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HubSpot Impact Awards 2025 Winner

How Unipart unified complex business parts into one high-performance engine with HubSpot and BabelQuest


CHALLENGE: 

A £1bn supply chain partner, operating across 22 countries with 8,500 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 an estimated £250k), achieving 100% adoption across 80+ users, and giving 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).

Unipart Group imagery

2:1 ROI achieved in Year 1

Cost benefits outweighed implementation/license costs

50% Increase in Year 2 Growth Target

Due to data confidence

6 Months Early Delivery

Saved £250k in estimated costs

Award Winning Work

HubSpot 2025 EMEA Product Excellence Winner

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About the Client

Unipart is a supply chain performance improvement partner, delivering efficiency, resilience, and sustainability across multiple sectors.

Industry: Logistics, Manufacturing, Technology
Size: Enterprise
Location: Headquartered in the UK

Unipart logo
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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 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. 


Creating  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.

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The Results? Scaling from Millions to Billions

 

Estimated £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%.

Positive ROI
Cost savings and immediate revenue impact meant the project achieved positive ROI within months of launch.

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.

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.

"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, Head of Bid Management

Platform Innovations

Built for How They Work

BabelQuest went beyond best practice and delivered a deeply tailored solution.

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.

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.

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


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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.

"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."
— CEO, Darren Leigh, noted the transformative power of this visibility

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By partnering with BabelQuest, Unipart Group did more than just swap out their CRM - they unified seven siloed divisions, empowered their teams with real-time pipeline visibility, and set themselves up for scalable, AI-driven growth.

Thinking your business might face similar challenges? If you're running a complex enterprise on a fractured legacy system, struggling to forecast revenue accurately, or battling to drive user adoption across multiple divisions - this transformation story shows that with the right partner and platform, there's a better way forward.

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