OURBACK
Case study
Email leads into HubSpot: the spreadsheet CRM is gone.
A professional services business was running its entire sales pipeline from email and a shared spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was the CRM, and every lead was typed in twice.
Sector: professional services · Systems: email, a shared spreadsheet and HubSpot · Delivered remotely
The challenge
Leads arrived by email. Someone opened the message, found the right row in the sheet, and typed in the name, company, contact details and source. Then they typed the same details into HubSpot so the team could track follow-ups and report on pipeline. Notes added, reminder set, next step chased.
It took around fifteen to twenty-five minutes per lead. On a busy day that was an hour or more of pure re-keying. Leads sat unnoticed in inboxes and follow-ups slipped. The spreadsheet and HubSpot drifted apart, so neither could be fully trusted, and in practice only one person really knew which was right.
What we built
Leads now flow from email into HubSpot automatically, and the spreadsheet is no longer the system of record. New enquiries are captured through a structured form or parsed straight from the inbox. The details land in HubSpot as a contact and a deal, with source, owner and a next-step task all created in the same run.
The team now works in HubSpot. The old sheet is archived for reference rather than maintained. A check runs after each sync, so if a lead fails to create the team gets a clear alert instead of a silent gap, which is how leads used to disappear.
The result
The double entry is gone. Leads reach the pipeline in minutes rather than hours, follow-ups are tracked in one place, and reporting comes out of HubSpot instead of a sheet that only one person fully understood.
All figures are the customer's own, for their process.
Why this one was worth doing
Plenty of businesses buy a CRM and then keep the spreadsheet running alongside it, because the sheet is familiar and the CRM is extra work to fill in. What you end up with is two half-true records and a team that quietly trusts neither. The fix is rarely more software. It is removing the second place the data has to go.
The time saved is real, but the bigger gain is that the pipeline finally reflects reality, which is the only reason to have a CRM at all.
Got one of these?
If your team is typing the same information into two places, a 15-minute Discovery call is enough to map one process and tell you whether it is worth fixing. No cost, and no pitch.