#The challenge
The company had added a business and enterprise product and was already fielding significant unsolicited inbound from large enterprise buyers, including parent organisations whose subsidiaries each buy separately. It had almost nothing to catch that demand with. HubSpot was live but effectively out of the box: one generic pipeline, no stage discipline, no lifecycle or product-qualified-lead model, no reporting, and a senior commercial executive personally triaging inbound leads through a homegrown internal app. With a sales team still to hire against an annual revenue plan, the foundation had to go up fast.
#The approach
Interactive growth model to pressure-test the plan
Built a live, interactive growth-model app pre-loaded with the company's own numbers and market benchmarks (baseline, stretch and conservative scenarios) and ran it in a working session to pressure-test the plan. The plan-versus-capacity view surfaced under-resourcing on both account executives and customer success.
CRM audit before touching anything
Read-only connection plus a data-quality baseline of the existing portal: subscription and seat entitlements, marketing-contact usage, the single active workflow in the account, and super-admin access.
GTM lifecycle design, signed off before build
Designed three pipelines (new business, expansion, renewals) with per-pipeline deal types, deal stages carrying entry/exit gating and required fields, product-qualified/marketing-qualified/sales-accepted lifecycle lanes, lead statuses, and company-type and channel segmentation — reviewed and signed off in a weekly sprint rather than discovered during the build.
Built directly in production
Shipped the schema and automation in the live portal: the three pipelines, a seven-stage lifecycle (lead to product-qualified to marketing-qualified to sales-accepted to sales-qualified to opportunity to customer) with promotion workflows, lead-status transition workflows, a closed-lost split with loss-reason capture and nurture routing, stage gating, trial fields, company-type and channel fields, an ACV backfill, and internal-contact tagging so employees stop polluting the funnel.
Rep and executive cockpits plus inbound routing
Scoped clean rep and executive dashboards, a redesigned website contact-sales form (enforce corporate email, drop a low-value seats field), and chat-based inbound lead alerts with round-robin routing to replace an executive triaging inbound by hand.
Product signal to PQL
Scoped the product-signal-to-PQL pipeline out of the data warehouse so product-qualified leads route to the right motion instead of sitting in product analytics, plus lead-to-account matching in Clay and penetration reporting across parent-and-subsidiary account hierarchies.
#Outcomes
Three GTM pipelines live
New business, expansion and renewals pipelines with per-pipeline deal types built directly in production.
Seven-stage lifecycle stood up
The full lifecycle from lead through product-qualified, marketing-qualified, sales-accepted, sales-qualified and opportunity to customer, with automated promotion workflows.
One week from kickoff to design sign-off
The full GTM lifecycle was designed and approved in the first weekly sprint, one week after kickoff.
Five of six core build tickets shipped
Deal-type conditional visibility, the seven-stage lifecycle plus promotion workflows, lead-status workflows, the closed-lost split with nurture routing, and new-business stage gating with trial wiring were all confirmed built in production; the sixth (a company-to-contact copy-down workflow) was still in progress at review.
Growth model delivered and used
The interactive scenario model was shared live and used to pressure-test the revenue plan, surfacing under-resourcing on AEs and CSMs. The plan is the company's own goal, not a delivered result.