Revlyn
REVLYN/WORK/DATAPEL
PUBLISHED · CLIENT ON THE RECORD

Datapel took lead conversion from 19% to 68%.
Two weeks. One rebuild.

Three years of HubSpot debt. 25,000 contacts nobody trusted. Six pipelines, none of them updated. We rebuilt the portal in a fortnight, then sat with the reps every second day for a month. Demo-to-closure improved by 50% along the way.

READ THE NUMBERS ↓
LEAD CONVERSION · DATAPEL
MoM · %
CURRENT
68%
Δ VS. BASELINE
+49pp
25%
50%
75%
REBUILD
21
18
19
22
38
54
62
68
M-3M-2M-1M0M+1M+2M+3M+4
Before Rebuild After
THE SCOREBOARD
MEASURED · POST-LAUNCH
LEAD CONVERSION
19%→68%
+49pp
DEMO TO CLOSURE
28%→~42%
+50%
BUILD TIME
—→2 wks
sign-off → live
ENGAGEMENT
Project→Ongoing
moved to HaaS
CHAPTER 01

Who Datapel is

Datapel builds warehouse management software. Twenty-plus years in market, based in Australia, serving wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, retailers, and 3PLs across more than 30 industries. Over a million stock items on their platform, native integrations with MYOB, Xero, and the major eCommerce platforms.

Their sales motion is standard B2B software. A lead comes in, gets qualified, books a demo, a salesperson works it to close. HubSpot was the system of record for all of it. That's the part that had stopped working.

CHAPTER 02

What we walked into

Three years of use without a defined process. Every symptom below traces back to one missing thing: nobody had ever agreed what a stage meant.

ARTIFACT · SYMPTOM BOARD
FIG.02 · SYMPTOM BOARDDATAPEL / OPENING POSITION
  • 6 pipelines · 0 owners
    ⚠︎
    Multiple dead pipelines
    Deals sat in stages that had no relation to where the conversation actually was. Some pipelines duplicated each other.
  • Segmentation broken
    ◐
    25,000+ contacts, <50% fill rate
    More than half the fields on more than half the database were empty. Any filter you built silently excluded the records with missing data.
  • 9 sources · 0 rules
    ↯
    Multiple sources overwriting
    Forms, imports, and integrations all pushed data into the portal with no rules about which source wins. A rep would enrich a contact and a sync overwrote it the next day.
  • System of record → paperweight
    ✕
    Reps had stopped trusting it
    The team had learned that fixing data was pointless. Visible symptoms: 19% conversion, 28% demo-to-closure. Underlying problem: nobody could answer three questions from the CRM.
?
Three questions nobody could answer from the CRM: how many real leads do we have, where is each deal, and what should a rep do next.
CHAPTER 03

Week zero, the audit

We did not clean anything first. A cleanup without understanding why the portal drifted decays back to the same state within a quarter.

FIG.03 · AUDIT COVERAGEDATAPEL / WEEK 0
CONTACTS
25,412
COMPANIES
8,140
DEALS
3,860
PIPELINES
6
STAGES AUDITED
41
PROPERTIES IN USE
218
DATA SOURCES WRITING
9
WORKFLOWS REVIEWED
74
For each object we documented what it was supposed to represent, what it actually contained, and which source created or modified it. The output was not a cleanup list. It was the reason the portal had drifted.
CHAPTER 04

Definitions before settings

Before touching HubSpot, we sat with Datapel and wrote down answers to questions that had never been answered in three years.

DEFINITIONS · v1.0 · DATAPEL × REVLYN
SIGNED OFF · WEEK 1
  1. 01
    What is a contact, a company, a deal?
    One definition per object. Named creation trigger. Named owner. Named archive rule.
  2. 02
    How does a lead arrive, and what happens next?
    Capture → qualification → conversion → follow-up → nurture. One sequence. One named owner at each step.
  3. 03
    What does each pipeline stage mean?
    Entry criteria per stage. What must be true about the deal before a rep is allowed to move it there.
  4. 04
    Which data source wins?
    One source of truth per property. Everything else reads. Nothing else overwrites.
Every step agreed before anything was built→ action plan · then two-week build
CHAPTER 05

The build, two weeks

Two weeks was possible because none of the thinking happened during the build. Every decision was already made and written down. What follows is what shipped, in what order.

  1. D-01
    Pipeline consolidation
    Six pipelines merged into two, aligned to the agreed stage definitions.
  2. D-03
    Stage entry criteria
    Every stage got explicit conditions. Reps cannot advance a deal until the fields at that stage are filled.
  3. D-05
    Object schema rebuild
    Contacts, companies, deals reworked. Property logic mapped to the agreed process.
  4. D-07
    Data-source override rules
    One source of truth per property. Manual work stops getting wiped by syncs.
  5. D-09
    Workflow rebuild
    Routing, task creation, follow-up automations, all owner-assigned.
  6. D-11
    Reporting
    Pipeline reports a manager can read in under a minute. One dashboard replaces four.
  7. D-14
    Go live
    Reps switched over. Documentation shipped alongside, not after.
CHAPTER 06

Every second day, for a month

A rebuilt CRM that reps route around is a failed project. So this phase got as much attention as the build.

WORKING-SESSION LOG · FIRST MONTH POST-LAUNCH
EVERY 2ND DAY · WITH REPS
  • Day 02
    FRICTION
    AE · SMB desk
    Follow-up tasks piling up. Reminders arriving late.
  • Day 04
    REQUEST
    AE · enterprise
    Wanted a quicker path to log competitor mentions on a deal.
  • Day 06
    SHIPPED
    SDR lead
    Routing rules over-fired for one region. Fixed same afternoon.
  • Day 09
    SHIPPED
    Sales manager
    Wanted stage-3 dwell time on the weekly digest. Added.
  • Day 12
    SHIPPED
    AE · SMB desk
    Task reminders now surface at the moment the action is due, not sitting in a list.
  • Day 16
    OUTCOME
    AE · enterprise
    Automation absorbed the bulk of routine follow-up. Reps stopped depending on remembering.
Each session shipped changes back into the portalReps stopped routing around the CRM
ON THE RECORD
“The moment they first saw the action plan, or the first pipeline review where the numbers were real.”
PR
Peter Rocke
Datapel · named reference on file
CHAPTER 07

What actually changed

LEAD CONVERSION
19% → 68%
Lead volume did not change. Every lead now has a defined next step, an owner, and a reminder that fires at the right time. Leads stopped going quiet because someone forgot.
DEMO TO CLOSURE
28% → ~42%
With entry criteria on every stage and field logic enforcing them, reps knew exactly what had to be true to move a deal forward, and managers could forecast from a pipeline they trusted.
THE ENGAGEMENT BECAME PERMANENT
Project → Ongoing
Datapel moved onto our HubSpot as a Service model after the project. Continuous optimisation and enablement as the business grows. Revenue has been growing month on month since.
IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR PORTAL

A three-year-old HubSpot with dead pipelines and half-empty records is not a tooling problem.

It is a missing-definitions problem, and no amount of cleanup fixes it, because the cleanup decays. Define the objects, agree the process, write the plan, then build. The build takes two weeks. The definitions are the hard part.

If any of this looks like your Monday, we should talk.

30 minutes, no deck. We open your portal on the call and tell you the three things we'd change first.