The client
EPI-USE is a global SAP and HR technology consultancy and a member of Group Elephant, with regional businesses across Africa, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, the Americas and Brazil.
Muloo has worked with EPI-USE on HubSpot for years, including the regional websites and the Africa portal that Strive Insight now sits on top of. That history is why the group asked us the bigger question.
The problem
Every region had bought HubSpot on its own. Same platform, separate contracts, separate databases and no shared view of the group.
- Six paid portals and roughly 68 paid users
- Five renewal dates spread across the year, so nothing could be negotiated or budgeted as a block
- Sales Hub ranging from Starter to Enterprise, with no shared standard
- Content Hub bought five separate times, Data Hub Starter four times
- One region paying for a website with no CRM behind it, and one region with no platform at all
Six databases means no group pipeline, no group leaderboard and no cross region view without a data warehouse.
What we did
1. Pulled the real numbers
- Read the live subscriptions from billing in every portal rather than working from invoices or memory
- Mapped products, tiers, seats and renewal dates region by region
- Found a total of around $90k a year across the six portals
2. Modelled one portal
- Costed a single group Customer Platform carrying every seat
- Modelled the saving at roughly $40k a year, a reduction of about 45 percent
- Showed that the saving pays for the migration, and the single source of truth is the real return
3. Designed the architecture
- Business Units per region, so each keeps its own brand, domains, contacts, assets and reporting
- Pipelines permissioned by team, so a consultant in one region sees their own accounts and not another region's
- A deliberately shared layer for the group leaderboard, cross region pipeline and cross sell
4. Answered the objections before the room raised them
- Local brands and domains, multi language sites, local currency deals rolled up to one reporting currency, regional access boundaries
- A clear recommendation on the tier: Enterprise, because Business Units are the mechanism that stops one portal becoming one shared mess
5. Set out a phased path
- Assess and get one group quote, then stand up the portal with Business Units and permissions configured first
- Pilot with the two regions that gain a CRM rather than move one
- Migrate the rest on their own renewal dates, so nobody pays twice
Proof it works
The model is not theory. The Africa region already runs it.
Africa runs a lean HubSpot core, used for pipeline, contacts and automation, with Strive Insight layered on top for sales tracking, account plans, forecasting and cross sell. One group portal feeds that intelligence layer cleanly for every region, which turns a working regional setup into the group template.
Before and after
| Six regional portals | One group portal | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual spend | Around $90k | Around $49k modelled |
| Renewals | Five dates, six negotiations | One date, one negotiation |
| Group view | None without a warehouse | Native: one leaderboard, one pipeline roll up |
| Cross sell | Invisible between regions | A consultant can see a client is already engaged elsewhere |
| Regions left out | Two | None, each joins as a Business Unit |
HubSpot platform in play
- Business UnitsBrand, domain, asset and reporting partitions per region
- Sales HubTeam permissioned pipelines, with hierarchies and territories for the larger regions
- Content HubEvery regional site on its own domain, from one account
- Multi currencyDeals in local currency, reported in one
- Strive InsightThe intelligence layer built by Muloo on top of HubSpot
What we learned
- Read billing, not invoices. The live subscriptions told a different story from what each region believed it was paying.
- Lead with the objection. "One portal means one mess" is the first thing a regional leader thinks. Answer it on slide one of the architecture, not in questions.
- Sequence by renewal date. A migration plan that ignores renewals makes the business case false.
- Pilot where the region gains, not where it loses. Moving a working CRM is risk. Giving a region its first CRM is momentum.
