Custom CRM for Cla**** Group, UKCase Study

The existing HubSpot set-up had been stretched around a sales process it was never shaped for. Multi-stakeholder deals and agreement-based line-item pricing were approximated with custom properties, while actual quotes lived in a parallel spreadsheet. As a result the CRM never held the full picture, and any meaningful pipeline report meant exporting data and reassembling it in Excel. At the same time, per-seat licence fees kept climbing with headcount for features the team largely ignored.

Migration was the biggest technical risk. Years of contacts, companies, deals, notes and email history had accumulated duplicates, and the associations between records would break if they were lifted across naively. Losing that history was not an option for a team that relies on it during long sales cycles. Any loss of historical notes or broken links between contacts and deals would have undermined confidence in the new system from its first day.

Email capture was equally non-negotiable, since a CRM that misses correspondence quickly gets abandoned. Doing it properly meant OAuth against the mail provider with tightly limited scopes rather than a simple forwarding address, alongside handling personal data in line with UK GDPR. A solution that captured correspondence unreliably would simply push the team back to inboxes and spreadsheets.

PapaSiddhi built a bespoke CRM with a React interface, a Node.js back end and PostgreSQL, modelled on how the team really sells. Opportunities carry multiple stakeholders with defined roles and long-cycle stage tracking, and quoting became a first-class feature with line-item pricing that honours each customer's agreement. Retiring the quoting spreadsheet meant the CRM finally held the complete picture, and reporting now runs from live data.

Migration ran as a dedicated workstream. We extracted the full dataset through the HubSpot API, ran deduplication with human review on ambiguous matches instead of blind merging, rebuilt associations explicitly and validated record counts and relationships before cutover. Email integration uses OAuth via Microsoft Graph or Gmail with minimal scopes, automatically threading messages onto the right company and opportunity. Lawful basis is recorded per contact, and retention and erasure are handled in the application, designed to support UK GDPR obligations.

The interface was intentionally kept narrow, since unused surface area had contributed to poor data quality before. Both systems ran in parallel for a short period before the HubSpot subscription was switched off, and reporting definitions were rebuilt with the sales director rather than copied, retiring inherited metrics nobody used.