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TIL onboarding a new client took 6 weeks longer than I planned
I picked up a mid size manufacturing client in February and thought I'd have their CRM set up in 2 weeks. It ended up taking 8 weeks because their old data was all over spreadsheets and sticky notes. Every department had a different way of tracking leads and I had to sit down with 4 managers to figure out what was real. I finally built a simple pipeline in HubSpot with just 5 stages and it actually works now. Has anyone else had a client promise clean data and then hand you a mess of random files?
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charles_coleman2d ago
The part about "promised clean data and then handed you a mess of random files" hit way too close to home, I've been there more times than I can count. What I started doing is asking for a sample of their actual data before we even sign a contract, just to see how bad it really is (and it's usually worse than they describe). For your sticky note situation, what worked for me was sitting down with the lowest level salesperson first, not the managers, because they know where the real leads come from. Then I built a single spreadsheet template with exactly 5 columns (name, company, phone, email, lead source) and made each manager fill it out for their own team before I touched HubSpot. That way they couldn't blame me for the mess later, and it forced them to admit what data was missing.
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hannahcraig2d ago
Sticky notes are basically job security for data people, right?
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