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CHALLENGE:
A £1bn supply chain partner, operating across 22 countries with 12,000 employees and seven siloed divisions lacked pipeline visibility, running on a fractured legacy CRM that made revenue forecasting impossible.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS:
Delivered six months ahead of schedule (saving £250k), achieving 100% adoption across 80+ users, and for the first time in 50 years gave leadership real-time customer funnel visibility across all divisions, identifying a 50% pipeline upside.

KEY PRODUCTS
Sales Hub Enterprise, Operations Hub (Datasets), Marketing Hub, Breeze AI (Deal Loss Agent).

The Challenge

How do you steer a £1bn ship when you can’t see the horizon?
Unipart is one of the biggest British institutions in logistics, manufacturing, and technology. However, revenue-generating was being stifled by a fractured legacy system across multiple divisions, and operating on a customised, open-source version of SugarCRM (SuiteCRM) that had stalled in development and was past its End of Service Life (EOSL).

Running a £1bn business on open-source software past its EOSL created a critical sense of risk and urgency.

Crucially, Darren Leigh, CEO, set a mandate to accelerate margin-accretive revenue growth. Yet, he faced a critical challenge: no single, accurate pipeline view across the seven divisions. Without this visibility, predicting revenue or forecasting resources was effectively guesswork.

"Before we started using this forecasting dashboard, our sales pipeline felt a bit like navigating in the dark. We had a general sense of our progress, but we lacked the granular visibility to truly optimise our sales process." Alex Smyth, Head of Bid Management

The challenge was also cultural, with each division believing that their sales process was unique, creating cross-selling and standardisation barriers. Unipart needed a solution to unify these complex parts into one high-performance engine.

The Solution

One Pipeline. One Process. One Source of Truth.
Unipart requested a 12-month plan to compare HubSpot against SAP. However, BabelQuest identified speed as critical to success. Recognising Unipart’s changing needs we pivoted to an accelerated strategy, delivering a Minimum Viable Product using Sales Hub Enterprise in six months - half the allocated time. This pivot supported Unipart’s primary reason for choosing HubSpot: "ease of adoption" - easy, fast, unified data as standard. This was critical for driving adoption across 80+ users across seven divisions.

The Unipart Way
BabelQuest strategically aligned to "The Unipart Way" (continuous improvement philosophy), agreeing to 10 principles to keep the implementation on course. Principles like 'solve for the customer' and 'Design globally, deploy locally' guided every configuration decision, helping overcome resistance.

Platform Excellence
To overcome the "my division is different" objective, instead of solving for seven internal sales processes, BabelQuest flipped the script: solving for one customer buying journey, as clients buy in the same way, whether buying rail infrastructure or logistics support.

The HubSpot configuration focused on scalability and continuous improvement. BabelQuest leveraged Sales Hub to build a unified architecture:

Standardised Pipeline: From 10+ pipelines, across 7 divisions into 1 deal pipeline, enforcing consistent data structure while allowing for back-office nuances via subprocesses.
Advanced Customisation: Calculation properties handle complex weighted revenue and contribution margins across multiple currencies.
Operations Hub Datasets: Complex financial reporting is phased by splitting deal values across the months they are active - not just the close date.
360° View: HubSpot's sensitive data balance Unipart’s 360° customer view confidentiality requirements.

The Impact

From Silos to Synchronicity
The implementation of Sales Hub fundamentally shifted Unipart’s operations from reactive account management to proactive, data-driven business development.

For the first time in the company’s history, leadership has a "real-time X-ray view" - the ability to see all interactions in one place - shattering cross-divisional silos, and unlocking previously invisible cross-selling opportunities.

CEO, Darren Leigh, noted the transformative power of this visibility: "For the first time ever I can see that number and I can break it down by all of these levels... now we can see the levers we need to pull. Don't underestimate what you've done here."

The Results

Scaling from Millions to Billions
Delivering the project ahead of schedule saved time and generated immediate value:

£250K in Savings: Shaving six months off the timeline saved £250k (estimated) in internal stakeholder and project management costs.
50% Pipeline Upside Identified: Increased confidence in data led to Year 2 growth target increasing from 20% to 50%.
100% User Adoption: The "if it’s not in HubSpot, it doesn’t exist" mandate ensured absolute adoption, with top sales reps logging 4,500+ activities after month two.
Transformed End User Experience: From navigating multiple systems, reps now have a single view of interactions, reducing admin time, preventing territory conflict, and unlocking cross-selling opportunities across the 600+ product portfolio.
Positive ROI: Cost savings and immediate revenue impact meant the project achieved positive ROI within months of launch.

"We've gone from poor data, spreadsheets, and people's heads to one unified solution through HubSpot... We're working on the right opportunities and we're closing more business than we've ever done." Alex Smyth

Marketing Alignment
Marketing was scattered across Unipart's divisions with varying HubSpot adoption speeds. Creating a 'One Marketing Team' required aligning everyone around a single HubSpot way of working, which not only leveraged the platform's full power but also enabled rapid team integration. With Marketing now owning HubSpot, the end-to-end view from prospecting to deals brought Marketing and Business Development into closer alignment.

AI Usage

Laying the Foundation for Intelligence
Unipart sensitive data requires a highly strategic AI approach. Phase one focused on embedding Breeze Assistant and AI summaries into daily workflows, allowing teams to experience value without disrupting processes.

Currently, Unipart is leveraging the Deal Loss Agent to derive qualitative insights, trialing AI-generated responses to build confidence in the data quality and accuracy ahead of full launch. By analysing stalling deals, Unipart is turning raw data into coaching moments - driving continuous improvement.

Looking ahead to Q1 FY26/27, the AI roadmap includes deploying more sophisticated agents such as Customer Agent and Prospecting Agent, to further automate relationship management and top-of-funnel activity.

This phased approach ensures each layer of AI capability is embedded, trusted, and delivering value before the next is introduced - supercharging sales efficiency while allowing for the cultural shift required to work alongside intelligent automation at enterprise scale.

With the guidance of BabelQuest, Unipart have mapped a 5-theme, 29-stage strategic plan to elevate use of HubSpot to World-class status.
"With HubSpot as our single source of truth across Marketing and Business development, with BabelQuest’s support we’ve created a roadmap which will lead to a greater understanding of our success - what works and critically, what doesn’t. This enables us to drive and embed the behaviours that best serve our customers, seeing clearly how we can partner with them across our wide range of performance-improving services." Dave Tilmouth, Head of Performance Marketing