We’ve lost a few deals recently, and while I never like losing, the pattern has forced me to think more critically about how we position and package our HubSpot implementation offering for credit unions.
The deals we’ve lost have been with credit unions that are new to HubSpot. At first, that was frustrating because we know how much work goes into building the right data foundation and how important that foundation becomes over time. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized why a credit union buying HubSpot for the first time may not value that part of the implementation as much as we do.
When you are evaluating a new platform, features and functionality are exciting. You want to see campaigns, workflows, email templates, automations, dashboards, and member journeys. You want to understand what your team can do as soon as the platform goes live. That is tangible, easy to visualize, and frankly, more interesting than talking about data models, integrations, field structures, and architecture.
The data foundation is boring by comparison.
The challenge is that, about a year later, those priorities often reverse.
The credit unions we work with that have already been on HubSpot for a year or more tend to ask very different questions. They are less focused on how many workflows or templates came with the original implementation and much more focused on whether the platform is easy to manage, whether their team can build things themselves, whether their data is structured correctly, and whether they can add new use cases without creating more complexity.
They start asking how to get more data into HubSpot, how to incorporate lending, payments, or digital banking data, how to create a more complete member view, and how to scale without relying on a consultant every time they want to make a change.
Credit unions that know, know.
Most of the organizations that have already lived through a CRM implementation understand that the long-term value is rarely determined by the number of features that were configured at launch. It is determined by the quality of the foundation underneath them.
That is where the implementation decisions made on Day 1 begin to compound.
If the data model is clean, the integrations are thoughtfully designed, and the platform is structured in a way that your internal team can understand and manage, each new use case becomes easier to build. Adding another campaign, workflow, data source, or department becomes an extension of the foundation that is already there.
A poor foundation compounds too, just in the opposite direction.
Workarounds accumulate. Duplicate fields get created. Different teams start defining the same data differently. Integrations are built to solve individual problems instead of supporting the broader architecture. Eventually, the organization wants to do something more sophisticated and discovers that the underlying structure makes it much harder than it should be.
At that point, fixing the problem is possible, but it is painful. You are no longer working with a clean environment. You are trying to restructure something while active workflows, reports, integrations, campaigns, and internal processes already depend on it.
We do a lot of that work today, which is one reason we are so opinionated about getting the foundation right from the beginning.
At the same time, losing a few of these new-to-HubSpot deals has also made me realize that we can do a better job meeting credit unions where they are.
We should not expect a credit union buying HubSpot for the first time to fully appreciate the value of a strong data architecture before they have experienced the problems that come from not having one. If they are asking what they will be able to do on Day 1, that is a completely reasonable question, and we need to have a better answer.
That does not mean backing away from our focus on data. If anything, I believe even more strongly that the foundation is what determines whether a HubSpot implementation becomes more valuable or more frustrating over time.
What it does mean is that our clients should not have to choose between a strong long-term foundation and immediate value.
We are making improvements to our implementation offering so that new HubSpot clients get both. We want them to launch with a secure, scalable data foundation that will support them for years, while also getting more of the practical campaigns, workflows, templates, and quick wins that make the platform useful and exciting right away.
There is a balance here. An implementation that focuses only on what looks impressive at launch can create significant technical debt later. An implementation that focuses only on architecture can fail to demonstrate enough immediate value to the people actually using the platform.
The best implementation should do both.
It should make the team excited about what they can do on Day 1 while quietly putting the structure in place that will make Day 365, Day 1,000, and everything after that easier.
We have learned a lot from the credit unions that come to us after living with HubSpot for a year or two. Recently, we have also learned from a few credit unions that chose someone else.
Both are useful signals, and we intend to keep listening to them.