---
title: Finish the year by fixing what’s holding you back
description: What would make the biggest difference to your business before Christmas?
image: https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hubfs/pexels-yankrukov-7640831.jpg
---

[Skip to content](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back#main-content)

[![](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hs-fs/hubfs/DT%20logo%202022-1.png?width=200&height=62&name=DT%20logo%202022-1.png)](https://www.hellodisruptive.com)

- [Disruptive blogs](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/)
- [Free resources](https://resources.hellodisruptive.com/guides)
- [Main site](https://www.hellodisruptive.com/)

Open main navigation

Close main navigation

- [Disruptive blogs](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/)
- [Free resources](https://resources.hellodisruptive.com/guides)
- [Main site](https://www.hellodisruptive.com/)
- [Contact us](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back#contact)

[Contact us](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back#contact)

 Oct 15, 2026, 2:00:05 PM

# Finish the year by fixing what’s holding you back

![Picture of Yiuwin Tsang](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Yiuwin%20headshot%20circle.png?width=50&name=Yiuwin%20headshot%20circle.png) [Yiuwin Tsang](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/author/yiuwin-tsang)

Share: [facebook-f icon](http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back) [linkedin-in icon](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back) [Twitter icon](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back) [pinterest-p icon](http://pinterest.com/pin/create/link/?url=https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back) [envelope icon](mailto:?body=https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back)

With the end of the year fast approaching, can begin to feel like there’s a hard deadline for everything that's still outstanding, from sales targets and marketing campaigns to client delivery and the plans that need to be in place for January.

Understandably, businesses respond by trying to fit more in. If the pipeline needs attention, generate more leads. If marketing isn't delivering enough, launch another campaign. If the team is struggling to keep up, introduce a new tool or process that promises to make things more efficient.

The trouble is that these responses tend to add activity before anyone has established whether activity is the problem.

We see this in businesses that have invested in their marketing, built a CRM and put processes in place to support growth, yet still find that things aren't working as well as they should. The team is busy, the systems contain plenty of information and there's no shortage of good intentions, but opportunities are slipping through the gaps and progress feels really hard.

It’s probably not a lack of effort. It's that the different parts of the business aren't working together as effectively as they could.

Marketing generates enquiries, but the follow-up isn't consistent. Sales has opportunities in the pipeline, but nobody has a clear view of which ones need attention. The CRM contains useful information, but it's difficult to turn that information into decisions. Meanwhile, the team keeps working around the same operational problems because there's never quite enough time to fix them properly.

When you look at the situation this way, the answer to a difficult Q4 isn't necessarily to push harder. It may be to understand where the business is losing momentum and address the things that are preventing existing effort from delivering better results.

That's a more useful place to start than adding another item to everyone's to-do list.

#### More activity won't fix a problem you haven't identified

When a business needs to improve its results, doing more feels like a natural response. More marketing should generate more interest, more sales activity should create more opportunities and more automation should give people more time to get things done.

There's some logic to this, of course. But it assumes that the existing activity is working well enough to justify increasing its volume, which isn't always the case.

Take marketing as an example. If a campaign isn't generating the right enquiries, increasing its reach might simply bring more of the wrong people to your website. If the campaign is generating good leads but those leads aren't progressing into sales conversations, additional investment may increase the workload without addressing the underlying issue. And if the sales team isn't following up consistently, generating another batch of enquiries won't necessarily improve revenue.

The same applies to the way teams work. Automating a process that nobody fully understands can make an inefficient process run faster without making it any more effective. And introducing another reporting dashboard won't help if the underlying data is unreliable or nobody knows what action to take when the numbers change.

The important distinction is between increasing activity and improving the system that turns that activity into results.

That doesn't mean businesses should stop campaigning, selling or investing in technology. It means understanding what those activities are supposed to achieve, identifying where the process is breaking down and making sure the next investment addresses the real problem.

Q4 is a particularly useful time to take this view because there's relatively little room to waste time on initiatives that aren't going to make a difference. You may not be able to transform your marketing or redesign your entire sales process before Christmas, but you can identify where a change in approach would be worthwhile.

The first step is to stop assuming that more is the answer and start asking where the business would benefit most from doing things differently.

#### Your marketing reports should help you decide what to do next

![pexels-yankrukov-7640831](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hs-fs/hubfs/pexels-yankrukov-7640831.jpg?width=302&height=302&name=pexels-yankrukov-7640831.jpg)Marketing teams have no shortage of numbers to look at. Campaigns generate engagement data, websites produce traffic reports and CRM systems record contacts, activities and opportunities. The challenge is working out which of those numbers tell you something useful about the performance of the business.

A campaign that generates plenty of clicks or form submissions might look successful in isolation, but those figures don't tell you whether the people responding are a good fit for your business or whether their interest develops into a genuine sales opportunity. Equally, a campaign with more modest engagement may be attracting exactly the kind of prospects you want to work with.

If you're measuring each activity separately, it can be difficult to see the bigger picture.

What matters is understanding how marketing contributes to the journey from initial interest to a commercial outcome. Which channels bring in the right prospects? What happens after someone responds to a campaign? Where do contacts progress, and where do they lose interest? Which activities are helping the sales team have better conversations with potential customers?

This is where HubSpot can be useful, provided it's set up to give you a meaningful view of the customer journey. Connecting campaign performance with contact records, lifecycle stages and deal progression can help you understand whether marketing activity is contributing to the pipeline, rather than simply generating numbers that look encouraging in a monthly report.

But the reporting itself isn't the end goal. Its value lies in the decisions it helps you make.

If a campaign is generating good-quality enquiries, you might decide to build on what's working rather than divert resources into something new. If people are engaging with your content but not taking the next step, you could look at whether the offer, landing page or follow-up needs attention. And if a channel is consuming a disproportionate amount of time without contributing much to the business, you have a reason to reconsider how you're investing in it.

None of this requires a complicated new measurement framework. It requires a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve and a willingness to look beyond the most obvious numbers.

The same thinking applies to your wider marketing strategy. If you're planning next year's campaigns, the most useful starting point isn't necessarily a blank calendar and a list of fresh ideas. It's an honest assessment of what you've learned from the activity you're already doing, including what's working, what isn't and where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie.

Sometimes, the best marketing decision you can make before Christmas is to stop doing something that isn't delivering and put that effort into something that is.

#### Before you generate more leads, look at what happens to the ones you have

When the sales pipeline isn't where it needs to be, the conversation often turns quickly to lead generation. Marketing needs to bring in more enquiries, the advertising budget needs reviewing or the business needs to reach a wider audience.

Those may be the right decisions, but there's another question worth asking first: how effectively are you managing the interest you've already generated?

A contact who fills in a form, responds to an email or gets in touch through your website has given you an opportunity to start a conversation. Whether that opportunity develops depends on what happens next, and this is where seemingly small gaps in the process can have a disproportionate effect.

Perhaps an enquiry arrives when the sales team is busy, so the follow-up is delayed. Maybe the contact is assigned to someone who doesn't realise they're responsible for it. Or perhaps a prospect has had an initial conversation, but the next step was never agreed, leaving the opportunity sitting in the CRM without any meaningful progress.

These problems rarely appear as one big failure. They're more likely to show up as a series of missed follow-ups, incomplete records and opportunities that quietly go cold.

Over time, the business can end up spending money to attract new prospects while failing to make the most of the ones it already has.

A CRM should help prevent this by giving the team a reliable view of who has expressed interest, what's happened so far and what needs to happen next. In HubSpot, that might involve reviewing lead assignment, checking outstanding sales tasks, examining deals that haven't progressed or making sure contacts who aren't ready to buy have an appropriate way to stay connected.

Automation can support the process, too, but it needs to reflect how you want the business to work. A workflow that creates a follow-up task or alerts the right person can be genuinely useful. A sequence of generic emails that runs regardless of what a prospect has already discussed with you is less likely to create a good experience.

This is where the human side of the process matters. Not every contact is ready to buy, and not every enquiry deserves the same response. Some people need a conversation, others need more information and some simply aren't a good fit. Understanding those differences allows the business to respond more appropriately, rather than treating every contact as another record to move through a funnel.

Before committing more resources to lead generation, it's worth checking whether the process you already have in place is giving those leads a fair chance of becoming customers. If it isn't, improving that process could be one of the most valuable things you do before the year is out.

#### A CRM is only useful when marketing and sales can work from the same picture

There's a reason marketing and sales alignment comes up so often in discussions about business growth. The two teams are responsible for different parts of the customer journey, but the value of their work depends on how effectively those parts connect.

Marketing may be focused on attracting the right audience and generating enquiries, while sales is concentrating on qualifying prospects, progressing deals and closing business. Both teams can be doing their jobs well and still struggle to achieve the results the business expects if they aren't working towards a shared understanding of what success looks like.

For example, marketing might report an increase in leads while sales reports that the quality of enquiries has deteriorated. Without a proper conversation about why that is happening, the business can get stuck in a cycle of generating more leads, questioning their value and asking marketing to increase activity again.

The underlying issue might be the way leads are qualified, the audience a campaign is attracting or the lack of a consistent process for following up enquiries. It might also be that sales isn't feeding back what it's learning from conversations with prospects, leaving marketing to make decisions without information that could improve its targeting and messaging.

A shared CRM can make these relationships easier to understand. HubSpot can bring campaign activity, contact history, sales interactions and deal progression together, giving both teams a more consistent view of what's happening. But having the information in one place doesn't automatically mean the teams are aligned.

They still need to agree on what the information tells them and what they should do about it. For example:

- Which opportunities are most likely to progress before the end of the year?
- What questions or objections are repeatedly coming up in sales conversations?
- Which types of lead are proving most valuable?
- What could marketing do to help sales move a promising opportunity forward?

These are practical questions that can lead to useful changes in both teams' work. Marketing might adapt an email sequence, produce content that addresses a common concern or focus its efforts on a particular audience. Sales might improve the feedback it provides on lead quality or agree a clearer process for managing enquiries.

The aim isn't to introduce more meetings or another layer of reporting. It's to make sure the information gathered across the customer journey informs decisions across the business, rather than remaining within individual departments.

If marketing and sales are pulling in slightly different directions, a conversation about shared priorities may deliver more value than another campaign or a new automation.

### Doing more isn't always the answer

More campaigns, more leads and more tools won't necessarily deliver better results if the processes behind them aren't working as they should. At Disruptive Thinking, we help businesses connect marketing, sales, CRM and operations, identifying what's getting in the way and making better use of what they already have. Get in touch for a quick chat to see how we can help.

[Book a call](https://www.hellodisruptive.com/contact)

 

#### Sometimes the thing holding growth back isn't marketing at all

It's easy to concentrate on the visible parts of growth, such as campaigns, sales conversations and new customer acquisition, while overlooking the operational issues that affect how effectively the business can deliver them.

We've all seen how workarounds become part of everyday working life. It’s so easy:

- Someone maintains a spreadsheet because the CRM doesn't quite provide the information they need.
- A report takes half a day to prepare because the data is spread across different systems.
- A handover requires several follow-up messages because nobody is entirely clear about who owns the next step.

Individually, these issues might seem manageable, particularly when everyone has found a way to work around them. The problem is that the time and effort they consume can quietly become a constraint on the business.

People spend less time on valuable work because they're maintaining processes that should be simpler. Information becomes harder to trust because different teams record it in different ways. And the business struggles to make confident decisions because the systems intended to provide clarity have become another source of uncertainty.

This is what makes operational improvements relevant to growth. The question isn't simply whether a process could be made more efficient; it's whether that process is preventing the business from making better use of its people, information and existing capabilities.

Sometimes the answer involves a CRM, whether that's improving data quality, simplifying a workflow or making reporting more useful. In other cases, the solution is much less technical. A clearer definition of responsibility, a simpler handover or an agreement to stop producing a report that nobody uses may be all that's needed.

The important thing is to understand the problem before reaching for a solution. It’s always a good exercise to ask the people doing the work where they're losing time, which tasks cause recurring frustration and what they'd change if they could remove one obstacle from their working week. Those conversations often reveal practical improvements that are more valuable than a major new initiative.

You probably won't fix every operational issue before Christmas, and there's no need to try. Identifying the problems that have the greatest effect on the business, then deciding which ones are worth addressing first, is a more useful starting point than launching another improvement project without a clear objective.

#### Don't let January become a repeat of this year

The pressure to get everything finished before Christmas often spills into planning for the new year. Businesses want to enter January with fresh campaigns, clear targets and a growth plan, but the preparation can become another source of work if it isn't grounded in what the business has learned.

A new year doesn't automatically make existing problems disappear. If marketing activity isn't connected to commercial outcomes, leads aren't followed up on consistently, or teams are working around the same operational frustrations, those issues will still be there when everyone returns.

That's why planning for January should begin with an honest look at the current year rather than an assumption that the business simply needs a fresh start:

- What have you learned about your customers?
- Which marketing activities have delivered the most value?
- Where have opportunities stalled?
- What do sales and marketing need from each other to work more effectively?
- Which processes are making it harder than necessary to deliver good work?

The answers can help you decide what deserves attention next year, without creating an unnecessarily elaborate plan for every eventuality.

There are practical things you can prepare now, such as getting the first campaign ready, checking that your landing pages and forms work as intended, agreeing how incoming enquiries will be managed and making sure you can measure the results. If your CRM needs attention, you can identify the most important changes and decide what can realistically be completed before the break.

But there's no need to map out every detail of the next twelve months just to feel prepared. A useful plan should give the business a clear direction and a sensible starting point, while leaving room to respond to what happens next.

The best preparation is the work that makes it easier to act on agreed priorities when January arrives, rather than creating another list of decisions and problems that need to be sorted out first.

#### What would make the biggest difference to your business before Christmas?

The final quarter will always bring pressure to deliver, and there will be things that genuinely need to be completed before the year is out. The opportunity is to avoid treating every outstanding task as equally important, particularly when time and resources are already stretched.

A business that understands how its marketing, sales and operational processes work together is better placed to identify where its efforts are being wasted and where a relatively small change could have a meaningful effect. That might mean making more of existing leads, improving the way marketing activity is measured, getting sales and marketing aligned or removing a process that's quietly slowing everyone down.

The common thread is the need to look beyond the volume of activity and understand what's helping the business move forward.

At Disruptive Thinking, our job isn't simply to configure a CRM or introduce another piece of technology. It's to understand how the business works, identify what's getting in the way and help bring marketing, sales, service and operations together so that the systems and processes support the outcomes you're trying to achieve.

If you're heading towards the end of the year with plenty of activity but less confidence about where to focus, we're happy to talk it through. We'll look at where you are, where you want to get to and what might help you make progress, without turning the conversation into another long list of things you should be doing.

[Get in touch](https://www.hellodisruptive.com/contact) for a quick chat to find out more.

[HubSpot](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/hubspot), [Marketing](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/marketing), [Sales](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/sales), [CRM](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/crm), [revenue](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/revenue), [growth](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/tag/growth)

## Related posts

## [What should ‘normal’ look like for modern marketing?](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/what-should-normal-look-like-for-modern-marketing)

![Picture of Yiuwin Tsang](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Yiuwin%20headshot%20circle.png?width=50&name=Yiuwin%20headshot%20circle.png) [Yiuwin Tsang](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/author/yiuwin-tsang) 

 Sep 2, 2026, 11:00:00 AM

[Read more](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/what-should-normal-look-like-for-modern-marketing)

## [Why better advertising starts inside your CRM](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/why-better-advertising-starts-inside-your-crm)

![Picture of Jenny Howell](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/c36280312d5f343b7c9c95a5dfc60290) [Jenny Howell](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/author/jenny-howell) 

 Jun 23, 2026, 11:30:00 AM

[Read more](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/why-better-advertising-starts-inside-your-crm)

## [Five quick wins to get your sales and marketing teams using the CRM more](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/five-quick-wins-to-get-your-sales-and-marketing-team-using-the-crm-more)

![Picture of Jenny Howell](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/c36280312d5f343b7c9c95a5dfc60290) [Jenny Howell](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/author/jenny-howell) 

 Jul 15, 2026, 11:00:02 AM

[Read more](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/five-quick-wins-to-get-your-sales-and-marketing-team-using-the-crm-more)

[facebook-f icon](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563863566157) [linkedin-in icon](https://www.linkedin.com/company/11236214/) [instagram icon](https://www.instagram.com/disruptivehq)

---

[![](https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hs-fs/hubfs/DT%20logo%202022-1.png?width=200&height=62&name=DT%20logo%202022-1.png)](https://www.hellodisruptive.com/)

Copyright © 2026, Disruptive Thinking Limited

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Yiuwin Tsang",
    "url" : "https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/author/yiuwin-tsang"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-10-15T13:00:05.386Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-10-15T13:00:05.000Z",
  "headline" : "Finish the year by fixing what’s holding you back",
  "image" : [ "https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hubfs/pexels-yankrukov-7640831.jpg" ],
  "mainEntityOfPage" : {
    "@id" : "https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/finish-the-year-by-fixing-whats-holding-you-back",
    "@type" : "WebPage"
  },
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "url" : "https://blog.hellodisruptive.com/hubfs/DT%20logo%202022-1.png"
    },
    "name" : "Disruptive Thinking Limited"
  }
}
```