Go Slow to Go Fast: Why HubSpot Adoption Matters More Than Configuration

Here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks.

Across 650+ HubSpot projects, we’ve found that only about 20% of our time is spent actually configuring the tool. The other 80% goes into documentation, training, project management, adoption support, and sitting with teams to make sure what we built actually works in their hands — not just on a whiteboard.

I’ll say that again: the configuration is the easy part.

If you’re evaluating HubSpot — or you’re already using it and wondering why it isn’t delivering — this may be the most important thing you read today. The companies that succeed with HubSpot are not the ones with the most complex workflows or the fanciest integrations. They’re the ones that get the boring stuff right first.

Let me tell you about one of those companies.

Meet Zeelo

Zeelo is the global leader in employee and student shuttle transportation. They move thousands of people from A to B for organisations like Amazon, McLaren, AstraZeneca.... They operate across the UK, the US, and Ireland, and they’ve been doing it for over a decade.

I’ll be honest — before I entered Zeelo’s world, I’d never really considered how a company like Amazon gets warehouse staff to a 4 AM shift when there’s no public transport running. Zeelo solves that problem, and they solve it at scale.

But here’s the thing: Zeelo had already been on HubSpot for four or five years before we started working together. And like a lot of fast-growing companies, the platform had grown with them — just not in the right way.

Jason Driver, who leads Zeelo’s technology and operations strategy, described it bluntly:

 “We had lots of different HubSpot admins doing lots of different things in different ways.”

The result was predictable. Orphaned properties. Forgotten workflows. Reports nobody could explain. Lists that served no purpose. HubSpot was being used by the sales team, but the rest of the business — operations, account management, and post-sale teams — were spread across a patchwork of disconnected tools.

Sound familiar? It should. We see this pattern in about seven out of every ten companies we speak to.

The Turning Point: Committing to the Platform

What changed at Zeelo wasn’t a feature release or a shiny new integration. It was a decision.

“We had a bit of a company strategy rethink,” Jason told me. “One of the main strategic levers we wanted to pull on was how to really reconfigure our core workflows to start to deliver the services in a really cost-efficient way.”

Zeelo decided to stop treating HubSpot as just a sales tool and start using it as the operational backbone of the business — a proper CRM and marketing platform working alongside their in-house software, Mission Control.

HubSpot would manage everything customer-facing: the sales pipeline, the marketing engine, account management workflows, and reporting. Mission Control would continue to power the core shuttle operations.

That kind of commitment is what separates companies that get real value from HubSpot from those that churn through tools every 18 months. We see it all the time: businesses bolt on a new piece of software, never fully adopt it, rip it out, and move on to the next shiny thing. Adoption gets strained. Teams get cynical. The cycle repeats.

Zeelo broke that cycle by going all in. More importantly, they recognised that going all in on a CRM and marketing platform like HubSpot meant more than buying licences. It meant investing in the people and processes around it.

Go Slow to Go Fast

When we kicked off the engagement, we did what we always do: we listened.

That meant a full-day discovery session at Zeelo’s offices. No configuration. No rushing to build. Just structured, deep requirements gathering with every stakeholder involved in the customer journey.

Jason and his team had a phrase for it:

“Go slow to go fast is something we banged about quite a lot within the teams.”

Before we touched a single workflow, we established the governance framework. Permission structures. Documentation standards. Ways of working. The unsexy stuff that stops you from ending up back where you started 18 months later.

Jason’s advice to anyone starting this journey is direct:

“Get the governance, permission structures, ways of working set up on day one or as close to it as possible — because it can spiral very, very quickly.”

This is where a lot of companies get it wrong. They want to jump straight to automation, dashboards, and advanced integrations. But without governance, you’re building on sand. And with a platform as powerful as HubSpot — spanning CRM, marketing, sales, service, and operations — the blast radius of ungoverned chaos is enormous.

The 80% Nobody Talks About

This is where it gets counterintuitive.

That 20% configuration figure shocks people. But when Jason heard it, he wasn’t surprised.

 “The 20% configuring HubSpot, once I think it through, actually makes sense,” he said. “And I think outside of that...before you start doing anything meaningful, planning for adoption is the key element, its about what happens afterwards (configuration) as well.”

The “afterwards” is where most projects succeed or fail.

It’s one thing to build a pipeline, design a lifecycle stage model, or configure lead scoring. It’s another thing entirely to get 50 people to use it properly, every day, under pressure.

 “Spending time with the teams on how they’re actually using the tools you put in front of them can’t be overstated,” Jason says. “It’s one thing having workshops and developing requirements and iterating and building something that is there or thereabouts, but the way it’s actually used in reality is completely different.”

We see this constantly. A company invests in HubSpot as its CRM and marketing platform, spends weeks configuring it beautifully, launches it to the team — and then moves on.

Nobody checks whether the sales reps are logging activities. Nobody notices the marketing team is still managing campaigns from a spreadsheet. Nobody sits with account managers to see whether the custom objects make sense in the flow of daily work.

At Zeelo, we didn’t do that. We stayed. We iterated. We sat with the teams. And that’s why it worked.

Why HubSpot Was the Right Platform

This is worth saying clearly: a big reason Zeelo’s transformation succeeded is because they chose the right platform to build on.

HubSpot isn’t just a CRM. It’s a CRM, marketing, sales, service, and operations platform — and that breadth matters when you’re trying to unify customer-facing operations across an entire business.

Zeelo needed one system that could support pipeline management for an account-based sales motion, marketing automation for go-to-market campaigns, service workflows for post-sale account management, and reporting across the full customer lifecycle.

HubSpot gave them that.

And because it’s a single platform rather than a stitched-together stack of point solutions, data flows naturally between teams. Marketing knows what sales is doing. Sales knows what account management is doing. Leadership gets visibility across the full picture without pulling reports from five different systems.

Combined with Mission Control on the operational side, Zeelo now has a tech stack that is clean, committed, and built to scale as they expand into new markets and verticals.

The Results

Since partnering with Periti Digital, Zeelo has expanded HubSpot from a sales-only tool into a company-wide platform serving every team.

They’ve scaled into three markets — the UK, US, and Ireland — with HubSpot operations robust enough to support that growth. They’ve consolidated a fragmented post-sale tech stack into a unified architecture. They manage four-plus verticals through a single HubSpot instance, with construction on the horizon. And their teams aren’t just using the platform — they’re actively pushing for more advanced features and automation.

As Jason puts it:

 “We really see this as a time to use all of that knowledge to break through and to really accelerate our growth, but do it in a really profitable way.”

The foundation is built. Now they’re running.

The Takeaway

Don’t overlook the simple things: governance, adoption, and having a strong foundation to build from.

The companies getting the most out of HubSpot as a CRM and marketing platform are not the ones with the most complex setups. They’re the ones that went slow at the start, invested in the people and processes around the tool, and committed to making it work.

Zeelo is proof of that.

Want to Talk About Your HubSpot Journey?

If any of this resonated — whether you’re evaluating HubSpot for the first time or trying to fix a platform that’s gone sideways — reach out to Dan Kirby, Head of Solution Sales, at dkirby@peritidigital.com.

We’ve done this 650+ times. We’d love to help you get it right.

*Source: The Proof by Periti Digital, Episode 3. References: HubSpot 2024 State of CRM Report; Gartner research on CRM adoption failure rates.*