How Havas People Connected Marketing to Revenue Across Three Continents

IMPLEMENTATION · MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS · SALES HUB, MARKETING HUB & BREEZE AI

The challenge: Havas People, the specialist employer branding team within the wider Havas Group, had no CRM, no integration between Mailchimp and its sales spreadsheets, and no shared view across its US, Asia and Australia operations.

The achievement: The team moved from "spreadsheet chaos" to a single, real-time view of the entire customer journey - from a stranger's first interaction with a marketing asset through to closed revenue - with full platform adoption from a standing start.

Havas People is a full-service employer branding and communications agency and the specialist employer branding team within the global Havas Group - a network of over 20,000 experts across 100 countries. Havas People operates across the UK, US, India, Asia and Australia, building brands and experiences in the worlds of work and study.

• Industry: Media and Communications
• Size: Enterprise
• Location: UK, with operations spanning the US, Asia, India and Australia
• Products used: HubSpot Sales Hub, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Breeze AI (Intelligence & Enrichment)

Despite being the specialist employer branding team within one of the world's largest communications groups, Havas People was working almost entirely in the dark. Their tech stack consisted of Mailchimp for marketing and isolated spreadsheets for sales, with no integration between the two and no unified view of what was happening across their international territories.

In practice, this meant:

• No link between marketing and sales activity - Mailchimp and spreadsheets operated as two disconnected systems, with no automated handoff between them.
• No shared view across territories - teams in the US, Asia and Australia had no visibility into one another's pipeline or campaign performance.
• No way to prove ROI to the board - revenue forecasting was guesswork, and marketing's contribution to closed deals couldn't be demonstrated with any rigour.
• A genuine CRM knowledge gap - the team had never worked with a CRM before, so they had the operational need but not yet the technical vocabulary to specify a solution. This was a natural consequence of fast international growth outpacing systems, not a shortfall in how the team worked.

With the wider Havas Group considering its own CRM initiatives for the future, there was also a strategic imperative: establish a robust, best-practice HubSpot instance now, rather than risk the team's specific processes being absorbed - and lost - in a future corporate rollout.

BabelQuest recognised from the outset that Havas People didn't just need a platform implementation - they needed a foundation in CRM strategy, built around how the team actually worked. The approach was deeply consultative: HubSpot Platform Consultant, Carrie Jones, ran workshops to surface undocumented processes, challenge assumptions, and translate what the team did day-to-day into a HubSpot architecture that reflected it. The project had a quick turnaround, with the project starting in late July 2025 and wrapping up in mid-August 2025.

It’s incredibly common for fast-moving teams to have vital process knowledge trapped in spreadsheets and disconnected tools. What made working with Havas People so rewarding was their openness and honesty during our workshops to break down those silos.

While their day-to-day workflows weren’t formally documented, each lead understood their role and was eager to see how Marketing, Sales, and Ops impacted one another. The workshops were a real journey of discovery and a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but uncovering those unwritten habits and translating them into a unified HubSpot architecture in just a few short weeks was a fantastic experience - especially seeing their initial CRM intimidation turn into genuine confidence.” - Carrie Jones, HubSpot Platform Consultant, BabelQuest

Mapping the full journey, not just the sales process

Rather than mapping a simple sales process, BabelQuest architected the full customer lifecycle in HubSpot Sales Hub and Marketing Hub - from the moment a stranger first encounters a marketing asset through to a closed deal. To bridge the team's knowledge gap, their workflows were built out and demonstrated ahead of the final implementation, so the Havas People team could see and respond to how their own processes would work in practice before going live - removing a significant source of uncertainty from the project.

Automating event management end-to-end

A key focus was event management, one of Havas People's most significant lead sources but previously a labour-intensive process involving multiple stakeholders. BabelQuest streamlined the entire workflow inside HubSpot: marketing assets, event sign-ups, and post-event sales sequences now run automatically, with a fraction of the manual effort previously required.

Building the platform around the team's own language

Custom properties were introduced to capture the specific data points that mattered to Havas People, reflecting the language and structure of the agency's own sales process, so the platform felt built for the team rather than retrofitted around them.

A considered introduction to AI

Because the team was new to CRM, BabelQuest was deliberate about how and when AI was introduced. Rather than overwhelming users with capability they weren't yet ready to trust, Breeze AI was deployed for data enrichment - automatically populating company and contact records to reduce the administrative burden on the sales team and build immediate confidence in data quality. This measured approach was intentional: with clean, enriched data now flowing through the system, the groundwork is in place to deploy HubSpot's Prospecting Agent in a future phase, automating top-of-funnel relationship management and freeing the sales team to focus on conversations that are ready to convert.

The shift from reactive spreadsheet management to proactive, data-driven operations was immediate and measurable:

• 100% campaign visibility: for the first time, the team has a single, real-time view of every campaign across all territories, with complete visibility into how marketing assets translate into event attendance, pipeline and revenue.
• Unified global data: data from the US, Asia and Australia is now consolidated in one place, eliminating the siloed working that had made cross-team collaboration almost impossible.
• Automated event management: complex workflows that previously required significant manual effort across multiple people now run automatically inside HubSpot.
• 100% platform adoption: by involving sales and marketing leadership throughout the design process, BabelQuest achieved full adoption. A team that had never used a CRM before now describes it as "transformative" to their daily working lives - in their own words, going "from never having used a CRM to loving the platform."

The most significant shift is at leadership level. The project lead at Havas People now has total oversight of business performance across all territories and can report accurate, board-ready ROI data to the wider Havas Group in a way that simply wasn't possible before. The guesswork is gone - the dots are connected, from a stranger's first interaction with a piece of content all the way through to closed revenue.

Operationally, the team has moved from digital obscurity to genuine data maturity. They've documented their processes, defined their data needs, and built a HubSpot instance that reflects how they actually sell and market.

As the wider Havas Group moves toward its own CRM initiatives, this team is no longer at risk of being absorbed into a generic corporate rollout. They've established their identity, proved their model, and built a platform that will scale with them, whatever the group decides next.

We went from managing everything across spreadsheets and Mailchimp, hoping nothing fell through the cracks, to actually seeing our whole pipeline in one place. For the first time, I can show the board exactly how our marketing turns into revenue - not just tell them." - Havas People