The Journal Creative Director 8 min read Get in touch

How Guinness Global Investors prepped for Marketing Attribution to get ROI from an Enteprise Subscription from day 1

Olivia Bagnall Jul 27, 2026 4:24:54 PM

Guinness Global Investors, an asset management firm running events, fund content, and multi-channel campaigns across a European investor base, was planning to upgrade to HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise to unlock proper attribution and ROI reporting. Before flipping that switch, Hatchi spent months getting their underlying data ready, so the reporting Enterprise unlocks will be accurate from day one instead of needing months of clean-up afterwards.

What Was the Challenge?

Guinness Global Investors couldn't report on true source, channel influence, or marketing ROI in any reliable way, and upgrading to Marketing Hub Enterprise on its own wasn't going to fix that. A previous HubSpot partner had built a custom event and event-guest structure years earlier, and by the time Hatchi got involved, that custom build was running in parallel with HubSpot's native tools, duplicating effort rather than saving it. Basic questions, like how many people had cancelled out of an event, needed a custom-coded workaround just to answer. Lead scoring was, in the team's own words, "very rudimentary": anyone who clicked a link in a marketing email got marked as a marketing qualified lead, regardless of what they actually did next. Campaigns were lumped into one generic bucket rather than tracked event by event, and attribution broke down completely whenever the person who attended an event or downloaded a fund fact sheet wasn't the person who ultimately signed off on the deal. Upgrading to Enterprise on top of data like that would only have produced more detailed, more confident-looking reports that were still wrong.

Our Approach

Hatchi had seen this pattern before, on a project with Calypso AI: a business upgrades to a more powerful reporting tier expecting it to solve their attribution problem, only to find the new reports are just as unreliable as the old ones, because nobody fixed the data underneath first. Guinness Global Investors wanted to avoid that outcome, and specifically wanted a small, hands-on team who'd get into the detail with them rather than hand over a plan and walk away, one who could also sit in on the HubSpot contract conversations directly. So the work here happened ahead of the Enterprise upgrade, not after it. Hatchi audited and rebuilt the legacy custom event structure, migrating it toward HubSpot's native event tooling in parallel with the old system so day-to-day sales work was never disrupted. Cancellation tracking was standardised into a single reliable workflow. Campaigns were split out event by event instead of sitting in one generic bucket. Email strategy moved from campaign-led, which had been producing inconsistent engagement, to lifecycle-led, matching content to where a contact actually sat in their journey. Every piece of this was groundwork for one goal: when Guinness Global Investors does flip on Marketing Hub Enterprise, the attribution and ROI numbers it produces will be trustworthy from the first report, not the fifth.

What Were the Results?

Guinness Global Investors is now in a position to upgrade to HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise and trust the reports it produces from day one, rather than spending the months afterwards most businesses lose to cleaning up data retroactively. Cancellation tracking, previously impossible to total up in a single report, now runs on a standardised workflow that mirrors the native events format. Every event sits under its own campaign instead of one generic bucket, so performance can finally be measured event by event. A live sales engagement dashboard already gives the team rolling 7, 30, and 180-day views of content performance by type, built on the same clean data foundation the Enterprise upgrade will report from. The unglamorous work of getting there, matching custom objects to native ones, retraining MQL criteria, untangling legacy workflows, is exactly the work most firms skip before they upgrade, and exactly why so many of them end up disappointed by what Enterprise actually tells them.

The Takeaway

If you're planning to upgrade your CRM's reporting tier to finally get clean attribution, it's worth asking first whether your underlying data can actually support it. Most businesses upgrade before they're ready, and end up with more expensive, still-wrong reports. If your team is weighing up a similar upgrade, or already regretting one, we'd like to hear about it.
FAQ

Questions?
We've got answers

Everything you need to know about prepping your CRM for scaling up.

Start with an audit of what's actually generating your current data: custom-built objects, legacy workflows, and any structures inherited from a previous partner or agency. Enterprise-level attribution reporting is only as good as the data feeding it, so the priority is standardising events, cleaning up duplicated tracking, and fixing lead scoring criteria before the upgrade, not after. Firms that skip this step tend to get more detailed reports that are still built on the same unreliable foundation they had before.

Before spending on a higher CRM tier, map out where your current attribution actually breaks down, whether that's inconsistent event tracking, unreliable lead scoring, or gaps between who engages with marketing and who signs off on a deal. It's also worth checking whether legacy custom builds from a previous vendor are quietly duplicating what the native tools already do. An upgrade won't fix structural data problems on its own; it just reports on them in more detail.

This tends to run as an ongoing engagement over several months rather than a single fixed project, since it usually starts with untangling legacy custom builds before any new reporting can be trusted. Expect an audit phase, followed by parallel migration to cleaner data structures so existing sales and marketing operations aren't disrupted, and ongoing refinement of things like lead scoring criteria as the data improves. The length depends heavily on how much legacy technical debt exists going in.

Asset managers commonly struggle with attribution because their sales cycles involve institutional buyers, third-party marketers, and multiple touchpoints across events, fund content, and compliance-heavy documents like KIDs and fact sheets. It's also common to inherit custom CRM builds from previous vendors that don't scale cleanly, creating duplicated objects and inconsistent reporting. On top of that, regulatory considerations around data like FCA reporting requirements often need to be integrated into the CRM itself, adding a layer most other industries don't have to manage.

Because the upgrade adds reporting capability, not clean data. If the underlying event tracking, lead scoring, or campaign structure was inconsistent before the upgrade, a more advanced attribution model will still be working from the same flawed inputs, just presenting them with more confidence. The businesses that get real value from an upgrade are almost always the ones who treated data readiness as a project in its own right, before the upgrade, rather than assuming the new tier would sort it out.

Most start by consolidating however many event tracking methods have accumulated over time, custom objects, native tools, spreadsheets, into a single consistent structure. Cancellation and attendance tracking is a common weak point, often handled manually until it's standardised. Firms further along typically also revisit their lead scoring criteria at the same time, since criteria set years earlier by a previous partner rarely reflects what actually signals genuine buying intent today.

Ready to transform
your HubSpot?

Let's talk about your next project.

Start a Project  ↗