Wolfbrook sales shift with HubSpot:  

More clarity, more speed, more wins

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The Client

Wolfbrook Property Group

Wolfbrook Property Group, a dynamic real estate organisation in New Zealand, manages a fast-growing property development company and a rapidly scaling property management division. They were facing internal challenges within their HubSpot CRM that began to impede their ambitious growth plans.

Concentrate was engaged to act as the Technical Lead for the project, providing dedicated HubSpot expertise to improve their system and implement new, scalable processes.

The Challenge

Growing pains and data clutter

Wolfbrook's success had inadvertently led to significant complexity within their HubSpot environment. Having been users for around five years and working with multiple partners, their system had become messy and confusing, directly impacting their efficiency.

The key issues identified by Shannon Bell-Ramsay, Executive Assistant, and the Concentrate team, led by Senior HubSpot Projects Manager Mevuni Mendis, included:

  • Sales team disengagement: The existing processes, pipelines, and excess of information in the CRM were confusing users, leading to a lack of active engagement with the system.
  • Messy permission control: resulting in inconsistent data and processes.
  • Poor data hygiene and reporting: Essential information was not consistently being logged, and the reporting was not generating the necessary insights for the executive team.
  • Lack of alignment: Different business units (BUs) needed a more structured way to operate within the single HubSpot instance.

“We engaged Concentrate to help accelerate mapping our CRM in line with our sales process. We're obviously a very fast-paced company and we like things to be done quite quickly, and Concentrate helped accommodate that.” Shannon.

Photo credit: Wolfbrook

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The Solution

Designing for the future

The project began with an implementation phase and evolved into ongoing technical support to ensure long-term stability and growth. Concentrate focused on a collaborative approach to restructure and optimise the CRM.

Phase 1: Implementing a consultative sales process 

  1. Workshops & mapping: Concentrate held multiple workshops with the Wolfbrook team to define a new, clear sales pipeline and associated requirements.
  2. User-centric design: A new, streamlined user interface was developed for the sales team, using HubSpot's property cards to show only the information "absolutely required." This eliminated "a lot of noise" for the users.
  3. Process enforcement: Conditional questions were implemented at key pipeline stages, ensuring that mandatory data was captured. A notification system was also built to alert Regional Sales Managers when deals were moved without the required data, serving as a valuable internal coaching tool.
  4. Scaling to BUs: The successful residential sales process was then replicated and tailored for other business units, including the Capital Team, Property Management, and Acquisitions.

Phase 2: Enhanced system control and user focus

To guarantee the long-term health and security of the CRM, a key step was optimising system permissions:

  1. Establishing clear governance: the number of "super admin" roles was strategically streamlined, creating a clear and efficient central control point ensuring all system updates and maintenance are executed correctly and consistently.
  2. Targeting access by role: Concentrate implemented role-based permission sets specific to job roles and regional teams (e.g., Auckland, Christchurch). It gave every team member precisely the access they needed for their core tasks, eliminating the risk of accidentally changing critical settings. As Shannon noted, the focused environment was crucial for preventing unintentional system changes.

 

Phase 3: Rolling out changes

After the core sales team was set up, the next focus was to replicate that success across the whole company. Concentrate helped roll out the new, efficient processes to other parts of the business like the Capital Team, Property Management, and Acquisitions.

A big final piece of work was migrating a brand-new property management team in Auckland into the Wolfbrook central HubSpot system. Concentrate kept things running smoothly during all this by providing support, including an audit and overhaul of over 800 workflows.

Mevuni Mendis, Concentrate Senior HubSpot Projects Manager, summed up: "It was a complicated business with different Business Units all of them in HubSpot, using the same database of customers. Designing their processes needed a lot of future-proofing, focus, and strategic thinking."

"The Concentrate team were very adaptable to how Wolfbrook operate... We're a very fast-paced company and we like things to be done quite quickly, and Concentrate helped accommodate that by jumping over all of our requests and helping with setting up all of the back-end processes." 
Lets chat

Shannon Bell-Ramsey

EA & Project Lead, Wolfbrook

Results and Impact

Better conversions, clearer insights

The strategic collaboration and the strategic restructuring of Wolfbrook's HubSpot CRM, delivered immediate and measurable improvements across the business.

The enhancements immediately fostered greater engagement and effectiveness from the sales teams:

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Improved conversions:

The new processes resulted in better results when following up on leads. Shannon noted that it was "definitely noticeable that our lead conversion rates have improved”.

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Leadership visibility:

The leadership gained the ability to effectively monitor the team's activity and performance within the CRM.

System integrity:

All Business Units (BUs) are now utilising the same HubSpot instance while benefiting from robust access control, meaning they only view the information relevant to their specific BU.

Data-driven acquisitions:

Wolfbrook is now able to structure their property acquisitions, design, and builds based on data-backed customer demand, ensuring market alignment.

The successful project implementation immediately enabled Wolfbrook to achieve its demanding, fast-paced objectives. Crucially, the changes were embraced by the sales team because the benefits were clear. As Shannon commented, regarding the initial anxiety around change, providing the right support was key: 

"Once they had the right support and guidance on how to do the process and how this benefits them, not just the business, it really helped them understand and want to learn the new way that we process in the CRM system. This shift has transformed the daily operations of the sales team. The new, data-driven processes are saving them from a lot of cold calling on leads that are not interested. Instead, the team is now empowered to focus on leads who are genuinely interested and partially qualified, supported by a much better process.”
Lets chat

Shannon Bell-Ramsey

EA & Project Lead, Wolfbrook

Looking Forward:

Looking ahead, Wolfbrook's primary goal is to continue their fast-paced growth trajectory aided by leveraging the marketing functionality unlocked by the recent HubSpot refresh. The team plans to initiate targeted nurture campaigns segmented by specific leads and departments, ensuring relevant communication for each of their different brands. By utilising the platform's automation tools to handle routine tasks, the internal marketing team will be freed up to focus on more hands-on work and strategic planning, ultimately driving more sophisticated marketing strategies across the group.

Reflecting on the journey, Shannon offers a key piece of advice for other fast-growing businesses:  "I would recommend, if you are starting up in a business or using a CRM system that you engage experts like Concentrate to help you with your process mapping and implementation ahead of launching ... It really would have made an impact had we done this properly a year or so earlier."

Ready to bring clarity and high performance to your fast-growing business? Contact Concentrate today to discuss a solution tailored to your strategic CRM and process needs.