One instance, one retention engine.
How a K-12 literacy platform brought governance to a sprawling HubSpot instance and built its first Customer Success motion.
This K-12 literacy platform sells decodable books and "Take-Everywhere" consumable literacy packs providing structured phonics practice to schools and districts. Its sales team is largely former educators, and leadership manages the business through HubSpot dashboards. Driftless was engaged as the unifying HubSpot owner and strategic operator for a large, sprawling instance.
Fragmented ownership, accumulated debt.
This K-12 literacy platform's HubSpot was deeply embedded but suffered from fragmented ownership and accumulated technical and structural debt, largely process- and hygiene-related, which meant stabilization was achievable without a full rebuild.
Scale and sprawl
800,800 contacts, 206,500 companies, 23,700 deals, 2,933 lists, 591 forms on the deprecated legacy editor, and 498 unused workflows (73% of the total).
Reporting without governance
90 dashboards and 1,769 reports with no governance or discoverability, causing brittle reporting.
Data hygiene and routing
Large numbers of unowned contacts from bulk imports, duplicate contacts driving double-enrollment, and location-formatting issues breaking territory routing.
No Customer Success motion
Biggest strategic gap: no Customer Success / renewals motion: the post-sale journey lived in a manual spreadsheet with no leadership visibility.
Governance first, then a retention engine.
Governance Audit
Ran a HubSpot audit and discovered bloat with unused records, workflows, and ungoverned dashboards that made reporting unreliable and caused data-quality issues. The most critical gap was the complete absence of a real Customer Success/Renewals process, which was the first to map and document.
Renewals Engine
After the process was approved, built a dedicated Renewals pipeline with enforced required fields, 11 CS deal fields, 5 automation workflows (kickoff SLA, setup tasks, auto-create renewal deal on program end, 120/90/60/30-day timeline tasks, cadence watchdog), 5 saved CS views, and a 13-report CS Management dashboard, seeded with test deals so every view could be demoed before real data load.
Sales, Data & Utilities
Built 5 custom task-queue views for a power-user rep as the sales-team template, cleaned up stale tasks, and shifted marketing task triggers from opens to clicks. Reassigned territories and owners, cleaned up parent/child company hierarchies, synced native company-to-contact ownership, and disabled the setting driving runaway company creation. Trained a dedicated internal data owner and grouped 70,000+ job titles into 7 clean categories.
Early-stage, with the foundation built.
CS + Renewals system
A complete Customer Success and Renewals process built and documented, staged for pilot ahead of org-wide rollout.
Sales task queues
Power-user sales task queues live and in active use, becoming the sales-team template.
Lead-capture automation
Lead-capture automation completed and marketing-task bloat reduced.
Data ownership
A dedicated internal data owner onboarded and trained, with the first supported event-lead import completed.
An embedded partner, not a vendor.
From a governance audit to a fully built Renewals engine, Driftless operated as an embedded extension of the team: recurring steering-committee presence, knowledge transfer, and platform consolidation onto HubSpot.
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