Companies get starry-eyed over automation and think, “We’ll just drop in a few email sequences, trigger them on form submissions, and boom, leads galore!” The most common mistake? Automating chaos. If your initial data is messy, your lists are a junk drawer of unqualified contacts, and your segmentation is non-existent, all you’re doing is scaling dysfunction, faster.

The fix? I always say: Automate intention, not assumption. Start with clear lifecycle stages and clean, relevant data. Then build automation that supports real human behavior. Not what you hope people do. And for the love of HubSpot, name your workflows something better than “New Workflow 7 Final FINAL v2.”

“Measurable ROI” — It’s the unicorn everyone’s chasing, but in HubSpot, it’s less mythical than most think. In a well-built CRM, it looks like clarity. You can trace a closed deal all the way back to its first touch. Whether it was a blog post, a paid ad, or a networking event. You know how many leads converted to sales, how fast deals move through the pipeline, and which channels actually deserve your budget (spoiler: it’s usually not the one the CMO is emotionally attached to🤣).

Good CRM ROI is seeing one dashboard and confidently saying, “This is working, this isn’t, and here’s what we’ll do about it.” It’s marketing and sales singing the same song. Ideally not off-key. 🤣