- Deciding on a new market?
- Hiring another sales rep?
- Adjusting your pricing strategy?
- Niching down to your best-performing customer segment?
These are real decisions with real consequences. Many leaders hesitate when they need to make them. Not because they lack data, but because they don't trust the data they have.
As Cait Grabowski, Senior Implementation Manager at Denamico, recently put it on the RevOps Champions podcast: "If you can't segment, automate or forecast from it, it's not data. It's storage."
Data only has value if it helps us make decisions. Otherwise, it’s just noise.
And often expensive noise.
We see this all the time when helping clients migrate data from an old system into HubSpot. The first reaction is often fear:
“We can’t lose that data!”
But when we dig deeper, it becomes clear they weren’t using it anyway. Why? Because they didn’t trust it. It was outdated. Incomplete. Or purchased from a third party that never delivered on its promise.
The consequence? Leaders end up making decisions without confidence. Teams waste hours manually compiling reports instead of executing. Forecasts are questioned. Pipelines stall. These are not inexpensive problems.
More data is not better data.
The solution isn’t to keep more data. It’s to keep better data. Clean, current, decision-ready data that fuels segmentation, automation, and forecasting.
“Every single client I've ever had in franchise building has come from spreadsheets,” Cait shared on the podcast.
Spreadsheets don’t help companies scale however, which is the essence of a franchise business model.
When we speak with franchise businesses, they’re typically interested in HubSpot for these reasons:
- Unifying operations. A franchise development leader told us their sales team was tracking leads in one tool, marketing was running campaigns in another, and real estate was buried in email threads. No one trusted the numbers. Once they moved into HubSpot, all three functions (plus the franchisees) were working from a single system, and allowed them to finally follow exactly the same process, and to be making decisions from the same source of truth.
- Empowering franchisees with marketing. One franchisor admitted their operators rarely used the marketing collateral they sent out, because it was too hard to find and customize. By creating a shared HubSpot library, franchisees could quickly launch campaigns with approved brand assets. The result? More adoption, more consistent messaging, and a stronger national brand.
- Building trust through transparency. We’ve seen franchisors unintentionally create friction by holding data too tightly, thereby leaving franchisees in the dark about performance benchmarks or pipeline health. By opening up dashboards in HubSpot, both sides could see the same metrics. Great trust also leads to greater adoption of the system.
And Cait has a favorite way of showing this in action: tracking time.
She uses HubSpot to measure how long it takes to move a lead to a sales conversation, to take a prospect through the sales process, or to hand off from sales to the next team. As Cait says, time is money.
That’s the bigger theme: scaling isn’t just about collecting more data, it’s about collecting the right data. The kind that tells you where time, money, and opportunity are being gained. Or lost.
The most effective way to do that is to work backwards. Start with the decisions that matter most to each stakeholder (in the case of a franchisor: your franchise development team, your marketing leaders, your franchisee operators) and then ask, what data do we need to make those decisions with confidence?
When you reverse-engineer data capture this way, you avoid the trap of storing information you’ll never use. Instead, you create a lean, trusted dataset that fuels segmentation, automation, forecasting, and ultimately, sustainable growth.
Whether you’re a franchisor, a B2B leader, or scaling any business model, the principle is the same:
Don’t collect data for storage. Collect it for action.
Here’s to action,
Kristin
P.S. If you don't trust your data, our 6-week HubSpot Clean-Up Sprint can help. One client generated $100K in the first week after rebuilding a single workflow and $80K-$120K every week after. That's the ROI of clean, actionable data!
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Kristin Dennewill
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