits. Six months later the CRM holds a marketing list, a handful of deals business development typed in themselves, and nothing a managing partner would rely on.
We start from the relationships and build the pipeline around them. HubSpot becomes the revenue nerve center: the place where relationships, referral sources, matters, billed fees and market signals meet, so leadership can see where fees come from today and where the next instruction is likely to come from.
| Area | What the CRM assumes | How your firm works |
|---|---|---|
| Who wins the work | SDRs and account executives | Partners originate it |
| Where new work comes from | A tidy outbound funnel | Existing clients, referrers and intermediaries |
| Who delivers it | A separate delivery team | Fee earners, who are also the relationship |
| Appetite for data entry | Part of the job | Least time, least patience |
Structure
Build it to answer three questions: who do we know, how well, and what has each relationship been worth? That calls for a different data model from a typical B2B setup.
Referral sources and intermediaries are often the biggest source of new work and the least measured. Matters usually sit in a custom object linked to the client, so HubSpot knows what work has been done without trying to run it. Revenue history comes from the system of record, so nobody has to guess which relationships matter most.
Example: for a US litigation defense firm, we built a relationship intelligence layer covering panel companies and referral sources, automatic Outlook and Gmail logging, alerts when a key relationship goes quiet, and dashboards that tie each new matter to the relationship that produced it. Partners can now see which relationships bring in their work.
Who do we know, how well, and what has each relationship been worth?
Where we push back
In a lot of firms, partners treat clients as personal property. Contact records get locked down and notes stay in a personal inbox. That feels safe until the partner retires or joins a competitor, and the firm discovers it has no record of a relationship worth seven figures a year.
We design HubSpot so the history, contacts, billing and activity belong to the firm, while partners still lead their clients and control what’s sensitive. Your managing partner has to make that call, so we raise it in the first workshop.
If your firm pays or promotes on origination, the CRM will become the place where partners argue about it. We’ve seen that argument stall rollouts for months.
Agree the rules first: who gets credit for a referral, a cross-sell, or a client who followed a partner from another firm. Then we build attribution in HubSpot to match. Partners ignore a CRM that credits origination in a way they don’t accept, and they are the people you most need using it.
Adoption
Stop asking them to type. Every minute a partner spends updating a CRM is a minute they don’t bill, and they know it. Adoption plans that depend on fee earners entering notes fail every time, so we design for as little manual entry as possible.
Our test: a partner opens HubSpot before a client lunch. Do they learn something they didn’t already know?
If yes, they’ll come back. If no, training and mandates won’t save adoption.
Who keeps HubSpot up to date
System boundaries
HubSpot should handle winning and growing work. Your practice management system should handle doing it. Firms that rebuild time recording and matter workflows inside HubSpot end up running two systems that do the same job badly.
HubSpot sees everything here.
| Job | System of record | What HubSpot sees |
|---|---|---|
| Matters, cases and engagements | Practice or case management | Summary, status, practice area, responsible partner |
| Conflict checks | Practice or case management | Conflict status, so BD doesn't chase work before it clears |
| Time recording | Time or practice management | Hours against budget per engagement, never timesheets |
| Billing, WIP and collections | Billing system or ERP | Billed fees, open WIP, aged debt by client |
| Documents and client files | Document management | Links where useful, nothing more |
One rule sits behind that table: data comes into HubSpot only if it drives an action or a decision. Billed fees by client tell a partner which relationships to protect. A conflict status stops business development chasing work the firm can’t take. Twelve thousand time entries tell nobody anything, so they stay where they are.
Integrations
Start with practice management, then billing and finance, then e-signature and telephony. Anything HubSpot can’t see, it can’t act on, and neither can your agents. See our integration approach.
Start here
We sync clients, contacts and matter summaries so the CRM knows who you’ve worked for, on what, and when. We’ve built the data map to a UK law firm’s case management system, designed contact sync and deduplication for another firm’s practice management platform, and connected relationship tracking to Clio Manage. The hardest part is agreeing which system wins when a contact exists in both, so we settle it in design.
Then
Partners shouldn’t have to ask finance what a client is worth. We bring billed revenue, WIP and aged debt into HubSpot at client and engagement level. For an IP law firm, we brought revenue data from its Symphony ERP into HubSpot. Time data earns a place one way: hours burned against an agreed budget, the signal for a scope conversation.
Then
Larger firms and business services groups run finance on SAP, SAP Business One, Dynamics 365, Business Central, Oracle NetSuite or Sage. For a security services group, we delivered a SAP Business One integration across two HubSpot portals, and we’ve moved firms off Dynamics CRM while keeping their finance connection intact.
Then
A signed engagement letter turns a prospect into a client. For an international business services firm, we built DocuSign and HubSpot workflows on AWS Lambda to handle approvals where several CFOs had to sign in sequence. When the letter is signed, the handoff to delivery starts automatically.
Then
High-volume enquiry businesses live on the phone. We integrated Aircall for a corporate formation group moving 62+ users from Zendesk to HubSpot, advised on back-end connections for background screening and global mobility firms, and built lead response tracking for a UK law firm.
A Zapier connection to your billing system will pass testing. Six months later it hits a limit or an API change, quietly stops syncing, and nobody notices until a partner quotes the wrong fee history to a client.
For business-critical connections we build on Microsoft Azure or AWS, with error handling, retries, monitoring and the security controls your IT team and insurers will expect.
Billing
For fixed-fee firms, often. For firms that bill hourly against matters, rarely.
HubSpot now handles quotes, payments, subscriptions and invoices. In the right firm that removes a system. In the wrong firm it creates a second billing system finance will never trust.
Ask which system your finance team would defend in an audit. That system should own billing.
Go-to-market data
Track the signals that come from clients you already have. Their people, networks and changing circumstances produce most of your next fees, and most firms leave those signals untouched.
01
When a GC or CFO who has instructed you moves on, you get the warmest introduction there is. When a key contact leaves a client, that relationship is at risk.
02
One partner and one contact is a single point of failure. We make coverage visible and flag it when it thins out.
03
No meetings, emails or new matters in six months. HubSpot flags it before the client notices you’ve stopped calling.
04
The tax client who has never used your advisory practice. With practice area data in HubSpot, you can see who buys one thing from you.
05
Which referrers sent work this year, which have gone quiet, and which you’ve never thanked. For many firms this view alone justifies the project.
06
Funding rounds, acquisitions, leadership changes and new regulation, brought in through enrichment and Claude-based research agents.
07
Seminars, webinars and articles tied to the instructions that follow, so marketing can show which content wins work.
For firms ready to go further, our GTM Engineering team builds outreach, enrichment and AI agents on your client context.
Confidentiality and conflicts
Design permissions around how your firm handles confidential and privileged information, and leave conflict checks in the system built for them. HubSpot only needs the outcome.
For one legal group, we set up HubSpot as a shared operational backbone for two separate firms, with a partitioned contact data model and guardrails that kept privileged relationships apart. We build GDPR consent and retention rules in from the start.
AI with Claude
They prepare partners, draft from past work and catch signals people miss, provided the context underneath them is sound. Through our Anthropic partnership, we build Claude automations that bring that context into HubSpot:
On a CRM full of stale contacts and missing history, agents give partners bad answers with total confidence, so we build the context layer first.
Groups and roll-ups
Private equity is consolidating accounting, legal and business services quickly. Every acquisition brings another CRM, another billing system and another set of partners convinced their way is right.
We help groups build one CRM across the firm, with a repeatable playbook for bringing each new practice, brand or office into it. Shared definitions, a shared data model and consolidated reporting let leadership see revenue, client overlap and cross-sell opportunity across the group.
1,200 users
The largest HubSpot implementation in EMEA.
Some firms ask us for a CRM when their partners don’t do business development, or when nobody has agreed who the firm’s target clients are. Software fixes neither, and we say so. Sometimes the right first project is a few weeks of design work, a clean client list and a referral program, or a small, focused HubSpot setup instead of a firm-wide rollout. We’d rather sell you the smaller project that works than the bigger one that doesn’t.
Who works on your project
Every Periti project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops with your partners and make the hard calls.
When a project needs integration with your practice management, billing or ERP systems, we assign dedicated engineers rather than stretching consultants into developer roles. Our directors review the work and hold every project to the same standard.
How a project runs
01
Map how work comes in through partners, referrers, clients, marketing and intermediaries. Design the relationship model, boundaries, integrations, permissions, attribution and AI.
02
Configure in sprints and demo regularly, so partners see progress early and can correct course while changes are cheap.
03
Bring in the data that serves a purpose, connect practice management, billing and finance, and test against real client scenarios.
04
Train partners, fee earners, business development and marketing by role, on your own clients and data.
05
Agree a roadmap so the system keeps pace as the firm adds practices, offices and acquisitions.
Where to start
Most firms
Where most of our professional services engagements start. You leave with a design your leadership team agrees on, whoever builds it.
Fast start
Our industry-specific HubSpot onboarding package, with a configuration built for legal and professional services firms. Live quickly on a proven setup.
Ongoing
Ongoing support from a team that knows your portal. 17 of our professional services clients are on it today.
Ongoing
An experienced Periti operator runs your revenue operations as part of your team, without a full-time hire.
Growth
Outreach, enrichment and AI agents built on your client context, for firms ready to grow beyond referrals.
Firms we work with
Law firms are our largest professional services segment, followed by HR and recruitment, and security, risk and compliance. Other business services include corporate formation, franchising, procurement, facilities and document management.
We also work with 62 consulting, marketing and advertising firms, many of which win work the same way.
Questions
Yes, for client relationships, business development and marketing. Run matters and billing in your practice management system. The firms that get the most from HubSpot connect the two, so partners see matter history and fees next to the relationship.
Yes. We've connected HubSpot to Clio Manage, to case management systems and to other practice management platforms. The key design decision is which system owns each record, and we settle it before building anything.
If you sell fixed-fee, packaged or subscription services, often yes. If you bill hourly against matters, with WIP, approvals or client money, keep billing in your practice management or billing system and bring the results into HubSpot.
No. Individual timesheets add noise and nobody reads them. Sync hours against budget at engagement level, because that flags scope creep and follow-on work.
Remove the data entry. Automatic email and calendar logging, synced billing and matter data, and partner views that show something useful in five minutes do more for adoption than any amount of training.
The firm. Partners lead their clients and control sensitive information, but the history and contacts belong to the firm, so a relationship stays when a person leaves.
We design permissions and record visibility around how your firm treats confidential and privileged information. Conflict checks stay in the system built for them, and HubSpot receives the outcome so business development doesn't chase work the firm can't take.
Yes, and for most firms it should be a priority. We model referrers and intermediaries, attribute work to them, and flag when a valuable referral relationship goes quiet.
Yes. We track job changes for key contacts and alumni through enrichment and Claude-based research, then send the right follow-up to the right partner. For professional services firms, few signals are worth more.
The most useful ones prepare partners for meetings, draft proposals from past engagements, triage enquiries and watch clients and contacts for change. They depend on good context in the CRM, so we build that first.
No. We review what each object and field will do in HubSpot and bring across what's useful, cleaned and restructured. For a US tax advisory firm, we completed a Salesforce to HubSpot migration in eight weeks, ahead of its Salesforce contract expiring.
Yes. It takes careful design of permissions, teams and reporting, balanced against the shared playbook leadership needs. Our largest rollout, for business services group Franchise Brands, brought 1,200 users across multiple brands and countries into one HubSpot environment.
With a Design and Strategy project. We map how work comes into the firm and design the relationship model, integrations and reporting before anything is built. Firms that want a faster start can use LaunchRight, our industry-specific onboarding package.
You might be replacing a legacy CRM, connecting HubSpot to your practice management and billing systems, bringing acquired firms onto one platform, or trying to get partners to use the system you already pay for. Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you how we’d get you there, including the parts you might not want to hear.