From loose Excel lists to one HubSpot system for Sustainable Motion

Sustainable Motion's exhibitors come from a client base built over sixteen years of projects: organisations that care about sustainability, many of them returning. New ones found the website or came through word of mouth. Cold organisations were another story. As event manager Laura Wolf says, finding cold leads, approaching them and calling them takes a lot of time, and a two-person team cannot put a department on it.

The conversation started as an outbound retainer. The market is about a thousand organisations and the ticket size of a stand does not carry a monthly campaign budget, so we told them so and scoped what would work: a one-off data build that their own team could run outreach from.

First the existing file: eight Excel files with 66 tabs, merged to 1,226 rows and checked person by person against LinkedIn. 471 people still worked at the organisation in the file; 324 had moved on. Then the market itself, sourced from public lists such as the MVO Nederland members, the B Corp directory, SBTi and CDP, and tiered by how likely an organisation is to exhibit.

The plan from July slipped: getting the TAM exactly right was harder than both sides expected, and Laura is honest that part of that was their own perfectionism. closed:in kept iterating with them without counting revision rounds. The delivery landed on 21 September 2026 in a HubSpot built to survive a downgrade to Starter: properties, one pipeline, lists and data, no automations that would vanish.

Sustainable Motion went from Excel lists that changed every year to one system their team works in. The tiering decides who gets an email only and who also gets a call, which matters when there are more contacts than a small team can phone.

The outreach is theirs and it is still running. What they have in hand: 3,215 validated contacts at 2,121 organisations, 252 new mobile numbers, 1,368 organisations with vacancy data, and 316 with their own notes carried over. Laura's recommendation is for smaller organisations without the capacity to build a list, find the contact details and work out who to talk to: if you want new leads you then approach yourself, ask closed:in.