How a Pre-Launch B2B SaaS Startup Set Up HubSpot the Right Way

This was a bootstrapped B2B SaaS startup building an AI-powered CFO and growth partner for SMBs. When we started working together, the product was still pre-beta, pre-revenue, and moving from MVP toward its first users. Like many early-stage SaaS teams, they were dead set on using HubSpot as their CRM.

The issue was that nothing had been set up in a way the team could actually rely on. There were no lifecycle stages. No lead definitions. No routing logic. No clear handoffs between marketing and sales. Data lived in different places, ownership was unclear, and there was no shared understanding of what even counted as a “lead.”

Inefficiency was an obvious risk. The bigger issue was scale. Launching a waitlist or driving inbound traffic on top of this setup would have created messy data, poor lead qualification, and very little visibility into what was actually working. Those problems would only compound after launch and become painful to unwind later.

The company ran lean by design, with no in-house marketing team and no internal HubSpot expertise. Marketing, sales, and operations each touched parts of the process, but no one owned CRM architecture, lifecycle design, or how HubSpot should actually support the go-to-market motion. Without clear ownership or experience, HubSpot risked becoming a tool everyone used differently instead of a system the business could depend on. 

So Nouvel Age Media jumped in as their fractional CMO and full-stack marketing team. One of the first priorities was to take ownership of strategy, configuration, and execution across both HubSpot Marketing Hub and Sales Hub. 

Our first call was to delay demand. Instead of rushing to launch campaigns or grow a waitlist, we stepped back and looked at the full go-to-market lifecycle, from first inbound touch through closed-won. The priority was to get the foundation right before anything else. We were designing a go-to-market system that marketing and sales could rely on once demand started coming in. The strategy centered on a few clear decisions:

• HubSpot needed to be a single source of truth
• Lifecycle stages and handoffs had to be defined before leads arrived
• Automation should reduce manual work and risk, not add complexity
• Visibility mattered more than volume at this stage

Only once the system could support growth would growth make sense. From there, we implemented a full HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro and Sales Hub Pro foundation. This included:

• CRM configuration, data model, and lifecycle stage design
• Lead flow and deal pipeline mapping from inbound through closed-won and closed-lost
• Standardized forms and integrations across the website and campaigns
• Automated lead routing to SDRs, BDRs, and Account Executives
• Lead scoring and segmentation framework
• Auto-responder workflows for form fills, waitlist signups, and content downloads
• Sales pipelines, sequences, templates, and dashboards
• Cross-hub reporting and performance dashboards
• QA, onboarding, training, and documentation

Advanced nurture and lifecycle campaigns were intentionally scoped for a future engagement, once demand justified them.

The AI SaaS startup launched its waitlist and pre-beta activity on top of a clean, scalable HubSpot foundation. Inbound leads were captured, segmented, scored, and routed automatically. Sales had clear visibility into lead status, ownership, and pipeline. Leadership gained confidence that future demand would be tracked accurately without rebuilding the system later.

At this stage, the focus wasn’t on more leads or revenue. The win was reduced operational risk, clearer ownership, and a system designed to scale as the product moved closer to market.

The impact went beyond tooling. 

Marketing, sales, and operations aligned around shared lifecycle definitions and handoff criteria. Manual work dropped. Decision-making became easier. With clear tracking and ownership in place, they were able to soft-launch with a system built to support what came next. 

For early-stage SaaS teams, growth rarely stalls because of missing tools. It stalls when tools are implemented without strategy. Building CRM and lifecycle infrastructure before launch creates leverage, clarity, and speed once demand starts coming in, without costly rebuilds later.

If you’ve bought HubSpot but don’t have the time, expertise, or internal ownership to set it up properly, this probably feels familiar. We help early-stage and scaling B2B teams design CRM and go-to-market systems that actually support growth. If this resonates, book a free strategy call. We’ll walk through what’s breaking and what to fix first.