The biggest mistake companies make with HubSpot

They underestimate it.

Most companies buy HubSpot to track deals, manage a pipeline and do some light forecasting. If that’s all you use it for, you’re paying for a platform and using a fraction of it.

We build HubSpot as the revenue nerve center for the whole business. Marketing, sales, service, finance and operations all feed one system, and the people and AI agents working on revenue can trust what they find there. When it’s built properly, your CRO, your CFO and your agents all work from the same picture of every customer. When it isn’t, you have an expensive address book.

The CRM was never the problem

We’ve done a lot of Salesforce and Dynamics rip-outs. If we’re honest, many of them had less to do with the software than with the process underneath it.

The system is a means to an end. Without a strategy and solid execution, it makes no difference whether you’re on Salesforce or HubSpot. What matters is who set it up, why they set it up that way, and how closely it matches where the company is trying to go. A badly designed HubSpot portal will fail just as surely as a badly designed Salesforce org.

Our biggest proof of this is Franchise Brands. It was a 1,200-user rollout and the largest HubSpot implementation ever delivered in EMEA. Their teams were spread across Europe, working in different systems, different languages and very different ways of selling. We brought them all into one HubSpot environment with one common playbook. That took serious data integration work across multiple systems, and just as much work understanding how each market actually operated.

The platform they chose isn’t what made it work. The planning, the design and the execution did.

Why we push back

Many of the leaders we work with have never implemented a CRM or run a data migration. That’s normal. You might be a new CRO brought in to fix the revenue process, and you’ll arrive with a clear idea of how things should be organized.

We take that vision, combine it with what we’ve learned from 2,000+ projects, and produce a plan that will actually work. Sometimes that plan looks different from the one you came in with. That’s the job. You’re not hiring us to configure what you ask for. You’re hiring us to make sure the system, whether that’s HubSpot, Anthropic, middleware or all of it together, supports where the business is going over the long term.

Data migration: why we won’t move everything

Every migration starts the same way. The client wants all of their data moved across, because they might need it someday.

We regularly inherit Salesforce orgs with up to 15 years of data locked inside. Some of it is gold. Much of it is duplicate, outdated, half-finished or simply wrong. Moving all of it into HubSpot doesn’t preserve your history. It contaminates your new system.

Here’s the question we ask about every object and field: why are we taking this out of the old system, and what job will it do in the new one?

Our answer is that everything going into HubSpot has to serve as context. Context is the new oil. AI agents, automation and reporting are only as good as the data they reason over. Fifteen years of historic deals, conversations and customer records can be extremely valuable to an agent, but only if they’re reformatted, cleaned and structured with a clear purpose. Untrustworthy data stays out. We would rather leave a field behind than let it mislead an agent, or a sales leader, for the next five years.

The pitfalls we design against

Lifting and shifting. Rebuilding every old field, workflow and report in HubSpot means paying for a new platform and keeping the old problems. We audit what’s actually used, retire what isn’t, and redesign what’s left for how HubSpot works.

Migrating without a data model. If you load data before agreeing on objects, associations and ownership, you get a mess that’s very hard to undo. We design the architecture first and migrate into it.

Losing the relationships. Records without their associations are just rows. Contacts lose their companies, deals lose their history, and agents lose their context. We test migrations in a sandbox and have your team validate real records before cutover.

Silent failures after go-live. We stay close during hypercare, because the problems that matter usually show up in week two, not on day one.

Who works on your project

This is one of the biggest differences between partners, and one of the least talked about.

Every Periti HubSpot project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops and make the hard calls. A team of consultants works under them on the technical build: configuration, data migration and testing.

When a project needs engineering for integrations, middleware or complex migrations, we assign dedicated engineers. We don’t stretch consultants into developer roles.

Above all of that, our directors bring up to 30 years of CRM consulting experience. They review the work and hold every project to the same standard. You get senior thinking at every level, not a strategy deck handed over to a junior team.

How a Periti project runs

Most partners open with a free discovery call and a quote. We think the design of your revenue system deserves more than that, so our projects begin with a Design and Strategy project.

Design and Strategy. We map how revenue actually moves through your business. That covers your processes, systems, data, teams and growth goals. Then we design the target system: the data model, the lifecycle definitions marketing and sales will agree on, pipelines, permissions, integrations, reporting and where AI fits in. You leave with a plan you can trust, whoever builds it.

Build. We configure in sprints and demo regularly, so you see progress early and can correct course while changes are still cheap.

Migrate and integrate. We bring in data with a clear purpose, connect your ERP and other critical systems, and test everything against real business scenarios.

Enable. We train every team by role, train your admins in depth, and stay close through go-live.

Grow. We agree a HubSpot roadmap, so the system develops with the business instead of falling behind it.

Already on HubSpot? This is where much of our work happens

Between 30% and 40% of our consulting time goes to companies that already use HubSpot.

They come to us with:

• Processes set up by another partner, or by someone in-house who has since left.
• Integrations that don’t work.
• Data nobody trusts.
• AI agents that won’t perform because the context underneath them is broken.

We start with a Design and Strategy project to work out what the system should look like, given where the business is going. Then we modernize it. Sometimes that means a rebuild. More often it means fixing the data model, redesigning a few core processes, and finally connecting the systems that should always have talked to each other.

New to HubSpot? Start with LaunchRight

If you’re getting started on HubSpot, you don’t need a big custom program on day one. LaunchRight is our industry-specific onboarding package. It gives you a proven HubSpot setup for your sector, built from what we’ve learned across hundreds of projects in your industry.

It’s a low-risk first step. You go live quickly, you avoid the setup mistakes that cause problems later, and you have a foundation that can grow into a full rollout whenever you’re ready.

Private equity: one CRM across the portfolio

Private equity firms often buy companies faster than their systems can keep up. Within a couple of years, a portfolio can be running three HubSpot portals, a Salesforce org, a legacy CRM and a handful of spreadsheets. Nobody can see margin across the group.

We work with PE firms over the long term, not one deal at a time. Together we build a repeatable playbook for rolling every new acquisition into HubSpot, with a one-CRM approach across the portfolio. Shared definitions, a shared data model and consolidated reporting mean operating partners can track pipeline and margin across every business in one place.

It’s some of the hardest work we do, because everything in that environment moves fast. Deals close, teams change and priorities shift mid-project. We have people on the ground across Europe and the US to keep up with it.

Integrations: if HubSpot can’t see it, it can’t use it

Anything that happens outside HubSpot without a proper integration is invisible to your sales, marketing and service processes, and to your agents. In total, 245 of our customers have needed integration work, including 68 ERP integrations.

ERP integration

We connect HubSpot with SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Business Central, Sage, IFS, SysPro and Xero. Typical work includes:

• Syncing customers and accounts in both directions.
• Turning closed deals into sales orders.
• Bringing invoices, payments and order history into HubSpot, so your teams see the full commercial relationship.

Manufacturing keeps us busiest here, but the pattern is the same in every sector: finance and revenue need to be looking at the same numbers.

Why we build on Azure and AWS

Here’s a pitfall we see constantly. A Zapier connection to the ERP passes testing. Six months later it hits a task limit or an API change, quietly stops syncing, and nobody notices until finance asks why invoices don’t match closed deals.

For anything business-critical, we build integrations on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. You get proper error handling, retries, monitoring and alerts, plus security your IT team will sign off on and the capacity for real data volumes. We still use HubSpot Data Hub, Zapier and Make where they fit, but your ERP connection should never depend on a tool designed for simple automations.