Growth exposes everything—especially in sales

In this episode of Return on Insights, Kristin Dennewill, Founder and CEO of Denamico, joins us to unpack what actually makes CRM implementations succeed, particularly inside complex mid-market IT and B2B organizations.

Kristin shares how Denamico evolved from marketing services to deep technical expertise in HubSpot CRM, and why most CRM failures have less to do with software and more with leadership, process, and adoption.

We explore:

• The risks of founder-led “cowboy” sales as companies scale
• Why structured CRM processes must be implemented earlier than most teams think
• The “pod approach” Denamico uses to manage complex, cross-functional implementations
• How CRM success drives five outcomes: revenue growth, operational efficiency, stronger customer and employee experience, and cross-functional alignment
• Why CRM should be treated as a continuous practice, not a one-time project

The conversation also examines AI’s growing role in sales and marketing. Kristin outlines how companies are experimenting with AI agents and tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but warns that without clean data and strong CRM foundations, AI impact will remain limited.

Her framework is clear: focus on adoption, data quality, automation, and business alignment. When those pillars are strong, revenue becomes more predictable, and growth becomes more durable.

This episode is a practical conversation about building operational clarity inside scaling organizations, and making technology serve strategy, not distract from it.

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David Lindover

Erin Abbatangelo

Our guest:

Kristin Dennewill

 Return On Insights, a property of Partner Marketing Works Int’l. Inc. is a collaboration between Erin Abbatangelo and David Lindover, operating as a media division of Partner Marketing Works.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Return on Insights, the show where candid conversations with bold founders and leaders spark actionable insights for your business. I'm David Lindover.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

And I'm Aaron Abitangelo. Every week, we pull back the curtains with leaders who are scaling teams and shaping the future, sharing the insights that create impact far beyond the bottom line.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Discover how high-performing companies build enduring cultures, inspire teams to think bigger, and turn vision into action. If you see storytelling as your strategic advantage, you are in the right place. Welcome to the Return on Insights Podcast. I'm David Lindover, your host for today. Today I'm pleased to introduce Kristen Denewell, founder and CEO of Dynamico, a trailblazing HubSpot CRM implementation expert, specializing in complex mid-market IT and B2B projects. Kristen guides businesses in transforming founder-led cowboy sales approaches into scalable, process-driven systems that are aligned with strategic goals. Dynamico's recognize HubSpot mastery and focus on change management, help her clients achieve operational clarity and enhanced customer experiences. In this episode, Kristen shares actionable insights on optimizing CRM adoption, navigating the total cost of ownership, and how to strategically apply AI to maximize revenue and efficiency. Welcome to the show, Kristen. It's good to have you here.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

So my first question for you, Kristen, can you share the story behind Dynamico's pivot from marketing to a HubSpot CRM specialization?

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Sure. First of all, I'm going to start with the fact that Dynamico is the name of the company is based on the word dynamic to describe the pace of change in business when we started the business. And that is increasingly more true as we all know the pace of change is just accelerated, accelerated since AI, you know, has been more prevalent. And we decided in, you know, we've been a HubSpot partner since 2014. And at the time, HubSpot really was only marketing automation software. So most of the partners in the space were all marketing agencies. But as the product has evolved, clients have needed other services to help them successfully use and adopt uh HubSpot. And so in 2017, as we started doing more and more um service hub and CRM implementations along with the marketing services, we recognized the need that our our clients needed a more technical uh consultant who also understood sales and service and things like that. And so that's how we evolved.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Makes sense. So how does the founder-led cowboy sales approach become a bottleneck? And what's the solution to the bottleneck?

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Yeah, good question. I I actually had this conversation with a prospect last week. He's uh the CEO of a very fast-growing$13 million business and you know has hired some salespeople more or less successfully and is really wondering now, does he implement the CRM first and have all the processes defined? Or does he hire the sales leader and then do that? And the conversation we had is, you know, founders and often CEOs by nature, when we start doing sales, we're typically not high structure person. We we operate well when there's less structure, which is what enables us to build something from zero. But that same lack of structure can really be a deterrent to success as you grow and you bring more people on, because not everyone can operate in that. And um and the conversation I had with this guy last week was the more structure, it doesn't have to be super structured, but the more structure that we can create before you bring on a salesperson is gonna enable that person to be more likely to be successful.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, I I I certainly can relate to that in my own experience. What complexities do mid-market companies encounter when implementing HubSpot, especially beyond the software costs themselves?

SPEAKER_02 4:29

Mm-hmm. So beyond the software costs, you know, we we our number one KPI for was an implementation successful or not is user adoption. And so um the larger the company that could be harder potentially. Um but I think it's also reflective of the alignment at the highest level of the organization of why are we doing this? What are the most priorities? What do we need as a team to be able to say this is successful in order for us um to sorry, I actually had turned those off. Um uh what do we need as a what do we need as a team in order for us to say this has been successful? Because there's lots of competing priorities and competing needs with the CRM implementation, and you can't do everything, you can't do everything. So um that's what I'd say is probably the most difficult piece of that. Um and how we get around that is by starting at the beginning and saying, as a business, what are our business goals that are most success that are most important? So that those can be our North Star as we implement and we have a, you know, a everybody has a finite budget, whether it's big or small. It's usually finite for like we this is how much we have to spend to get us live. But then ongoing, it's being cognizant of the fact that we we're not gonna have all the bells and whistles when we get when we go live. So this is an this is gonna be ongoing continuous improvement, and we need to treat it like I call it a practice, like a yoga practice.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

That's that's a great suggestion. Having gone through CRMM and CRM implementations myself and for my customers, you're you're spot on. It's it's a continuous development process and one, you know, where it's step one, get certain, you know, uh capabilities in place, step two, step three, and beyond. Um moving on, how does your company structure its CRM implementations to ensure alignment with broader revenue and company experience goals? Customer experience goals, I should say.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Good question. So we always start, even like in the sales process, we start with what are what are we trying to achieve here for the business? What are the what is the the potential outcomes that we could have? And what if what if we you didn't do the CRM implementation? Is that gonna hinder us from, you know, if it's not gonna, if it's not gonna be problematic to not have that, we probably haven't yet figured out why it's so important.

unknown 7:10

Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

And then I think during the implementation, so being clear on those, like what are those North Star things that are, you know, where is the return on this investment gonna come from? And then secondly, we structure our implementation teams because we work mostly with complex implementations, meaning there's multiple teams, multiple HubSpot hubs that we're implementing. We're often integrating the system with a ERP system or other types of soft, other software that is sometimes even like custom apps or platforms that that company uses for their own, you know, to run their services. Um, we have uh we we call it a pod approach. So in the past, HubSpot was simple enough that you could have like a HubSpot consultant lead implementations and they would could be successful. But as the platform has grown, the clients who are using the platform have have grown and gotten more complex, we take a team approach. So all of our implementations are led by an implementation manager who's supported by HubSpot consultant, change management uh specialist, a technical consultant or solution architect. And so they're they'll be involved in different levels depending on the phase of the project, but it's it's a whole team working on that client's project to you know increase the likelihood that it's successful.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Makes a lot of sense for sure. So can you share examples of how proper CRM processes have accelerated growth for you know some of your clients?

SPEAKER_02 8:48

Yeah, for sure. I I like I you know I go back to like five big at the highest level um benefits or outcomes of implementing a CRM as it and getting the value that you can out of a CRM. And one is revenue growth. So being aware, having a single source of truth for your customers and knowing where the cross-sell, upsell opportunities are, how much what's the cost of customer acquisition, knowing what the lifetime value is, just having the data there to be able to analyze and make conscious decisions of, you know, where are we going to focus? Is this even profitable for us? Things like that. Um so that's one. Uh secondly, is operational efficiency because CRMs today are not just a catalog or of all of your customers. It's also there's so much automation available. This is even pre-AI, and now with AI, it's just like leveled up to do the manual rote work that people don't need to do. So that accelerates operational efficiency. So we have a couple of um clients. Uh a good example is um a client that automated their whole, they were a business broker. And so, in order for them to if if you as a buyer are interested in a business listing on their website, you would have to submit paperwork, you know, to sign an NDA, make sure you're a qualified buyer. We automated that whole process. So instead of them waiting, the buyer waiting a week to submit all that, get it all approved and back, you know, sent back, it's all online with and it's pretty much immediate that it happens. So it really improves your customer experience. Um, and that saves potentially, you know, hundreds of hours in a month of processing that depending on the size of the business. And um, so customer experience, employee experience, because employees don't need to do manual work that they know that there's a better way to do that, like compiling reports manually in Google Sheets or Excel or whatever, that's not necessary when you're using a CRM like you can. And um, and then the the fifth one is cross-functional alignment. Just because everybody's using the same system and has the same data, it really the the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Absolutely. Good examples. Um so you mentioned AI, so we'll transition to to AI. So how is it beginning, from your vantage point, of course, to influence sales and marketing processes in mid-market IT companies? So your customers, how are you seeing them uh use it within their organizations and how is it influencing the processes?

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Yeah. Uh what I think initially there's you know quite a few companies are starting to test agents. So for prospecting or customer agents, and I think that's a you know, that's a great use case. Another um less formalized way, but powerful nonetheless, that we've seen, in fact, our our team was doing it uh recently, is using using chat GPT as a team to to analyze our current like uh ICP buyers' journeys and then identifying using chat GPT to you know take what we have and bring in real life experts via Chat GPT, you know, of like published authors who talk on these topics and things like that, and help us identify the gaps or areas where our our buyer journey might have changed. And um one thing that I'm thinking about increasingly, or we're thinking about increasingly in our own company, but it's it's true for clients as well, is instead of thinking just in terms of like verticals, also think of in terms of mindset of your buyers and where they are in the buyer's journey and how their minds, you know. I I I often talk too about CRM maturity. That influences a lot where how much we can help a client and what's going to be most useful is their maturity level in terms of using the CRM. And I think that influences mindset as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Very good insights, thank you. Um common pitfalls. What are they? What are what are businesses facing when they adopt AI and how can they transform from what I see as tactical to a more strategic use of AI? And I know this is a question that are a lot a lot of people are struggling with right now.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Yeah, for sure. So we have um, like if I take our company, for example, we everybody's using AI right now. We are Google Shop, everyone uses Notebook LM for compiling and you know analyzing certain situ, you know, certain documentation or whatever. There's lots of different one-off. And I think that's true in most companies. Like most people are using AI to some level. I think where what I've seen in any case is that it hasn't yet gotten to a strategic point, like you, like your question is, is how are we doing that in a consistent way for this particular process of ours? This we're gonna have AI do this certain piece of it. Like that requires more strategic um analysis of the processes and what you know, where is their friction and where are the opportunities for us and things like that. And I think um that in order to get to that, it really requires leaders of companies to understand AI and not necessarily solve for how are we going to do that, but where are we gonna do that and make sure that it's the expectation that we have to incorporate AI. We can't be competitive if we're not. And um and putting, you know, maybe what is the framework for what is what's good enough and be open to testing because there's the the pace of change back to that is so rapid right now, not everything is gonna stick. And the only way we're gonna land on the things that are really most impactful is to to have that testing, engineering, iterative approach to that. But I think leadership has to get involved so that it's done in a strategic way.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

So so do you find that conversation coming up now when you're doing your discovery with leaders in these mid-market companies who are contemplating a HubSpot implementation? Are they bringing that forward or is it still you pushing that message?

SPEAKER_02 15:49

I think I think it's on everybody's mind. I think everybody has a pressure, it feels a pressure that we need to be use we're not using AI enough. And but the reality is, is that until you have a system in place with good data, the AI can only do so much. So a bigger conversation we're having with clients right now, or not necessarily clients, but prospects, is we don't have all of like our, you know, we might have 80,000 contacts in our CRM, but we know only half of those are actually good quality contacts. The rest are incomplete data, missing data, things like that. So, you know, that's where we recommend is the first place to start is to making sure you get your foundation, like all of your data in good shape, because then using the AI is gonna be so much easier and more powerful.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Do they uh do these people, your prospects, do they are they ready for strategic use? Have they figured out the one or two, you know, low-hanging fruit use cases that they're gonna go after, or are they still kind of scratching their head?

SPEAKER_02 17:02

I I don't think they've figured it out. I think they I think everybody has ideas, but I think the reality of where are we applying this, it's got back to my maturity question earlier. Like it has to be a very mature company in terms of using systems and technology that's gonna be that's that's doing using AI significantly right now.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

And would those mature companies typically be, you know, a HubSpot CRM you know, prospect?

SPEAKER_02 17:33

They could be, for sure. I mean, there's some very sophisticated um users on HubSpot and and sophisticated companies, but by and large, I think most companies are just scratching the surface of what they could be doing. Back to treating your CRM like a practice of continue, it's part of your continuous growth plan is to get better and better and more mature, not only with user adoption, but also um using all the functionality that's available. And you're not going to use functionality just to use it unless it leads to a better outcome, a better business outcome and more return. But it has all of that potential if if you're intentional about trying to continuously improve and grow.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

That's a good message. My last question um, what advice would you give to IT business leaders who are preparing to adopt CRM and AI technologies effectively? That's a you know wide open question, but if you could narrow it down to one or two pieces of advice or insights. And I think you touched on the continuous improvement piece as a good insight.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Yeah, okay. I love this question. You teed me up quite well, unknowingly, because we've done a lot of analysis on this, and there's four pillars that we think about in terms of continuous growth and your CRM. And the first one is adoption. You have to have people using the system. Secondly, is data quality. Thirdly, is automation. So the automation makes everything better, but it's kind of irrelevant if you don't have user adoption and you don't have data quality. And then fourthly, it's alignment around, you know, what's most important, how are we prioritizing, what is the what is the desired outcome. So we've we've looked at our clients who do who have grown the most over the course of the last few years, and um what are they doing differently? And it came down to those four things which lead them to um, which get them more momentum in their business when they're when they're tr when they're you know approaching each of those things or working on each of those four pillars. And when you do that, you become more mature in your CRM usage, which gives you more mature insights as well, getting you to a point where you have more predictability in revenue because you understand what those markers are.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Great answer. Thank you so much, Kristen. Very insightful. I think our viewers are gonna really learn a lot from this podcast. And I hope to speak to you again soon.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Thanks so much, David.