Applied · Greensboro Convention & Visitors Bureau
Building a segmented CRM from 2,200+ records
A complete HubSpot CRM rebuild that gave the marketing and sales teams a database they could finally segment and target with confidence.
The problem
The Bureau's CRM had grown faster than its structure. Records had been imported from different sources over time, contacts' roles were out of date, and there was no consistent way to group partners by industry. For a small marketing and sales team, that meant every campaign started with manual list-building and a lot of guessing about who was who. I came in as the Data Analytics Intern and took ownership of fixing it end to end.
How I approached it
I started by auditing the existing data to find the failure points: duplicate companies, broken imports, and contacts whose roles had changed. From there I transferred, cleaned, tagged, and standardized 2,200+ contact and company records in HubSpot, resolving import errors and validating contacts against their current roles so the team could trust what they were looking at. My boss told me what needed to happen and let me figure out how; I learned the best practices from HubSpot support and worked out the rest by trial and error.
The bigger fix was structure. I researched and classified 1,100+ partner contacts across 25+ industry categories, building a segmentation taxonomy the team could filter and target by. A flat list finally became a database you could ask questions of.
Going beyond the CRM
With the data in shape, I looked at how the Bureau was showing up to its audience. I analyzed 980 posts across 7 platforms in Sprout Social (roughly 9M impressions and 432K engagements) and ran a year-over-year Instagram deep-dive that found impressions down 89% while engagement rate rose 58%. That reframed what looked like a content problem as a distribution problem, and shaped my recommendations around collaboration and format. (Read the full Instagram diagnosis.) I also audited a 913-page website with Screaming Frog and Google Analytics, then prioritized the SEO and content fixes that would matter most for the least effort.
The outcome
The team came away trusting their CRM for the first time, with a partner taxonomy ready for outreach and a clear sense of what to fix first, on social and on the site.
What I took away
The unglamorous work, deduping records, standardizing fields, agreeing on categories, is what makes everything downstream possible. Clean, well-structured data isn't busywork. It's the difference between a team guessing and a team targeting.
Deliverables
- Standardized HubSpot CRM with a working segmentation taxonomy
- Partner classification across 25+ industry categories
- Year-over-year social analysis across 7 platforms
- 913-page website SEO and content audit
Tools
- HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Excel
- Sprout Social, Screaming Frog, Google Analytics