The CRM was demoted
Platform to sensor. The plan was to remove it. It tells me more now.
We killed the HubSpot renewal six weeks after a conversation in a fishing boat. We did not rip it out and we did not replace it with another CRM. We dropped to a starter bundle, cut the bolt-ons, and stopped paying the marketing contact tax.
I was a homer for years. I was defending the tool, not the job it was doing.
THE RENEWAL
What we actually cut
On 27 August we killed the HubSpot renewal. We dropped to a starter bundle and stopped paying the marketing contact tax, the line item that went up every time we got better at our jobs. We dropped the stack of bolt-ons bought to make HubSpot do things HubSpot did not do. There are years of history in there and I am not torching it to earn a better headline.
THE SIGNAL
Still useful, differently
The plan was to remove it entirely. I changed my mind. Every browser that has touched our stuff carries a HubSpot cookie, and BLU resolves that cookie back into our own record of who that actually is. Somebody lands on the site: the cookie says this browser is user 68, our own data says that is customer 42, the IP puts them in Madison. Where they came from is unknown, so the card says source unknown instead of guessing, and no purchase on record instead of implying zero.
THE DEMOTION
System of record to one signal
HubSpot stopped being the system of record and became one input to a system that keeps its own record. We came out with better attribution, better email infrastructure, better segmentation, better churn visibility, and a customer-level understanding we did not have before. We are still only partway there.