Industry: Media / newsletter · Scope: Sales, marketing, finance · CRM: 700,000+ contacts

The problem

Growth was real. Visibility was not. Contrarian Thinking was building an audience and running webinars, newsletters, and education products at speed. The problem: nobody inside the company could actually see what was working. Not in sales, not in marketing, not in finance.

One person controlled everything, because they were the only one who understood how the pieces fit together. That isn’t a leadership style, it’s a structural ceiling, and it meant the company couldn’t grow faster than one person’s bandwidth allowed.

No one knew their numbers at all.

What we built

  • HubSpot CRM rebuild. Structured 700,000+ contacts with upgraded sales pipelines and a clean data foundation to build everything else on.
  • Multi-touch attribution. Tagging infrastructure to trace the full customer journey across channels, instead of last-click guessing.
  • Leadership scorecards. Executive dashboards giving the whole leadership team real-time visibility.
  • Financial models and pacing. Models and pacing calculators built from scratch, so the team could plan against targets.
  • Renewals visibility. A clear view into renewal patterns and which customers to target separately.
  • Webinar automations. Automated lists and follow-up sequences to cut the manual lift.

The transformation

Leadership could finally step back because the systems worked. Scorecards gave people permission to decide without checking with one person first. Pacing calculators told executives when to push spend and when to hold. Newsletter models turned growth from reactive to planned.

It kept them more stable and able to grow.

The results

  • Full visibility across sales, marketing, and finance in one engagement
  • Multi-touch attribution across every channel, no more last-click guessing
  • Pacing models they called huge levers, which unlocked executive spend decisions
  • Leadership unblocked, with systems accurate enough to step back without risk
  • 700,000+ contacts rebuilt into a structured, operational CRM
  • Confidence to scale, no longer bottlenecked by one person’s bandwidth