Client: Bernard Gallay Yacht Brokerage
Industry: Luxury yacht sales and charter
Solution: HubSpot CRM, Sales Hub, Marketing Hub
Project Duration: 2 months
Scope: CRM, sales pipelines, forms, lead scoring, reporting, newsletters, social media, Google Ads, lead segmentation and qualification
Key Challenges: Improving sales visibility, reducing lost opportunities, and optimizing marketing spend based on top-performing channels.
A luxury yachting firm held back by scattered data
Bernard Gallay Yacht Brokerage (BGYB) is an international brokerage specializing in the sale and charter of luxury yachts. The business is built on long decision cycles, high transaction values, and a wide range of acquisition channels: website, specialist platforms, broker networks, Google Ads, and social media.
In this environment, every opportunity matters and every poorly managed lead carries a real cost.
How a fragmented CRM was holding back growth
Before partnering with if/else agency, BGYB was running on a legacy CRM, disconnected third-party marketing tools (Brevo, ad management handled outside the CRM), and largely manual processes. The result: fragmented data, sales teams spending significant time qualifying leads by hand, and no reliable way to identify which channels were actually driving opportunities.
Before the HubSpot rollout, the organization was facing several deep-rooted structural challenges:
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Fragmented data: Information was spread across a legacy CRM, third-party marketing tools (Brevo, social media, separately managed ad accounts), and manual operations.
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Inefficient qualification: No filtering at the point of entry, forcing sales teams to spend valuable time manually qualifying leads, many of which were a poor fit.
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Limited visibility: No reliable way to track deal progress across both business lines (Sales vs. Charter), or to connect marketing activity to actual pipeline outcomes.
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Operational risk: Without automated scoring, warm leads were slipping through the cracks, never followed up on, never converted.
The goals: a CRM built around how the business actually works
BGYB's objectives called for a fundamental shift: moving from reactive, administrative lead handling to a structured, data-driven approach to growth. Three priorities defined the project:
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Centralization: Bring customer data, marketing activity, and sales transactions into a single, unified platform.
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Performance: Streamline the sales funnel to shorten decision cycles and improve conversion rates.
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ROI visibility: Give leadership real-time insight into marketing performance: by channel, by source, and by cost of acquisition.
A tailored HubSpot deployment: CRM architecture, pipelines, and lead scoring
1. Strategy and HubSpot architecture
Before touching any configuration, we ran a thorough analysis of BGYB's business processes and requirements. This groundwork allowed us to design a CRM architecture shaped around their actual operations not a generic template.
2. Rebuilding the CRM foundation
Data was restructured around the business objects that matter in this industry: Contacts, Companies, Boats, and Deals connected through smart associations that reflect how transactions actually work.
3. Data cleanup and migration
Existing data was fully audited and cleaned before migration: normalized, deduplicated, and mapped to the new structure with no loss of information.
4. Custom pipelines: Sales and Charter
Two dedicated pipelines were built to reflect the distinct dynamics of each business line. Each gives a granular view of deal progress by type (something that simply wasn't possible with the previous setup).
5. Automated qualification via multi-step forms
Five dynamic forms were embedded across the website, designed to capture key qualifying criteria: budget, destination, purchase intent, before any sales rep gets involved.
6. Hybrid lead scoring
An automated scoring model was put in place, combining two dimensions: behavioral engagement (web and email interactions) and profile fit (alignment with defined buyer personas).
7. Full marketing ecosystem integration
Acquisition sources, Google Ads and social media were natively connected to HubSpot, and email campaigns were brought into the same platform. The result: a complete view of every lead's journey, from first touch to signed deal.
What changed after the rollout
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Operational efficiency: Sales teams now receive leads that are already qualified and ready to engage. No more time lost on low-value triage.
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Smarter prioritization: Hybrid scoring lets reps focus on the opportunities most likely to close, improving both win rates and time-to-close.
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Clear ROI visibility: Leadership now has unified dashboards to instantly see which channels are generating pipeline and which aren't pulling their weight.
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Full marketing autonomy: The marketing team manages every campaign from one place, with no more jumping between disconnected tools.
The bottom line: what a well-built HubSpot actually delivers
In just two months, Bernard Gallay Yacht Brokerage went from a patchwork of disconnected systems to a unified HubSpot environment configured around their real business needs and aligned with a clear commercial strategy.
The result: a more secure sales pipeline, a better client experience, and the visibility leadership needs to make smarter marketing investment decisions.
BGYB now operates on a scalable foundation, one that's built to grow with them without sacrificing sales efficiency along the way.