I get it. You're under pressure. Bigger targets, tighter budgets, fewer people. The mandate hasn't changed — grow — but the room to manoeuvre gets smaller every year.
I'm writing this in solidarity. As a Commercial Director who speaks to hundreds of businesses every year about growth, I'm in the same boat. So are most of the Marketing Directors, Commercial Directors, and CEOs I talk to. We're all looking for the same thing: where's the extra growth going to come from?
And here's what I keep seeing: most of you are overlooking the single biggest lever you've already got. Your tech stack. Specifically, HubSpot.
Think about what a well-run HubSpot should be giving you: better insight into what's actually working, more efficiency across your teams, stronger signals on who's ready to buy, more targeted and personalised engagement with your market. That's not a nice-to-have. That's a growth engine.
But the truth is, for most businesses, it's probably not delivering everything you hoped. And honestly? That's nobody's fault. It's just what happens. You implement, you get busy, priorities shift, people leave, new people join, and slowly the platform drifts away from where it needs to be.
That's where I can help. We've developed a simple framework to guide a strategic look at your HubSpot investment — to prompt the right questions, surface the right priorities, and build a way forward. We call it AAAA: Alignment, Adoption, Activation, AI.
Four levers. Four honest questions. Let me walk you through them.
Here's a question I ask a lot: is your HubSpot set up to deliver the outcomes that matter to your business right now?
Not the outcomes you needed when you implemented it. The ones you need today.
For most businesses, the answer is uncomfortable. HubSpot is still configured for goals you had two or three years ago. Your business has moved on — your ICP has shifted, your sales process has evolved, your priorities for 2026 look nothing like they did in 2023. But your HubSpot? It's stuck in the past.
And the impact is tangible. It's the Commercial Director who can't present a confident sales forecast to the board because the pipeline stages don't reflect how the business actually sells. It's the Marketing Manager who can't use automation to cut freelance costs because the workflows were never built properly. It's the Sales Manager who needs accurate pricing because the product library doesn't sync with the ERP when quoting.
These aren't abstract platform problems. These are business outcomes that HubSpot was probably always supposed to deliver — but isn't, because nobody's gone back to realign it with what the business actually needs now.
I was talking to a Marketing Director last month — events and hospitality sector — and she was frustrated that she couldn't get a clear picture of pipeline from HubSpot. Turns out, the deal stages hadn't been touched since implementation. They'd completely changed how they sold, but HubSpot was still tracking the old way. The reports were technically accurate. They just weren't answering the questions anyone was actually asking.
Misalignment shows up everywhere: dashboards that don't tell you what you need to know, marketing campaigns that aren't connected to revenue, sales and marketing pulling in different directions because they're literally looking at different numbers.
If HubSpot isn't aligned to the outcomes your business needs this year, it's not a growth platform. It's just expensive admin.
This one's uncomfortable, but we need to talk about it.
You've invested in the platform. But is your team invested in using it?
I see this all the time: half the sales team logs their activity religiously, the other half treats HubSpot like a chore they'll get to later (they won't). Marketing is building campaigns in HubSpot but nobody's looking at the attribution. Customer success has their own spreadsheet because "it's just easier."
The result? Your data is a mess. And bad data means bad decisions means missed growth.
Here's the thing: low adoption isn't usually a training problem. I know that's what everyone reaches for — "let's do another training session" — but in my experience, the issue is more fundamental. Your team doesn't see the point. They don't believe HubSpot helps them win. They see it as admin, not advantage.
I worked with a travel company last year where the sales manager was convinced his team just needed more training. So we dug in. Turns out, the way HubSpot was set up actually made their jobs harder. The required fields were wrong. The workflow notifications were annoying. The mobile app experience was clunky for people who spent half their time on the road.
We fixed those things — not with training, but with configuration — and adoption went through the roof. Because now HubSpot was helping them sell, not slowing them down.
The question isn't "how do we make our team use HubSpot?" It's "how do we make HubSpot worth using?"
Quick audit: how much of your HubSpot are you actually using?
I don't mean "have switched on." I mean "are actively generating value from."
Most HubSpot portals I look at are full of ghosts. Workflows that were built in a burst of enthusiasm and never touched again. Sequences that got half-finished when someone left. Reports that were set up for a board meeting eighteen months ago and haven't been opened since. Lead scoring that nobody trusts.
You're paying for this stuff. Every month. But is it paying you back?
I had a conversation with a Commercial Director at a software company — they'd upgraded to Enterprise about a year ago for the custom objects and advanced reporting. When I asked what they were using those features for, there was a long pause. "We were going to set that up. It's on the list."
That's thousands of pounds a year for features on a list.
And here's the thing that makes this worse: HubSpot doesn't stand still. Even beyond the headline features like the Prospecting Agent or the new personalisation tools, HubSpot is quietly iterating every single month. More flexible data structures. Self-updating CRM data fields. AI inside workflows. Smarter automation triggers. These aren't splashy announcements, but they're the kind of improvements that compound — if you're actually using them.
Activation means being ruthless about this. Every feature you're paying for should be generating one of four things: pipeline, revenue, efficiency, or insight. If it's not doing any of those, it's shelfware.
Here's a brutal question I sometimes ask clients: if you cancelled HubSpot tomorrow, what would your business actually miss? If the answer is "not much" — that's an activation problem. And it's probably also a sign that there's a lot of untapped value sitting right there.
Everyone wants to talk about AI. And I get it — the potential is genuinely exciting.
AI is now native in HubSpot. It's not future state, it's available today. Content generation, predictive lead scoring, conversation intelligence, AI-powered forecasting. Real capability that can genuinely move the needle.
But here's what I keep telling people: AI is an accelerant, not a strategy.
AI amplifies whatever's already there. If your alignment is off, AI will help you move faster in the wrong direction. If your adoption is weak, AI will generate insights from incomplete data. If your activation is low, you'll bolt AI onto processes that don't work and wonder why nothing improves.
I was talking to a CEO recently who'd seen a demo of HubSpot's AI features and wanted to "switch everything on." We had to have an honest conversation: your sales team isn't logging activities consistently, your pipeline data is unreliable, and your marketing attribution is basically guesswork. If we turn on AI forecasting right now, it's going to forecast garbage. Very quickly, very confidently.
Get alignment, adoption, and activation right first. Then AI becomes genuinely powerful — automating the grind, personalising at scale, surfacing patterns you'd never spot manually.
AI doesn't fix your growth strategy. It multiplies it. Make sure you're multiplying something worth multiplying.
Look, I'm not here to tell you your HubSpot is broken. Maybe it's working brilliantly. Maybe you're one of the businesses that's genuinely getting full value from the investment.
But if you've got that nagging feeling that there's more in the tank — that you could be getting more growth from the same spend — then it's worth having a proper conversation about it.
Not a product demo. Not a portal audit where someone shows you a list of things that are "wrong." A strategic growth conversation about your business, your goals, and whether HubSpot is genuinely set up to help you hit them.
What we'll do is simple. We'll understand what you're actually trying to achieve this year — not in vague terms, but specifically. We'll look at what's really happening on the ground, not just what the dashboard says. We'll show you what's possible that you might not have seen yet. And we'll give you practical recommendations — not a 47-page roadmap you'll never implement, but actual moves you can make.
If you're a Commercial Director, Marketing Director, or business leader who's feeling the squeeze and looking for extra levers to pull in 2026, let's talk. You've already made the investment. Let's make sure it's working as hard as you are.
Book a 2026 Growth Conversation — 30 minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at where you're at and where the opportunities might be.