|
|
|
|
Caption: Key Takeaways from the ImpactLab project
ImpactLab helps charities and funders demonstrate their community impact using data.
When charity-sector funding contracted, the inbound enquiries the team had relied on slowed to a trickle. ImpactLab needed to move from responding to inbound leads to proactively engaging prospects, and the CRM underneath that shift had drifted.
HubSpot was in place and underused. Automation was unfit for the work. The reporting could not be trusted.
AllDemand audited the whole RevOps system, ranked what was found by the value of fixing it, and worked through the list in that order.
The portal now reflects how the team actually sells: a pipeline that describes the business, stage probabilities calculated from ImpactLab's own history, the Leads object switched on for outbound, and an automated brief that carries every engagement from sales into delivery.
A significant downturn in charity-sector funding dropped the flow of inbound enquiries ImpactLab had relied upon, and the team needed to build an outbound motion at speed. HubSpot had been in place for years. What it could no longer do was tell the team where the business stood.
ImpactLab's board identified the need for a revenue operations specialist and reviewed several firms before choosing AllDemand, who came recommended by others who had worked with the team.
What stood out was the combination of strategic thinking with the ability to execute and drive the transformation on the ground.
Several sales pipelines were still live in the portal, still holding records, and no longer reflected any motion the team was running.
Alongside them sat a large set of data properties that had gone outdated or unused, cluttering every record and hiding the fields that mattered.
There was no documented way of working underneath any of it, so new team members learned the process by watching whoever was nearest.
AllDemand's first move wasn't to touch the CRM, it was to understand it.
The team ran workshops across ImpactLab and audited the full revenue operations system, then presented their findings and a roadmap to the board before any rebuild began.
From there, the work covered the full pipeline: qualification frameworks, outbound strategy, CRM data enrichment, and supporting technology and automation.
Training and enablement ran alongside the rebuild, so the new system was one the team actually adopted, not one they inherited and quietly avoided.
The team ran everything through the deal pipeline. HubSpot's Leads object, which holds early outbound activity before a real opportunity exists, was switched off.
Every speculative conversation either became a deal that distorted the pipeline, or lived nowhere at all. There was no orderly method for working outbound inside HubSpot, and no process describing how it should be done.
ImpactLab works with funders, sponsors and charities, often in overlapping roles, and the portal could not distinguish between them.
The record layouts a salesperson looked at every day surfaced whatever HubSpot had defaulted to, so the context that mattered for the next conversation had to be reconstructed by hand each time.
Finding #5- A handover that started cold
When the delivery team was called into an engagement, sales rarely had time to write a full brief or hold a handover meeting.
Delivery began work without the context it needed, and effort was spread too thin across the team to know where to focus.
AllDemand audited the full RevOps system, running workshops across the team to understand how ImpactLab sells, and presented the findings and a roadmap to the board.
The roadmap ordered the work by the value of fixing each thing, and the team then worked through it step by step, so the highest-value repairs landed first and each one built on the last.
AllDemand retired the pipelines that no longer described a live motion, cleared the property sprawl back to the fields the team uses, and rebuilt the contact, company and deal record layouts so a salesperson opens a record and sees what they need to act on, in priority order.
Every process step was documented as it was built.
AllDemand recalculated each deal stage probability from ImpactLab's own closed-deal history, so the percentages reflect what has happened in this business.
With the numbers behind it repaired, HubSpot forecasting was switched on. For the first time, leadership can hold a revenue conversation with the sales team and plan forward on figures that hold up in a board meeting.
AllDemand enabled and configured the Leads object, giving the team a working surface for outbound execution and a visible queue of who to contact next.
Alongside it sits a qualification framework and a deal progression framework: the criteria that defines whether an opportunity is worth pursuing, and what has to be true for it to move stages.
AllDemand rebuilt the association logic so a record shows plainly who is a funder, who is a sponsor, and how each relationship works.
The distinctions ImpactLab makes commercially are now distinctions the CRM understands and can report on.
AllDemand connected AI agents into the system and implemented AskElephant. Its agents populate the qualification properties across every deal automatically, drawn from the conversations the team is already having, and score each deal against the framework.
AskElephant then generates the sales-to-delivery brief without anyone writing it. The delivery team receives the same structured, digestible picture every time, before the work starts, which is where the 90% reduction in briefing time comes from.
Live guidance sits inside the portal, so the instruction for how to use the system appears at the point of work.
A HubSpot onboarding plan brings each new starter to working competence on a defined path. Enablement and training ran alongside the rebuild, and the sales and delivery teams were aligned around one shared definition of what good looks like at handover.
"I've seen a real culture change in our team - much more energy, much more enthusiasm, much more enjoyment for the task of engaging with customers."
Maria Owen,
CEO at ImpactLab
| 114% | Increase in closed-won business |
| 59% | Increase in total weighted revenue |
| 41.2% | Increase in deal volume |
| 90% | Reduction in time to brief the delivery team |
ImpactLab now has clear, trustworthy visibility into its pipeline, market activity and day-to-day customer conversations, which gives the team a basis for realistic goal-setting and coaching.
Time previously lost to low-value tasks has been redirected towards building relationships with customers.
The pipeline is stronger, engagement sizes are larger, and the leadership team holds real confidence in where the business will be six months from now.
Maria Owen, CEO of ImpactLab, describes AllDemand as feeling like an integral part of the ImpactLab team.
Flexible as circumstances changed, willing to challenge existing thinking, and backed by founders with senior operating experience.
"Don't try to do it alone. Find a partner who can strategise and execute alongside you. AllDemand really delivered and continue to deliver that for us, both the strategy and the tactics under one roof."
Maria Owen,
CEO ImpactLab
Facing a similar shift from inbound to outbound? Get in touch to talk through what a revenue operations partnership could look like for your team.