The Client
Numbers can be challenging to make sense of. And adding in the extra pressure of these numbers representing financial data doesn't help it get much easier.
Our client's software platform takes raw financial numbers and turns them into dashboards and reports that marketing and sales teams can act on. It is the kind of product that promises clarity in an industry drowning in complexity. The company itself, however, was running lean.
With barely more than a dozen employees and only two people selling, every conversation had to count. The CEO even ran most of the deals himself. His counterpart straddled sales and marketing, trying to keep pace with all of their operations. The team wanted tools that amplified their reach without slowing them down, and they wanted to be able to run those tools themselves. And with a startup budget, there was no room for wasted effort.
The Problem
They had tried Salesforce, and it swallowed them whole. The Salesforce org was brand new but already felt unusable. On top of their incomplete setup, their reporting was too complex to configure. All this customization required time they didn’t have.
With no dedicated administrator, the system became a dead weight. Despite their investments of time, money, and effort, shortly after starting, they had already pulled their data out of Salesforce and shut it down.
In the meantime, sales ate, slept, and breathed Outlook. Every email went out one by one, untracked, with no way to see if a prospect opened or ignored it. The two sellers had to check in daily just to confirm who had been contacted, often repeating work or leaving gaps. Their notes made their way into an Excel when someone remembered, but nothing was reliable. For a company selling precision and clarity, their own process was anything but.
The Solution
ClearPivot was brought in with a clear mandate: build a working sales engine in six weeks. The team started by importing roughly seven hundred contacts and forty deals into a fresh HubSpot instance and laying down a sales pipeline the team could actually use. Outlook was connected for tracking, turning their guesswork into visibility. Emails now showed opens, clicks, and web visits tied to each contact.
Scheduling moved into HubSpot Meetings. This meant that calendar links dropped directly into outreach, auto-populated Teams links, and updated records without anyone having to chase details later. Sequences were next. The teams worked in tandem to build the first, which was tied to their event-driven outreach, trained the team to build and run the next themselves. By the second round, the CEO was creating his own sequences and importing contacts without help; a key step for a team that needed self-sufficiency.
Dashboards made the system real. A daily report landed in the team’s inbox each morning, showing website activity, email opens, and top-of-funnel engagement. Sales dashboards tracked deal source, lifecycle stage, and overall movement. For the first time, the team could see exactly what was happening without calling a meeting or comparing notes. The HubSpot mobile app became their pocket command center, letting them update deals on the floor of an event and get real-time notifications when a prospect opened an email.
The Results
The daily “what did you do yesterday” meetings stopped. Their sellers could finally see every interaction without asking. Sequences replaced scattered one-off outreach, with one sequence in particular earning a fifty percent open rate and a twelve percent meeting rate right out of the gate. Meetings booked through HubSpot synced seamlessly with MS Teams, cutting down on friction. Reports that once required manual updates now arrived automatically each morning.
The CEO no longer had to rely on anecdotes or spreadsheets. He could see deal movement, source of pipeline, and engagement metrics in one place. Just as importantly, he learned to run imports and build sequences himself. It was proof that the system didn’t just work—it worked for them.
ClearPivot gave this ten-person startup the presence of a much larger team. In six weeks, they moved from disconnected tools and guesswork to a connected system where every outreach, meeting, and deal lived in one place. What they sell to their own clients is clarity. Now, they finally have it in their own sales process.
