When leaders only want the numbers, your CRM has already lost its way

When we work with companies on their CRM system, we often find that the problems don’t begin where we’ve been asked to look for them.

They don’t start with sales teams resisting the process, or with systems that are poorly configured. They don’t usually show up first as missing fields or inconsistent data. More often, they begin much higher up, in a place that rarely gets named directly. It’s the way senior leaders relate to the CRM itself.

In many organisations, leadership teams have a clear and seemingly reasonable relationship with HubSpot. They want the numbers - pipeline value, forecast coverage, conversion rates, activity levels. They want enough information to understand whether things are broadly moving in the right direction. They don’t want to navigate deal records, read notes, or spend time inside the system. That kind of interaction is seen as operational detail rather than leadership work.

On the surface, this makes some sense. Leaders are busy, and their role isn’t to manage deals day to day. Their role is to make decisions. So HubSpot becomes the place where data goes in and reports come out, and as long as those reports appear when needed, the system is assumed to be doing its job.

Quietly, though, without anyone making a conscious decision, the role of the CRM begins to change.

Teams pay far more attention to behaviour than to intention. When leaders only ever engage with HubSpot through dashboards or exported summaries, a signal is sent, even if it’s never articulated. The signal is simple: this is a reporting system, not a place where understanding lives.

Once that signal lands, behaviour across the organisation starts to adjust. Sales teams become less inclined to invest time in capturing nuance or context, because it rarely seems to be used. Marketing teams optimise around surface metrics, because deeper insight never quite appears to matter. CRM champions find themselves pushing standards uphill, trying to sustain momentum in a system that lacks visible senior sponsorship.

Nothing breaks immediately and activity remains high. Pipelines continue to move and reports continue to be shared. But over time, HubSpot starts to resemble a scoreboard rather than a shared source of truth. Useful for status updates, less useful for understanding what is actually happening and why.

What makes this pattern particularly difficult to address is that it often shows up in organisations that are otherwise well run. Many senior leaders have lived through failed CRM implementations before and learned, quite reasonably, to keep their distance. CRM usage is framed as an operational concern, something for sales or marketing teams to manage, rather than a system that shapes how decisions are made.

There’s also a very human element at play. Opening a deal record and not immediately knowing where to look can feel uncomfortable, especially in front of others. Dashboards feel safer. They’re curated, familiar, and quick to interpret. Over time, habits form, and once those habits are in place, they’re rarely questioned.

This is where conversations about 'leading by example' often go wrong. Leading by example does not mean senior leaders need to log calls, update deal stages, or become HubSpot experts. That assumption tends to shut the discussion down before it really begins.

What effective leadership engagement actually looks like is much simpler, and far more impactful. In organisations where the CRM functions as a true system of record, leaders tend to open deal records during pipeline discussions rather than relying solely on summaries. 

They ask questions based on what’s documented rather than what’s remembered. They expect risks and blockers to be visible before meetings, and they refer back to CRM context when decisions are revisited or challenged.

The shift here is subtle, but it matters. HubSpot becomes the first place to look for understanding, not the last. And once that happens, behaviour downstream changes almost automatically, because the system is no longer just a place to satisfy reporting requirements.

For the people inside the business tasked with improving CRM usage, this leadership posture is often the hardest part to influence. Workflows can be refined, fields simplified, and expectations clarified, but without leadership engagement, there is always a ceiling on progress. Context remains optional. Standards erode. Champions end up enforcing rules rather than enabling clarity, and over time, the energy drains away.

This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a signalling problem.

Encouraging leadership engagement doesn’t mean forcing adoption or asking leaders to fundamentally change how they work. It means making engagement feel useful, natural, and low risk. Starting with the questions leaders already care about, rather than the system itself. Bringing HubSpot into existing meetings instead of asking leaders to explore it alone. Making sure context is visible before it’s requested, so trust can build quietly over time.

Often, the most effective intervention is simply making the signal explicit. Many leaders are unaware of how strongly their behaviour shapes CRM usage until it’s clearly and constructively named.

When senior leaders keep the CRM at arm’s length, resets rarely stick. Teams comply, but they don’t invest. Context lives elsewhere and learning slows. Decisions rely more on confidence than evidence. HubSpot continues to function, but it never quite delivers on the promise it was bought for.

Is any of this ringing a bell? 

At Disruptive, this is the kind of issue we’re often brought in to untangle. If your HubSpot looks healthy on the surface but has never quite become the source of clarity it should be, we help organisations reset the relationship between leadership, systems and decision-making.

If any of the patterns above feel familiar, it’s worth a quick chat. Feel free to get in touch at team@hellodisruptive.com